I am just returning home (Sunday pm) from staying with a friend during a power outage that occurred on Wednesday. Almost a million homes were without power during out fourth major storm in a month. High winds knocked my power out before the rain even arrived. I just threw away everything in my fridge/freezer. Some things may have been okay but four days is to long to risk it.
So I don't have much to relay in terms of books/movies.
Megan will on the fourth hour of the Today Show with Hoda and Jenna Thursday at 10:00.
12 comments:
My power was off two days. Long enough to ruin everything in my freezer. Glad you had somewhere else to go.
The Emagine theater next door to me kept their power. Went and saw The Green Knight which I liked a lot. Reminded me of Ingmar Bergman's medieval films. Probably the best film I've seen so far this year. Watched a Netflix original, Beckett which was terrible. Also the last episodes of The Unforgotten. Very good.
Read Therese Raquin by Emile Zola. Working my wayb through the new short story collection by Jeffrey Ford and Billy Summers by Stephen King which first's hundred pages could have been cut in half. Hope it improves.
I'm glad you're home safely, but how awful to be without power for four days! It's a rough reminder of how much we depend on electricity...
Well, that stinks@ (And not just literally.) Glad you're home. We are back to more temperate weather after another warm to hot week. We had thunderstorms but nowhere near the problems you had (or the heat out west).
Finished UNFORGOTTEN last night. Terrific series and sorry it will (apparently) be the last. Also finished the mediocre (at best) Aussie HALIFAX: REDEMPTION. I wouldn't bother. Still watching the rest of the series mentioned last time, so won't bother you with the list.
Jackie was obsessed with lowering the cable bill so spent literally hours on the phone with various Verizon people over several days, including a couple she was sure were in India. Everyone seemed to have his or her own theory of what we should do and how to accomplish it - "pretend" we were new customers (using a fake name, apparently), then return the boxes for new ones was the most outrageous suggestion. In the end, don't ask me how, she not only got our bill lowered by $20 a month, but they added Showtime and Starz/Encore! (She wanted to get Showtime back for BILLIONS and Starz for the 5th series of OUTLANDER). So now we have even more things to watch (or not watch).
Otherwise, a quiet week. We did NOT go to the concert at Jones Beach due to their total lack of a COVID plan - no vaccination requirement, masks "suggested" but not required, no enforcement, thousands of people milling around unmasked singing and screaming, etc. NOW we got a thing from Ticketmaster that all concerts will require proof of vaccination, but not until October.
I have spent countless hours trying to lower my cable bill and I did--except now I only get five regular stations and whatever I stream separately. My son says I am even more taken advantage of than before I began this negotiation. And yes, almost all of the representatives are in India and can only speak from a script. It is hopeless except to get rid of them for everything except the Internet and either get Hulu or You Tube Plus Live TV. Or just steam.
Yes, if I thought I would be here very long I would get a generator.
Hope THE GREEN KNIGHT plays on TV soon.
Thanks, Margot.
Yes, so true. And we already have Netflix and Amazon/Acorn/Britbox/MHz Choice/PBS Masterpiece. In fact, almost everything we watch is on one of those channels. What happened was, the first woman trying to sell her some package called it "random" - apparently you get 10 channels, no choice, besides the basic ones. Like you did, we would have lost TCM. I only asked for a few specific channels - YES (Yankees), TCM, a few others. I just don't get the whole "random" thing at all.
One guy she spoke to in India was clearly at home, as members of his family were yelling in the background, banging pots and pans, etc. It was crazy. She was finally told we had to bring in the boxes to the local Verizon store (very close to us, but very, very unhelpful whenever we've dealt with them) and would get new, enhanced boxes. Of course, we would have lost everything on the DVR now. Jackie agreed but only if they sent a tech to replace them for us, as I have no doubt that if we took them to the store they'd have looked at us (assuming we could get them to look up from their iPhones) like we had two heads. When they transferred her to tech support (hold for an hour, no answer) and she finally got someone (having to call a second time using my phone), she was told that the woman in India hadn't put the order through at all and there was no record! But this guy, finally, just said we didn't have to change boxes after all and we had the discount. We've gone from $217 several months ago to $197 now to $173 starting next month. Don't ask me to explain it.
After experiencing no power for three days back in 2006, Diane and I decided to buy a GENERAC natural gas generator. We've had six or seven power outages since then and the generator provided power until National Grid restored power. Well worth it.
I'll be watching Megan on Thursday!
We finally enjoyed a weekend with temps in the 70s after weeks of hot and humid weather. But, of course, we're back in the 80s in a few days. July was the hottest month for the world since the weather statistics started. Very bad sign for the future!
Diane's sister Carol is visiting this week. She picked the right week weather-wise. Stay safe!
Jeff-your experience is so much like out--different provider, different state but same tactics. I am paying about $160 for the most very basic cable. I can make no sense of it.
There are battles around here going on over the noise generators make for their neighbors.
We have power here but Fred is due today, followed soon by Grace.
We were expecting Fred yeasterday so we beached on Saturday instead. A chance to relax and center ourselves. There were dolphins.
The numbers for Kitty's anemia have stayed the same so she is continuing the chemo on a monthly basis. As I have mentioned before, this is "chemo light" so there are no adverse side effects.
Mark is home and will attend classes online this year. He followed his job at a summer camp with a week in Oklahoma for a symposium -- don't ask me what. Erin will be headed off to school in Tallahassee after spending a year doing online classes at home. She had clepped her Freshman classes while in high school so now she will be a Junior. Jack started fourth grade last week and WILL be wearing a mask, so f... you, Ron DeSantis!
Jessie turned 49 yesterday and we celebrated at a Mexican restaurant. The special on Sunday was $2 mojitos but since neither Kitty nor I drink we had to settle for some yummy food. Where does the time go? It seems like just yesterday when we were in the delivery room amazed at that perfect, beautiful baby who started off life yowling.
On television, we have been watching TITANS and MIRE as well as catching up with the late night comics while we were in Cape Cod. As for books, I finished Frederic Pohl and Jack Williamson's STARCHILD trilogy (the publishers should have come up with a more accurate name for it) -- as with both authors, the ideas and the satire comes fast and furiously; recommended for science fiction fans. Since I read six novels by James Blish over the vacay, I decided to read a couple of his collections. I have a few more to go and there are four other novels available online for me; I'll probably spread these out over a few months. I'm also back on my John Creasey kick, reading two books in his BARON series and one of his ROGER WEST books. Throw in a few miscellaneousshort stories and that was my week.
JEFF: Can we borrow Jackie? I think she's the only person in the world who has gotten a concession out of Verizon. We dropped Verizon years ago out of disgust, but I'm willing to bet Jackie can work her magic with other large corporations. I'm looking at you, Mediacom!
Anyway, welcome back home, Patti. Have a great week and tell any potential power outages to go away. Looking forward to watching Megan on Thursday.
Verizon dvr/cable boxes (and their remotes) tend to fail, frequently. We care currently on our third or perhaps fourth Verizon box.
How's the antenna reception where you are, Patti? You'll get a wider array, of course, of channels for no extra charge than you apparently now do, since all the MeTVs, StartTVs, World Channels, etc. are broadcast networks, as well. Even not too far out of Philadelphia, but on the far side from the broadcast antenna agglomeration (we used to live in the Andorra neighborhood in western Philadelphia, so were constantly bathed in transmissions from the towers) the first antenna we tried couldn't pick up much of anything (give the short distance, in comparison, digital tv broadcast reaches vs. the old analog broadcasts...no DXing from hundred-mile-away stations on a fluky night any longer.
Sorry about the long outage, and the food waste...glad the power's back (I'm not certain I've ever experienced a multi-day outage, though perhaps a day.5 on rare occasions). How many houses in Detroit use solar panels? Storage batteries might be a problem, or not. And glad that the publicity push seems to be working well for Megan.
Most surprisingly good film viewed of late was SPONTANEOUS (), getting a sparse run on Epix, or at your leisure on Epix streaming. Kind of like a latter-day HEATHERS, only instead of teen murders in a high school disguised as suicides and the resulting gallows humor and satire, we have members of a suburban high school's senior class...and only them...spontaneously exploding at varying rates, an exclusivity that is never quite explained, but the playing out of how the 17yos respond to this and the varying levels of governmental and citizen hamhandedness in response to their plight is well-conceived and performed. Variously described as a comedy (decreasingly so as it goes along, albeit the script is witty enough throughout) and as sf (only if you squint very hard, given the lack of attempts to explore how and why the events are happening, albeit with quarantines and medical research going forward at a furious pace and with only the most condescending attempts to explain what's what to the victims, their surviving peers and their families) when it's more a satirical horror film. Based on a YA or "New Adult" novel by Aaron Starmer. Piper Perabo and Rob Heubel, playing the protagonist's parents, are the "biggest names" in the production, among the mostly younger cast, but everyone is at very least good enough. Highly recommended.
SPONTANEOUS was a 2020 release. No good idea what happened to the digits I typed.
That sounds like a horrible experience, Patti, and then to have to throw out all that food. I am sure it is great to be back home though.
We have had problems with our refrigerator lately and had it turned off for 24 hours but did not lose any food. The refrigerator makes loud noises (and is less than 2 years old) and we had a very expensive set of fans replaced and little if any improvement in the noise.
Not much news on things we are watching. We did start watching the one Ellery Queen season with Jim Hutton for the 2nd or third time. It is so much fun. I am reading a Georgette Heyer regency romance, THE GRAND SOPHY. Only the 2nd of her romances I have read.
So sorry to hear of your power outage! We had one for 5 days in January during and after an ice storm, and it was miserable, though we had help from neighbors, one who had power and brought an extension cord, and another who ran a generator to our garage freezer, where most of our meat and stuff is. We still lost most of the stuff in the fridge, and it's no fun.
I've been reading the Timber Creek K-9 series, featuring Deputy Mattie Cobb and her K-9 dog Robo. On George's scale, they probably get a B, but I'm on the 3rd one now. That'll be enough. Next up will be KEEPERS, which Jeff just read, I think. It's another K-9 mystery, but different author and characters. Things in bunches. Lots of library books came in at once and I had to return several and get back on the hold list, then pause them.
I also read THE LAST COMMANDMENT by Scott Shepherd, who has a movie-TV background, and the book read like it. It's a serial killer novel, not my usual, but not bad, excepting I sussed to the bad guy fairly early on.
The heat has let up today, in mid 80s, but there is a LOT of smoke from the California and Oregon wildfires, and wind direction is everything. When we get onshore it's fine, but when it comes from the south and east it's nasty. Over 70 days without measurable precipitation. We really, desperately need rain!
Chin up!
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