drscott | We're the phone company....

...and they really are here to help.

After the third phone outage in two months (and that doesn't count the internal wiring fault that I fixed last week), a tech came by yesterday and fixed ours. The recent outages are part of a pattern that includes dumb techs stealing working pairs from other people to fix each call, so the phone techs have been to our quiet circle about 20 times in those two months fixing other people's phones (for at least a week or two until their line is stolen again.) Finally after yesterday's outage I threatened to file a complaint with the Public Service Commission about the obvious failure to fix the underlying problem of a bad neighborhood drop, and today three trucks and about 10 guys are here replacing it. Cost to phone company today: high. Total cost of not fixing it right in the first place: much higher.

It's algae season again, so I shocked the pool ~~(showed it dirty Michael Jackson pictures)~~ (dumped a bunch of chlorine in to overwhelm the chemistry and kill everything.) Tomorrow I get to brush away the dead algae.

Last night we re-watched the first part of Victor / Victoria. Like the Broadway version of La Cage aux Folles, it struck me when it came out as a middlebrow entertainment that used its gay content to spice up an otherwise conventional product aimed at a straight audience. But it's fun. Leave it to

excessor to leave me feeling gritty and on the artistic edge by comparison. Then it was onto The Band Wagon, which I'd never seen -- you'd have to really love the music and dancing, since the book was thin and the romance unconvincing. Unfortunately only a few bits were worth the time.