Notes, Quotes, and Billy Goats

Some things which have been on my mind during my recent lengthy absence from blogging:

One main reason for said absence is the utter unpredictability of the Internet connection here at my apartment. We had a technician from the cable company out a while back to fix it, and it ran fine for a while. Now it's back to it's old tricks. The only way to get it to connect is to unhook the cable from the splitter and directly into the back of the modem. Often, even that doesn't work. It's irritating, and even if it worked all the time, I shouldn't have to do it. Unfortunately, the local cable office is only open during "normal business hours," which precludes Brandi or myself from visiting under normal circumstances, and the customer service reps at the national call center have proven themselves to be most unhelpful. Somehow, we have to get this back working on a regular basis, because being without the Internet isn't feasible, and we really don't have any other options for our connectivity.

From one computer problem to another. I love my iPod, but iTunes has to be one of the worst pieces of software I've ever had to use. That's the software you have to use to transfer songs onto your iPod, and oh yeah, it'll also sell you more songs if you're interested. It takes forever to load new songs onto the iPod, though. For some reason, this evening it decided my iPod was blank (even though it wasn't), and so it has to go through and replace all 2,747 songs instead of just the 12 I wanted to add.

I'm happy to report, though, that I did finally manage to get my car fixed. It had a stalling problem on and off for the past year or so, which had gotten worse over the past few weeks. I had taken it in for service, but no one could figure out what was wrong with it. Finally, I got an appointment to have it looked at by the service department at the local Dodge dealership, and I told them just to keep it until they had figured it out and fixed it. That meant that Brandi had to take me to and from work one day, and I had to take the next day off altogether, but I finally have a dependable car again. That's a big load off my mind, because I was starting to think seriously that I was going to have to replace it, and frankly, I can't afford that right now. It's still something I need to think about, as my car does have pretty high mileage, but it doesn't have to be done right away.

Lately Brandi and I have been overdosing on episodes of Family Guy, which my cousin Mike gave to me on DVD for my birthday. I don't watch much TV (non-sports TV, anyway), so Family Guy had slipped my notice. Mike knew it would appeal to my sense of humor, though, and he was oh-so-right. We can't get enough. We've watched the entire first two seasons over the course of the past week, and we've been laughing our asses off. I'm blown away by how random, how irreverent, and how clever it is. The evil baby genius and the alcoholic talking dog are comedy gold.

I'm hoping to get back to something approaching a normal blogging schedule this week, if my Internet connection will cooperate. That also goes for any e-mailing that needs to be done. Please, stay tuned.