Bah! Our Internet has only actually been in service for a week or two, and we’ve already got problems. Woke up this morning to discover we had no Internet. Re-set the router, modem, server, PCs…nada. Turns out our ISP is having problems, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Of course this would happen on patch day…

I never thought I’d consider ladybugs a pest…but here I am, setting up a ladybug trap. I’ve never heard of them being a problem, but I guess they are, since it was so easy to find information and a trap. Apparently they like to come into your house in the fall and spend the winter there. They don’t really do anything terribly harmful… They don’t eat you out of house & home, they don’t sting, they don’t even reproduce indoors… But they cease being cute when you find a dozen of them above one of your light fixtures. So, we bought a ladybug trap. The thing is supposed to attract them into a plastic jar that they can’t get out of…then you can dispose of them however you’d like.

Today has been fairly productive actually… Got to sleep in until around 10:00, but I’ve actually gotten quite a it done. Replaced the trap under the basement sink again…didn’t crack it this time. So now we can use that sink without soaking our toes. Also replaced the aerator on that same sink. The old one was clogged up and not working properly - water sprayed out in just about every direction except where you wanted it to go. Now our basement sink is completely functional. It’s ugly… The sink basin is chipped and old… And the surrounding countertop is also ugly as sin… And there’s no real cabinet to hide the plumbing underneath… The whole thing is as ugly and utilitarian as it gets… But at least it now works.

We also picked up a new lighting panel for our basement… We’ve got a drop ceiling down there, with a couple of fluorescent lights in it, one of which is covered by an ugly old yellowish plastic panel. I’ve gotten sick of looking at that dingy old thing, so we bought a replacement for it. Eventually we want to replace all the ceiling tiles as well…maybe add some more lights, or move the existing ones…but this is a start at least.

Still don’t have the phones working the way I’d like to though. We’ve got the Vonage box in the basement, with one cordless handset plugged directly into it, and it works fine. I tried to string a phoneline over to a wall jack elsewhere in the basement, so that we could use the phone jacks upstairs…but I got all sorts of horrible interference from it. Apparently the phoneline extension that I got isn’t shielded. Took a look at Lowe’s today, but I couldn’t find any shielded phoneline. Heck, I don’t know if they even make it… So now I’m wondering if it might work better just to use CAT5 instead of standard phoneline. All I need is some kind of conductor between the jack and the Vonage, there’s no reason why CAT5 wouldn’t work… And the CAT5 is already twisted to reduce interference, and then I could buy the STP cable for added protection… That might turn out to be the best solution.

After a couple weeks of trying to get settled into our new house, today we finally had a day without much to do. We decided to go to the movies… The plan was to go see V for Vendetta, which looked very good, but at the last minute we changed our minds and went to see The Hills Have Eyes instead. Big mistake.

It isn’t that the movie was badly made… The acting, special effects, story - all of it was quite good. There were some good scary parts, some lighter bits… Altogether a decent movie. But it just plain was not enjoyable.

The movie was flat-out brutal. It reminded me a lot of Saving Private Ryan - good movie, but just not enjoyable. I felt exhausted and worn out when we left the theatre, and I have absolutely no desire to see it ever again.

The last two weeks have been interesting, to say the very least.

Charter told us that we’d have cable television up and running on the 28th, and that they’d show up again on the 1st to connect our cable Internet. We did have television on the 28th, but we missed them on the 1st… They re-scheduled it for the 3rd, and then tried calling our old apartment to make sure we’d be on-site for the install - of course we didn’t answer the phone at our old apartment, since we were on-site at the new house waiting for them. Then we called again to re-schedule the install, and were told that they couldn’t install anything until they disconnected the previous owner’s service - even though they had already scheduled 2 installs.

They showed up a couple days later and disconnected all the services…then they were supposed to show up on Thursday to reconnect us. But they screwed something up and decided we were a Mr. Robert White who’s had an outstanding balance since 2001. We had to go to our local Charter office and prove who we were by providing photo ID. They scheduled another reconnect…and then the work order just vanished. We went back down to complain, they scheduled us again…and this time we actually got connected.

Being without cable/internet for two weeks was the least of our concerns though… I got home from work around 6:00 one day to find out power was out. A call to the local electric company revealed that they had our address wrong - they’d intentionally disconnected the power at this house because they didn’t have a customer at this address.

Then our garbage company screwed things up… They didn’t process our change of address and just kept on picking stuff up at the old apartment. We wound up with an extra week’s worth of garbage crammed into our bin and angry phonecall to our garbage company.

But…it looks like things are finally starting to work themselves out… We’ve got garbage service, we’ve got electricity, we’ve got cable television and we’ve got cable internet. Now I’m just wondering what else is going to go wrong…