2025 Life Logs, Day 206: Catch Up Day
Date: Friday, July 25, 2025
Weather: Sunny, Late Afternoon Thunderstorm; High Temp 77, Low 68 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
It was a much needed ‘catch up’ day. Ollie went to play golf with his friend Seton and his dad and then they went to the beach. So, I started early working on the list of things that needed to be done. First was making the decision to have the surgery done to remove the cyst from above Shadow’s eye. It is very expensive, but I really have no choice but to have it done. I made the appointment to get the pre-op blood work done on Monday and the surgery will be the following Monday. Then I was off to the post office to get Coco’s birthday presents in the mail as early in the day as possible. Hopefully the package will arrive by July 30, the magical day.
The rest of the day was spent alternating between things that had to be done and things I wanted to do. I spent time outside with Shadow playing ball and then Shadow helped me as I took the snippers to some unwanted weeds throughout the yard that had grown to be very tall. We had a late afternoon thunderstorm that was mostly thunder with very little rain. Then I spent almost two hours on the phone with Xfinity. My television reception has gotten worse and worse over the past few months. I have ignored it because I knew it would take a very long time on the phone. But this evening when I turned on the television to watch last night’s Colbert show while eating an early dinner, the pixelization was so bad I could hardly watch. After a long but productive online back and forth with a robot, I was told a live technician would call me shortly. He did, and then the fun started. While talking on the phone with him, I had to move the shelving unit the television sits on out from the wall, unplug this and then that, and then wait for the technician to run tests. And we did this about three times. Finally, he said he would set an appointment for a house call with a live technician. We did that, but then I asked him to tell me what all of the diagnostics he had run told him. He mentioned that the HDMI cable that goes from the cable box to the television might be faulty. So, I told him I have extras and would replace it while he was still on the phone to see if it helped. And it did. I still have some pixelization, but it is much better. It will do until the technician can come next Thursday morning. But between now and then, the technician told me to take notes on when the pixelization is better or worse. Why was it so much worse in the recorded program than when watching live? I guess I’ll have to watch more television this weekend to figure this out!
