Roof progress report

After three days of construction the new gable is built, decked in, and tar-papered.  I expect that the beginning of next week will see them tearing off the roof on the old house, then re-decking and re-shingling.  Photo of progress will follow; I don’t have them on this machine.

The thing there’s still NO progress on is getting our Net connection, which ever since February has been intermittently cutting out for hours or days at a time, fixed.  The ISP has finally acknowledged that, as they’ve replaced all the hardware and cabling in the house twice without resolving the issue, the issue’s probably on their side of the node, but because the problem is intermittent, they have no clue what’s really causing it, so they’ve put my cable modem on “probation” for a week, which means they monitor the line 24×7 to see if they can figure out a root cause.  My current theory is that they have too many subscribers on our loop, and the total load is sucking enough bandwidth that everyone should be suffering.  The only fix for that, though, is to split the loop into two, which costs the ISP money, so they’re hoping I’m wrong and they can find something else.

Our crappy Net connection makes it difficult to work from home, which I need to do while the builders are in the house, so I’ve been spending a lot of time on the free wifi at Quack’s, but zomg their chairs are unCOMFORTable to sit in for more than thirty minutes, despite padding!  Mickey D’s could take a lesson or two from them about chairs that encourage quick turnover.  Maybe I should look into Epoch’s seating instead.  It’s not much farther from the house, although not as easy to walk to.

And T called Friday to say that she’ll be home Monday to take a mental-health vacation week.  Having to move her store and learn a whole new staff, plus the other managerial stuph, all at once has run her nearly into the ground, and her district manager has been trying to get her to take some herself-time for some time.  I don’t know what the precipitating event was, but she called her manager and said she needed mental-health time, and after he “yelled at her” (but likely not literally) for ten minutes about being an idiot and refusing to take any care of herself, he told her “go on home for a week.”  So she is.

While she’s here, she wants me to go with her to Carmax as a bullshit detector while she shops for a new car.  She and my MIL seem to have come to a co-sign agreement with USAA, and she’s intending to drive home to Houston with a new car, and leave the pickup with us for good.  Which is a good thing; the pickup is fifteen years old, has more than 200,000 miles on it, and she has no business trying to make it hold up to the kind of use she needs.  (Now I’m going to see if I can finally get the pickup to tell me what its name is.)

And somewhere in there, I’m taking her to Discount Electronics and we’ll get her a laptop to replace her aging desktop system.  If I can do what I want, we’ll be getting a Latitude D630, about two years old, which will have plenty of life left in it without getting stuck with the cheesy crap that ends up in consumer-class systems.