When it rains…

Several folks have seen my scattered posts on Facebook about contractors and insurance adjusters and such. Let me explain what happened.

A few weeks ago we had the roof inspected for damage. We have some tiles that have lost their adhesion and need to be replaced. We called the insurance company and had an initial inspection done. The roof was too wet to inspect everything, so the adjuster is coming back Wednesday.

The weekend before last we went out of town to the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque. We got back Sunday night. Before I went to bed I went to the basement to check on something and noticed the floor was wet.

Turns out we had an early freeze and a part in our sprinkler system broke. Water cascaded into the water well at the nearby basement window and into that room of the basement. The sump pump worked well, but that room, the unfinished room next to it and a good part of the hall got wet.

We’ve had Servicemaster in to dry the subfloor and the walls and to pull out the insulation that couldn’t be dried. Next we have to get the wall repaired and new carpet put in. All while getting the roof taken care of. That’s two claims at once.

And today, it snowed all day.

Roots

I recently took a trip to Southern California to visit a customer in Santa Ana. I arrived early and drove around looking for a place to eat. I found myself in a predominately hispanic part of town and ended up eating in a restaurant that caters to locals. The food was great and the waitstaff friendly. Afterwords I took a stroll through the local grocery store where I had parked my car (to avoid the parking meters) and bought a soda.

Not really interesting stuff, I know. Here’s the rub: I am half Mexican, and I felt very out of place throughout the whole experience.

This bugs me.

As I look back, it seems every step I have taken has taken me further and further away from the Hispanic side of myself. I took French in High School, not Spanish. I eat at taco bell a lot. The friends I have are mostly white. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I wonder why I don’t have more Hispanic friends.

I think a big part of it is that I don’t speak Spanish. I was raised mostly by my mother as my father worked long hours. She knows some Spanish, and my father learned English as a second language, but we always spoke English in the house. At school, my classmates thought I was Italian, not Mexican, so it never really came up.

So I found myself sitting in a restaurant with Mexican music playing occasionally, TV set to a Spanish-speaking channel, and a waitress who addresses me in Spanish first. I really wanted to feel comfortable, and part of me tells me I should, but I didn’t. In the grocery store, I was the weirdo that had to look closer at the writing on some of the products to read the English subtext written under the main, larger Spanish text. There were many, many products there I didn’t even recognize.

I’m feeling an urge to reconnect with my roots.

I’m thinking my first step should be to get some experience with Spanish. I’m considering the Rocket Spanish downloadable course. I would, of course, take any advice anyone cares to share with me about other courses that are effective and affordable.

Some wisdom from the traditional media

“I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll. Doubting the results is kind of the point.”

-Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor, time.com

The World’s Most Influential Person Is… – TIME.

Consolidation

I have now combined this blog with my homebrewing blog. I will leave the old blog up for a while, but eventually I will put a URL forward in place to redirect visitors from the old blog here automatically.

I once had a personal blog, a writing blog and a homebrew blog. Too much work. This is much better!

Stupid Qwest Tricks

I am in the process of switching from my current setup to Qwest POTS, Fast Broadband (12mb, woo hoo) and Directv. I had thought this would be a smooth process but, sure enough, we hit a snag on the first day.

Service was supposed to be up by 5:00 pm. I got home around 4:30, grabbed the DSL install kit, went through the instructions, did some other things, and at 5:30 plugged in and started off. No go. I took one of the filters for the phone, hooked up the phone (which works fine) to the wall outlet. No dial tone. I checked all the other phone ports in the house. No dial tone.

I call Qwest. After getting past their frustrating voice-recognition crap I get an agent. Everything is go on their end. The technician came out at noon and verified there was dial tone to the house. They will double-check everything on their end and call me back.

As I hung up, I wondered: How did the technician check this? Tanya was home most of the day, and she didn’t notice anyone at the house, so no one came INTO the house. So what’s going on? Being the geek I am, I went outside and looked at my telephone terminal box.

In the box there were 3 terminal sections. Two had phone numbers written on them. The third did not. Logic circuits went off in my head. Each terminal had a phone jack on them, and the wires from the jack appeared to be hooked up from the direction where the phone lines came in from Qwest. I plugged in the phone to the first jack. Nothing. I plugged it into the second jack. Nada. I plugged it into the third, non-labeled jack. Bingo! Dial tone!

I noticed the wires on other side of the box ran into the wall. Ah, these must be house wires. I traced them and, sure enough, none of them attached to the third terminal section.

The Qwest technician had run the lines to my house but neglected to attach the house wiring to the new terminal.

Needless to say I rewired the house wiring to the new terminal pretty quick. I have dial tone in the house now, and am posting this via my new DSL service.

I was hoping for a smooth ride. This was not a great start to my relationship with Qwest.

Tornado Alley

Take a look at this:

http://bigstormpicture.blogspot.com/?vortex

I had always thought it would suck to live in Tornado Alley. I was right. It was bad enough growing up at one end of it.

The deeds of the day

My family and I went up to Cedar Crest with my wife’s folks to play in the snow. A friend of my mother-in-law came with us, and that family had just adopted a 6-year-old from South Carolina who had never seen snow. At first he didn’t want to get out of the car, but soon he was sledding and making snow angels and throwing snowballs like a champ. I didn’t get video because it was snowing too hard.

My family doesn't change

I love my family. I do. I just want to say that.
Tomorrow we depart from our yearly visit to my folks in my home town. My parents, my one surviving grandparent, my brother and sister, and all but the oldest of my nieces and nephews were there tonight. But things never change, it’s just a matter of degrees of chaos. My wife and I never come back from a visit there with a happy warm fuzzy feeling. With the situation my family is in, has been in, has gotten themselves into, I don’t see this ever being the case. The reasons are far, wide, deep and profound, and might lead me to drink if I thought about them too much.
So why do we go? Why subject my wife and myself to the chaos and stress? Why subject ourselves to my nieces and nephews who are all being raised by my mother who seems less and less able to handle them as time goes on?
It’s a vigil. We go to observe, and to remember. We go because if we didn’t, we’d never see them. We go because we are family.
But I would be lying if I said we wished we could stay longer.

Getting more social

Well, not really. I created an account on facebook. Tanya found a lot of her old friends there, so I thought, eh, why not. Already, all the members of our original wedding party are on my friends list! Okay, so there were only five of us, including Tanya and me, but still…

A FAQ I can relate to

Q: Your website is boring.
A: Yes?

Q: I have this web design company, we…
A: No.

Q: You want your website to be boring?
A: Yes.

Q: Why?
A: Bells and whistles are overrated.

Source here.