Winter 2015 January 3 Saturday

35 degrees this morning.  45:49 minutes walking. one earthquake

Due to the weather (possible ice), we haven’t been out hardly at all.  We just figure ice on streets  is something we don’t want to mess with. 

It was always just slightly warmer in Memphis and  we rarely had icy streets, but when we did it was bad.

I do miss exercising and will be glad to get back to it,  although  actually I have only missed two walks, and in the past I normally missed about 7 days over the holiday season.  

I decided to walk this morning and it was fine, wet, but not slick at all.

More thinking about New Year Resolutions, or priorities/goals etc.  I really don’t have any major goals or priorities this year, except to live my life to the fullest.  Which maybe is a good goal.

As anyone who has been reading this for any time knows, I don’t mean going out partying by “living life to the fullest”, on the contrary, I mean really experiencing life for whatever it is, the pain, pleasure, the disappointments and the successes.   

What I don’t want to do is to not live life because I am trying to avoid something disappointing, or painful etc., if that makes any sense.  

We signed up with our insurance company for a “good driver” device, that supposedly rewards you for not driving excessively, avoiding sudden stops ` ll.

We are required to use it, just if we just want about a 15% discount for the first year (after that it depends on the driving), so it is worth a try.

I have decided our cable tv system is worthless.  It simply doesn’t work, and all Cox  dose is say it is a “software problem”, but they still make the same claims that it does work in their advertising! 

Might be time to “pull the plug”.  It doesn’t necessarily bother me that it doesn’t work, it is just that they sell it on the basis it does work work and it really doesn’t work.   Why should they get by with false advertising?  

I decided to call every time we have a problem to document the problem.  

We had a problem with TV reception in Lakeland.  Comcast blamed it on a problem with the TV (and anything but them).  However, we have the same TV here and don’t have the same problem, so we know it was Comcast.  We decided the same thing isn’t going to happen again.

Part of the problem is Cox uses “contractors”, who (at least more than the employees) could care less about doing a decent job and just want to get in, grab their money and get out 

It makes me nervous that the government is using “contractors” so much.  I really wonder what kind of work is really being done.  

The phone company has the same problem with “contractors” who lay their cable.  The contractors just want to get done and don’t care about their work, again at least to some degree.

I think the problem is they know they won’t have to live to bad work, the employees know they will have to deal with bad work.

That isn’t true of all contractors, but it is a very serious problem.  

Reading a book “Beijing Bastard” about a woman who was born in America (of Chinese parents) and went to China to work when she was in her twenties.  I am still early in the book, but it is interesting, since she experienced some of the things we saw (like living in a “hu tong”) and it gives me some more information on what it is like.  

That’s it for now, Saturday, January 3, 2015