Danita and I had a great time on our little 3-day jaunt. It was so much fun to get out and about a little. Now we’re in a modified quarantine. We wear masks whenever we leave the house. That means no eating in restaurants. We’re scheduled for a COVID test tomorrow. So far, if we have COVID, we are symptom-free.

We have Verizon FIOS internet service. It’s great service, fast and reliable. At $45/month, it’s not crazy expensive. This month the cost went up $5. I called Verizon. They couldn’t decrease the price, but they could double our speed (to 200 Mbps) and upgrade our ONT (Optical Network Adaptor) at no cost. I decided if we had to pay the extra money, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have the faster service. The tech arrived on time. That’s when I learned we weren’t actually getting an upgraded ONT. In the past, our ONT converted our internet from fiber-optic to coax. A modem connected to our coax converted it to Ethernet. Verizon was going to bypass the coax and take Ethernet directly from the ONT. Fortunately, our house wiring allowed us to do this, but it meant I had to rearrange our Ethernet wiring. I also had to move some heavy furniture to give access to the wall plates. The tech did his job and left. It took him an hour to do what is normally a 2-hour job. That left me with the task of making a modification to the wiring in the house. After over an hour of frustrating failure, traipsing up and down two flights of stairs, I realized I had to put an Ethernet connector on a cable. That’s when I learned that it is much harder for me to put a connector on an Ethernet cable than it was 3 years ago. No matter how much light I had, I simply couldn’t see well enough to do the job. It took over three hours with two major “frustration breaks”. I got the job done before dinner, but it took a good chunk of the day. In addition, I hurt my back. I’m still in pain, but my back seems to be responding well to rest. Hopefully, I’ll be able to put the furniture back in place in a couple of days. All in all, a job that would have taken an hour when I was younger took a day. On the good side, I was surprised to find our latency went from 15 msec to 7 msec. That’s quite an improvement.

JAMM (Jiajia, Mark, and Mira) are coming for a 3-day visit, and we’re upping our game to be prepared. Besides the COVID precautions, we put coves in all the unused power outlets. I also got cabinet locks to keep Mira out of danger. I went with latches that require a magnet to open the cabinet door. I chose them because after JAMM leaves, we can reconfigure the latches to leave the cabinets unlocked. It sounds pretty slick, but when the package arrived, I noticed they have a video to explain how to install them. We’ll see how this goes.

Things are going very slowly on the maintenance front. The Leaf is still at the dealer. It seems our car has a problem that is unique. Lucky us. Nobody has come up with a way to install the new door to the deck. The old door is still in place, but all the framing was removed in preparation for the door swap. The new door is sitting on the deck, tied to the old door with a strap. The entire area is covered with a blue tarp to protect the new door from the weather. My joke is that I can’t take a nap on the couch because, as everybody knows, blue light disrupts sleep. The construction crew “sealed” the old door with blue painter’s tape. It’s a most unusual “accent wall”. The vertical blinds have been sitting on our couch for the last week. There’s no other place in the house to put them. The construction foreman promised to re-install the blinds before Christmas if they can’t install the new door by then.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.