Month: March 2014

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T-Minus 18 Hours and counting…

Heading home tomorrow.

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I’d planned to leave yesterday or today. But Mom wanted to have a family Sunday dinner. I’m cool with that. The last time I visited FL was 7, maybe 8 years ago I doubt that I’m going to have as long a hiatus before my next visit.

You know the saying, “if you don’t use it you lose it,” that’s unfortunately whats happening with my folks. They really don’t move around a lot and as a result, it’s getting harder for them to move.

I compare my Mom to my Aunt and its night and day. Even though my Aunt is the older sister she’s in a lot better shape and part of it is that she just moves around all the time. She’s always doing something, whether that’s working in the yard or fiddling with some new recipe.

As a consequence, she’s lighter, stronger, and healthier, overall. Yeah she’s got a couple of problems with her hips but nothing like the problem Mom has.

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So I’ve learned a lot while I’ve been here. First and foremost is take care of yourself. It’s all too easy these days to plop yourself down in front of the TV and do nothing. All I can say is DON’T!

Stay in motion, work out, walk, breathe the air, and live your life, don’t let things pass you by.

The consequences of doing nothing are terrible and painful for you and for your loved ones to watch.

Imagine your family not wanting to visit; not because they don’t love you, but because you’ve become so disgusting that they don’t want to visit, or expose their children to you. 

That’s exactly what can happen if you don’t take care of yourself. Yes! There are boundaries even to love.

Watch what you eat. Salt is a killer! My BP has climbed steadily since I’ve been here.

Part of that climb is due to the fact that everything in this house is processed to the point that it’s just barely food, and it is loaded with salt! Part of it is that I’m used to drinking a lot of tea and water at home. Here I’ve not been thirsty and that means that I’m not flushing salt out of my system. This is BAD! Unfortunately it’s very easy to do.

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I think it’s going to take at least a couple of months for me to get stuff like diet and salt intake and fluid intake back on track again.

Yes, I could go to the grocery store and buy my own food and make healthy choices. Problem is, that would be somewhat rude to my folks. So I’ve decided to just tough it out, eating what they eat when they eat it.

Tomorrow at the gas stop, before I hit the interstate, I’m loading up on water and will start flushing my system on the drive home. So what if I’m pissing at the side of the road, there’s a whole lot of open lonely roads between here and home.

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I could use a massage, and some naked time! I don’t think I’ll get either until I get home. Yeah I can be naked in a hotel room but I tend to sleep, shower, and take off. It’s not like Palm Springs where I can spend a day by the pool just relaxing.

As to the massage. Well, do I take a chance on someone; I want a massage, not a quick jerk off. It’s difficult to tell the legitimate massage folks from the “I’ll rub your but for a minute and then get you off” crowd.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s room in my world for both practitioners, but I really want a massage I’ll handle my own dick thank you…

I’ll sleep on that one. I don’t have to make a decision right at this moment.

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It will be good to be back on the road. I’m tired of seeing the inside of the grocery store, the home repair store, staples, and the grocery store again. I’m also kinda tired of picking up after my stepdad and him leaving a trail of paper, crumbs, paper towels, tea stains on the counters, and greasy fingerprints on the fridge.

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Ding, Dong, Fred Phelps is dead!

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I thought I’d feel happy about it.

I don’t.

I’d planned a pilgrimage to his grave site so that I could piss on his grave, I find myself not wanting to waste the gas or time.  It would be relatively easy and not that far out of my way, since I’m driving back home soon.

It’s not worth it, I’m just not that much into the symbolism and all I feel, is that a very sick, very sad caricature of a religious man is dead. He’ll never learn anything about the consequences of his hate, or how to let that hate go.

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Perhaps he has taught me something though, holding on to hate, anger, and sadness, prevent you from seeing that there is more in the world.

Oh, I’m nowhere near being enlightened! 

I’ve spent years trying to connect the dots about anger and hate. Maybe another 30 or 40 years and I’ll get it right. Hey, I have issues, so sue me! Sometimes you have to go back to the beginning to understand why you’re so knotted up.

Just going back to your beginning isn’t going to help unless you’re in a place where you can understand objectively what you’re seeing and not get caught up in the minutiae. You kinda have to take the wide angle view and see your place in the interactions and you gotta accept your part in the mess. Yeah, you’re not a victim, even though you might want to think of yourself as one, you’re more often an active participant.

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I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will want to cause the Phelps family as much grief and pain as the Phelps family has caused. And they will… For my part, I think stopping the cycle of pain, anger, and grief is a better choice.

Fred Phelps deserves nothing but my pity. His legacy will be a footnote in history as a person that was misguided and who used religion to cause others pain.

Moving on…

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It’s past time to go home

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Things that have gone untended this past month at home are starting to need attention. 

Most recent is the Alarm System.

Don’t get me wrong, I can handle a ton of this stuff over the phone. Which is what I’m doing now, albeit I’m in a hold queue.

Something has apparently gone wrong with the cellular radio in the control panel. First it was just a minor inconvenience. Our ability to remotely arm & disarm the system wasn’t working. No big deal, the other half just armed and disarmed with the panel code. 

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I called ADT and after speaking to a little lady who had no idea what she was talking about when she told me that the device in my house was connected to the internet via my router…

It isn’t, for that to happen ADT would have to know my network password. When  confronted with that bit of information, she claimed that ADT had installed their own router in my house. Again, incorrect since the only hardline internet coming into my house is under my control. Therefore an ADT installed router wouldn’t do them any good since it again wouldn’t be connected to the internet. 

When I pointed out that the panel wasn’t even connected to my telephone line, she transferred me to the next tech in their hierarchy who did actually know something about the system.

He tried to reset the alarm system remotely but the system refused all commands. 

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The tech suggested that we unplug the adapter, and then pull the backup batteries out of the machine to reset it.

Had I been home I’d have done that but I didn’t want the other half attempting this maneuver due to inexperience with very compact circuits in a confined enclosure. 

It was at some point in this exercise that we discovered the transformer that runs the panel is screwed into the outlet with a square bit screw.

No, it couldn’t be phillips, flathead, hex or torx it had to be the ONE screw head type I don’t have a driver for. My cunning plan was to unplug the unit from the wall and then let the batteries die over the course of 24 hours. It was my hope that at that point we could plug the adapter back in and effectively reset the device. 

My cunning plan was thwarted by a damn screwhead.

This led to setting up an appointment for Thursday to have a repair person come to take a look at the machine.

Then at 3 am on Saturday, the other shoe dropped. In this case the “shoe” was the last leg of the radio communications gave up the ghost.

No big deal you’d think… 

Yeah, except that the panel started beeping constantly reporting that the long range radio failed. It did this intermittently until the other half who’d not been able to get any sleep called me and asked me to make it all stop!

I get back on the phone to ADT and ask the little lady who answers the phone how to make the panel shut up. “Enter the code and press off,” she says.

“We’ve done that and have been doing that since 3 am, every 30 minutes the alert starts beeping again. Can we shut it up permanently?”

“I don’t know how to do that sir,” she said.

I’m thinking “you’ve got to be kidding me!” 

This is the first time one of these systems has failed? REALLY? The ADT people don’t know how to control it? Worse is that the other half consulted the manual seeking answers. Much as Homer Simpson concluded about the bible there were no answers to be found in the alarm system manual even with an index!

The other half managed to shut the alerts off, by accident! It was simple but the ADT people didn’t seem to know how.

Since we had a hard failure, I asked to get someone out to repair the system right now!

Nope! no can do…

I called ADT again this morning and asked for a supervisor, this is insane.

I asked the supervisor the following questions and got little in the way of reasonable answers.

1) Why was there no call when you completely lost communication with our system? It seems that should have raised some eyebrows somewhere in a monitoring facility.

2) A hard failure trumps installs and/or minor repairs, why are we still looking at a Thursday, earliest repair visit?

3) What were the ADT people thinking, effectively asking unskilled labor to open a control panel and start fiddling with it’s connections? Not to mention that the installer had made it impossible to unplug the transformer if we needed to.

If that’s what’s required then clearly a tech should have been rolling to the house right at that moment.

(We now own a nice shiny set of square drivers, but at this point I want to leave the system in failure mode so they can actually fix something!)

4) Clearly the folks on the phones at ADT have no idea what their machines do or are capable of. Those first line phone people need a lot more training.

5) Why am I paying for 24/7 monitoring?

None of these questions or statements were answered or challenged. 

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We will be chatting with the insurance agent, after all they give us a discount on our policy for having a monitored security system.

I wonder how they’d react to learning that the monitoring may not be 24/7 as advertised?

All this has led me to wonder if there’s another vendor of alarm services that might be better.

For example…