Still no word on Pete

Several years ago, when we were living in our second basement apartment in Provo, we got a message on our answering machine.  It was a wrong number, but we found the message so amusing that it has remained on our answering machine all this time, being played occasionally for a good laugh.

Since we bought a new set of phones yesterday, I figured I should record it off the old machine before it was lost forever.  So for your listening pleasure, here is the message that has become our family joke.

Thanks Mary Sue, whoever you are, for the message.  And I'm sorry to hear about Aunt Grace.

Why Max?

A few months ago our phone and DSL provider merged with some other company, changed names, and downgraded their internet service from Fine to Why did only half this page load?.  A few weeks ago, Dan clued me in to the new WiMax sensation sweeping the nation, and said it worked great for him, so figuring it couldn't be any worse than what we had, we switched.

Since a large portion of our old phone/DSL bill was actually the phone, we decided to switch to a VOIP phone service as well, which meant that even after going with the faster speed WiMax, our overall bill is still less than what it was before.  Hooray for the free market.

We got the modem and everything was fine and good until I tried the VOIP phone.  We could call out, the phone would ring on a call in, but we couldn't answer it.  I tried to no avail to manually open ports and configure settings.  After calling around to both companies, my initial suspicions were proven correct, and the fancy modem I got had built-in telephony that was blocking my VOIP service.  So they next-day-ed a new modem, an older model without the telephony.  This modem was obviously a refurb, and couldn't hold a signal.  Great.  So after another lengthy conversation, they next-day-ed their slightly less old, third and final modem model.

In the meantime, Amber was trying to coordinate Primary stuff and dealing with an unanswerable ringing phone.  So finally after several days of this, we get the third modem and it works.  Finally.  I plug everything in and tuck away the cords.  The next day, no internet (thus no phone).  Once more I'm on the phone with customer service, thinking maybe this modem wasn't properly activated.  Turns out the tower we were connected to had a known service outage, and it had nothing to do with my setup.

That was fixed by the next day, but then I hear Amber yell to me, "Is something wrong with the phone??" after her call cut out.  What now?  The battery on one of our two portable handsets had decided to give up the ghost, and no longer holds a charge.  Although annoying in its coincidence, it's actually pretty good timing since with only one plug-in location we needed to get a setup that has more remote handsets anyway.

Oh, and our air conditioner broke somewhere towards the end of that timeline.  Thankfully, it was a quick and relatively painless fix.

On the positive side, the customer service was great throughout the process (with the glaring exception of their online chat service) -- very friendly, and willing to provide solutions -- and now we're paying less for our services.  Both internet and phone are completely portable, so we can take our modem wherever there is coverage, and plug in our home phone wherever there is internet.  This could be useful for vacations or maybe even if the power goes out for hurricane-lengths of time.  We have 911 service, but only when there's power. We have neighbors and cars and cell phones otherwise, I guess.

So far the internet service and speeds have been great.  I can't personally vouch for the VOIP service, since I rarely use our home phone, but it seems to be working just fine.  And perhaps best of all, I no longer have to choose between the two evils of Comcast and slow DSL.  WiMax works, it requires much less infrastructure, and with entertainment moving online anyway it may be the way of the future.

Speaking of the future, I have a feeling this post will be very funny to read about in 50 years.

Girls being cute

Not really any explanation needed here.

Skeeters

Last Saturday I wanted to get out of the house, so we got some food and headed over to the state park.  The plan was to hike for a while on one of the trails, then eat.  We got about 50 yards down the trail before we were literally swarmed by mosquitoes.  It had been raining a lot recently, and there was a lot of standing water in this park.  We tried to outrace them in vain and ended up heading back to a picnic area to at least eat our food.

We had on enough bug spray to avoid actual bites, thankfully, and the kids were more than happy to play in this wooden teepee.

Maybe we can try again this Saturday... what do you say, Carmen?

Phone pics

I found some pictures on my phone that I'd forgotten about.  Here's a pic I took on our way to church in November of last year.

I call it "Mark of the Beast... Extreme Edition"!

When I worked in a 5th-floor office overlooking a highway, I used to post interesting pictures from my window at work.  After a brief stint in a small windowless office, I moved to a slightly less small office around the corner with a view of an alley.  Not quite as cool as my old view, but I tried to keep up the tradition.

Here's some snow from when we got our annual fluke snowstorm last year.

Oh oh, and here's an exotic city bird paying me a visit.

Maybe this feature will have to wait until I get a new office.

July 5th

It's a good thing we didn't do much this weekend besides watch the World Cup, because I still need to get caught up from last week.  Congrats to Germany (and Uruguay) for an exciting 3rd/4th place game, and thank you Spain for beating the Netherlands in the overtime period instead of making us suffer through a PK victory.

We used our July 5th holiday to go to the Downtown Aquarium.  The rest of my family went without me at some point a long time ago, but I drive by it every day on my way home and I wanted to go, so we went.  It's actually more of a "mini-amusement park that also has an aquarium", but it's definitely "downtown", snuggled right between skyscrapers and highways, and as it turns out, a pretty fun place to spend the day.

Here's Olivia at the main entrance, with downtown Houston in the background.

We weren't sure how long the kids would last, so we saw the aquarium first.  It's kind of underwhelming as an aquarium, but there were still a few interesting things to see.

This was Olivia's favorite exhibit, partly because the string rays had spots, and mostly because she could climb on it.

Inexplicably, at the end of the aquarium they have a tiger exhibit.  They are beautiful animals, but I wasn't a fan of their unnatural habitat (they were sliding around on the tile).

Like Kemah last year, we found ourselves in the aquarium restaurant for lunch, where we excused the steak and shrimp (me) and Captain's platter (Amber) as a "vacation expense".  No matter that it was more than our entry tickets.  Surprisingly, the shrimp was better than the steak, which is saying something from a lukewarm seafooder like me.  Here's Carmen enjoying the ambiance.

We also rode a train (strikingly similar to the Kemah train... and now that I think about it [digging through blog], the Hermann Park train... there must not be many manufacturers of mini trains) through the park.

The main attractions to this were a shark tunnel (whelming) and a poor man's Universal-Studios-style "Oh noes, that prop boat has prop bite marks in it" followed by an animatronic shark popping out of a ridiculously small pool of water and spraying us.

Finally we tried out the carnival personality of this identity-confused place.  As a reward for spending a ridiculous amount of money at the restaurant Olivia eating her seafood we got a free carnival game ticket for an impossible ring toss game.  Olivia had a hard time even hitting the bottles, much less ringing them, so I ponied up afterwards for a guaranteed-prize fishing game.

The carousel was an acquired taste for Olivia, who was happy to get off.  Carmen had to be dragged screaming from her seahorse.

Surprisingly, Olivia loved the ferris wheel, while my weak inner-ear equilibrium was complaining after back-to-back spinning rides.  Here are Amber and Carmen enjoying the views of the elevated highways and downtown.

And of course, no trip like this is a success unless somebody zonks out on the way home.  Her's Carmen (and Cinnamon the cat) in her new car seat.

July 4th

We gave the girls a little sneak preview on July 3rd,  letting them play with sparklers and setting off a few smoke bombs and small fountains.  I was happy that both of them really enjoyed it, because there were a lot more coming.

We saved the majority of our stash for the 4th and invited Dan & Hyde's family and some of our friends from the ward (the Shephards and Armandarezes).  We did sparklers and small stuff at dusk, then broke out the big guns when it got dark.  We had enough stock to last a couple hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I think everyone else had a good time too.

As it turns out, I should not have doubted the patriotism of my neighbors.  The conglomerate of 3 households down the street put on a very competitive show and there were two more on our street with a substantial presence, as well as an impressive sounding (and occasionally looking) show on the next street over.

I was too busy lighting fireworks to take many pictures, but here are a few of the kids playing with sparklers after the big show.

Happy Independence Day

For the last couple of years we've gone to a local fireworks show, but this year I decided I wanted to buy some of our own.  So after dinner tonight we all loaded up and drove down the street to the local fireworks warehouse (seriously, this is a permanent building that just opens up before fireworks holidays).  I thought I did pretty good, I spent about $60 and got a big variety pack with lots of fountains, some jumping jacks, some sparklers for the kids, and shelled out (ha!) for that black multi-shot.

When we went to check out they told us about their daily drawing that happened at 7 o'clock, so as I was paying, Amber entered me into the daily drawing for $250 worth of free fireworks.  Well, you guessed it.  An hour or so later, we got a call.  I was the daily winner!

On our previous trip, my Californian wife was no help at all, so I called up Dan and he readily agreed to help me decide what to get.  We met there and decided on a much fancier variety pack (all fountains and artillery shells), a set of fancy mortars (i.e., real fireworks), and two more bags of miscellaneous stuff for the kids.

I was hoping to keep a low profile, what with the HOA and all (I'm sure there's a rule in there somewhere), but hopefully my neighbors are very patriotic.

Carmen

Ugh, I started this several days ago but never got to actually writing it.  So before I forget, here's the quick version.

The night before several days ago, I put Carmen to bed.  It's pretty obvious when she's tired, and even she knows it.  Normally we read a book or two, then sing, then snuggle until I put her in her crib.  This night I skipped the books and tried to sing her a song.  She put up with that for about 30 seconds before she just slid off my lap and toddled over to her crib and motioned that she was ready to get in.  If you say so!

Not really newsworthy, but it made me appreciate what a good kid she is.  She's awfully cute, whether putting herself to bed, or babbling mostly incoherently, or backing up and sitting on your lap (or chest, or face), or playing in the dirt.  Here she is clapping while getting her fingernails clipped.