On A Clear Day You Can See Forever

The other day I blogged that there were still branches in my neighborhood that were making it hazardous for me to get to my bus stop. That was Saturday... imagine my surprise when, on Thursday, I found that some of the branches had been removed! (Unfortunately, not all of them had been taken off, but it was a little safer getting to my bus.)

The only reason I had the camera with me that day was because a few days before that, I took a bunch of pictures from my office window of a "snowstorm" blowing in. I thought it would be interesting to take some similar pictures on a clear day so you can see how far the visibility really is from that window. Here are a couple of examples:


Snowy Day


Clear Day

I should have waited for the next day... it was much more clear... the pictures in the set were taken when it was kind of overcast, but you can still see a lot of stuff. I also took some pictures of my desk... anyone who has been to see me in my office will attest that it has (ahem) "character". (Really... it has cartoon characters.) I also took a few kind of pretty sunset pictures. Click over to see the whole set!

Super Fat

Yesterday was simultaneously two special Tuesdays at once: Super Tuesday and Fat Tuesday. Inspired by a blog post from Cathy's cousin in Louisiana, in honor of Mardi Gras we went and picked up a King Cake; in honor of Super Tuesday we went over to my father-in-law's house and watched Fox News on his big screen TV until the returns had pretty much settled down (at least for Oklahoma) and everyone was tired and cranky and wanted to go home and go to bed. Ah, the joys of family. :)

DirecTV

We've had DirecTV for over a year now. Before that for several years we had used Cox, which is the terrestrial-based service that is available in Tulsa (previous to that we were using a service called Heartland Wireless which is now gone) I was dissatisfied with Cox for several reasons. First of all, I wasn't happy with the availability of the service; it seemed like sometimes we would lose our cable signal, and sometimes it would remain unavailable, for no apparent reason. An recent example of this... ahem... "commitment to service" happened during last December's ice storm; my father-in-law was lucky enough to only lose power for a couple of hours total, but his Cox digital cable was out for over a week. For much of that time he was getting a digital signal, but no channels. When he called in later to ask for a refund, they gave him a tiny $10 credit on his bill. What's up with that?

Another thing is that I don't like Cox's practices if you are late paying your bill. I regularly got charged huge penalties for being late... something like a $25 penalty for being late on a $45 bill. Positively ridiculous.

Then there's Cox's advertising. I can't STAND their commercials. They are annoying at best (the cartoon man with the big chest) and dishonest at worst (especially the ones when they blast satellite providers for downtime and that sort of thing, when I've had MUCH less downtime with DirecTV than I ever had with them!)

With DirecTV, as soon as my power came on after the ice storm, my DirecTV came back on. If I forget to pay a bill and my DirecTV shuts off, I get on the Web site and pay the bill (no late penalty!) and it comes back on automatically (occasionally we have to call customer service to get it to switch on, but in general that's just to get it to happen sooner rather than later). And DirecTV's advertising doesn't grate on my nerves, although anyone is subject to a bad commercial or two every once in a while. :)

The only (very minor) gripe I have with DirecTV is that they don't have true local weather inserted into the broadcast on The Weather Channel. They just show you the regular satellite feed... you may have seen it from hotel rooms or whatever. You get local temps for like Boston, Dallas, New York City... the big cities. Tulsa isn't one of those big cities. On Cox you actually see the local NWS forecast and some local radar. There's a button on the DirecTV remote marked "Active" that brings you to their "Active channel" which has a basic local temperature forecast and the current conditions, so that's kind of useful, but it would be nice to see the actual text forecast and local radar (the Active Channel doesn't have local radar). On the other hand, the Weather channel's "Local On The 8s" is only available on the "8s" (and not even 24 hours a day on the 8s), while the Active Channel is available every minute of every day.

We LOVE the DVR! Of course, you can get DVR service with Cox (and probably every other cable TV system in existence, at this point) as well.

Anyway, if you've been thinking of DirecTV (my father-in-law has) or if I've convinced you, call them at 1-866-443-8869. Here's the channel packages they have... very similar to other cable TV services. If you subscribe, be sure to mention my name and account number: Michael Jones acct #062953050. You'll get $50 off, free DVR or HD, and free shipping, and I'll get $50 off too (here's the info). (If you're reading this after February 26 2008, the offer may be different, so ask about it and make sure you give them my account number if they want to know who referred you!)

Another Cold Front, Another Sleepless Night

Another weather front is coming through today. Or, more specifically, it started coming through last night and is slowly moving in this morning. And, sort of like last time we had a front, Hannah was crabby about eating in her middle-of-the-night feedings. At midnight-thirty I was awakened by her grumbling, but when I got up and tried to give her a bottle, she cried louder with the bottle in her mouth than with no bottle! Finally after trying for about a half hour, I gave up and took her back into our room in her bassinet, where she grumbled and grouched for a few minutes until Cathy woke up and told me that Hannah had been doing the same thing to her at midnight! Which meant that I was up less than an hour later. Anyway, Cathy apparently took care of things after that, and Hannah slept most of the night, because I woke up at 4am and gave her a bottle, which she took with no problem at all. But whatever Cathy did with the baby must have either been shaking the bed a lot (read: my poor wife up and down all night) or noisy enough to keep me from really resting that well. I woke up feeling like the spiders that Garfield is always smashing.

Mikey's Early Months

"Way back in the dark ages of the year 2000, we had a child named Mikey. Back in those days, you whippersnappers, photo-sharing sites were few and far between and they were not free, and blogging sites were scarcer than hen's teeth. When you got home from walking uphill in seven feet of snow, you sat down with a cup of hot cocoa that you milked fresh yourself from your chocolate cow, and you made your own darn Web site! Without templates or anything!"

Anyway... in the midst of those dark years, I made a mini-site to display pictures of Mikey, and I thought I'd let anyone visiting this blog know about it. Here it is.

Ice Storm Cleanup Continues

It's been almost two months since last December's devastating ice storm, and around town there are still piles of tree branches (and in some cases, bigger things like trunks!) all over the sides of the road. The City of Tulsa has been having a really slow time getting them picked up, although they have pledged to make a total of three trips through each neighborhood, I understand, and make sure everything gets picked up. Well, because of the whole having a new baby thing, plus, it being wintertime, ever since then it's either been dark when I've been at home (shorter days in the wintertime), or I've been dog-tired in the daytime because of staying up to feed the baby at all hours.

Anyway, this afternoon after the Men's breakfast at Grace, it was a beautiful day and I was outside anyway, so I dragged the limbs that have been littering my backyard ever since the ice storm out to the curb. As soon as I got finished I looked down the street, and what should I see but the cleanup trucks coming down the street! I'll bet my little pile of twigs wasn't there more than 45 minutes total. It almost looks like they may have gotten to our house and then called it a day, though, because the street past us is still piled with branches. It's a shame, too, because that's the way I have to walk to get to the bus; with piles of branches sometimes covering the sidewalk, and in the dark just before sunrise, it can be pretty hazardous if you check out mentally and don't look where you're going. I'll sure be glad when they get that cleared out so I can safely walk on the sidewalk again.

January 31, 2008 Snowstorm

Today there was a snowstorm that had been trumpeted by the TV news as pretty severe, and then turned out to be something of a non-event, at least in Tulsa proper. As it turned out, it was mostly pretty. I took the camera with me to work to try to take some fun pictures... this one is one of my favorites of the batch. Click over to see the whole set!