Happy birthday Chevrolet. The company was formed on November 3, 1911, so it’s 100 years old now.
I’m not a big college football fan, but as far as I’m concerned the college national championship game (I know there isn’t one) will be played in Tuscaloosa Alabama this Saturday. And while I’m not going to be on the edge of my seat, enough members of my family went to Alabama that I hereby say, “Roll Tide.”
We celebrated our wedding anniversary recently. The day before, my wife, Saint Karen (She has to be a saint to put up with me) made my favorite meal which is Swiss steak prepared according to her recipe. The next leftover night I had the last of the Swiss steak while she ate some of the things left over from our dinner at a fancy restaurant we went to on our actual anniversary. She asked me to save the remaining sauce so she could freeze it. I was kidding, but I said I was planning to pour it over ice cream, because it is that good.
In addition to taking her to dinner, I gave her some lingerie in a hard-to-find style she likes. I also ordered a new flat-screen TV for her, but it came early and it was too big to hide, so I gave it to her last week. Nothing has changed in the past year: marrying Saint Karen is still the smartest thing I’ve ever done. The smartest thing she’s ever done is not say what the smartest thing she has ever done is.
I took my wife out to dinner twice last week, so she’d better not expect a present on my birthday.
I have no serious complaints about Cablevision which supplies both cable and Internet to my home. It does cost a lot, but at some point in your life all prices become ridiculous. They do rely too much on automated phone attendants though. Overnight from Monday into Tuesday, something happened to our service. When I woke up Tuesday morning, all of my cable boxes were rebooting, and I wasn’t connected to the Internet. I called them about the Internet, and got a phone attendant. The problem with that is the attendant basically walked me through the following: Unplug your router and your modem; plug them back in; if that doesn’t work, call us back. The bigger problem is that one sentence of advice took more than five minutes to administer.
From the department of improved products comes Cabot acrylic deck stain. When my front porch was rebuilt, I used oil-based Cabot deck stain on it and liked it; so did “Consumer Reports.” Last time I repainted it I used Cabot acrylic deck stain and didn’t like it. The color was the same, but the acrylic came out with a really glossy finish and it was slippery too. I repainted it again this week and used the acrylic again because to go back to the oil stain I’d have to sand off the acrylic. The acrylic stain has been reformulated. It didn’t dry shiny this time so I like it much better than I did the first time I used it.
