Quiet time

Saturday morning and everyone is on the weekly supply run to walmart. In some ways I envy my wife's ability to handle the air in that accursed place. I simply can't breath when I'm in there, the smell and feel of the chinese retail god makes it seem like I'm in some sort of twisted version of Logan's Run. Do you really need a monitor every ten feet to remind you of what it is that you should be buying. She hates it too, but it's the cheapest place around to buy food.
Friday nights are movie nights when each person gets a turn to pick a movie that they would like to watch. Last night my son picked Conan... Needless to say half way through the movie, my wife was on this devil devised computer, one son was taking a bath, and the other one was making sport of the dogs via grenade practice with anything small enough to throw, yet with enough mass to cause damage. I was alternating between carving a stick and playing a hand held tetris game, while bothering my wife about what she was doing on line.
The supply run will take a couple of hours, it's the time for perfunctory duties about the place to be done - dishes washed, floors swept etc. Yet here I am on the satan feed while Ben Stein drones on in the background about where to place your money. Regardless of his investment prowess, all I can hear is him calling for Ferris.
When the supplies are off loaded and put away it will be time to begin tackling the set up of the wooden swing set that we have piled in the yard. I have a five pound bag of nuts and bolts, a four foot high pile of lumber and no instructions; sure to be a smooth operation.
There was to be a service call from the isp drones this morning but they called to inform us that the connection from and to hell was up and running at a good rate; which baffles us since they were adamantly holding on to the position that the reason the connection was so sporadic was a mystery application that we were running on the computer that was blocking the feed. Strange how these things can fix themselves when the power to said unit is off... But we faithfully tried it again, as good little subservient minions should, and what do you know... I felt it necessary to call them to find out why this was so and was informed that the connectivity was low due to updates in the area... "How is it possible that the last 77 minute call we had gone through we were told that it was our machine causing the problem, yet now, it was an update issue?" Then the question came... "Who told you that?"... "Some guy named Bob from india" enough said... They actually told me not to listen to customer service from overseas, now that instills confidence in a company's ability to take care of the customer doesn't it? Be sure to have plenty of ky lube on hand when you call them....
Now the background feed is having trapper from MASH telling me that eight dollar a gallon gas is coming because owl gore is trying to make sure that we have all of our electricity powered by the wind and sun within ten years... When was it exactly that this society as a whole fell into an episode of Gilligan's Island? Think about it, we have Alfred E Newman as President and comedy stars telling us about financial investments and energy policies... just damn.
The dogs began the ubiquitous barking an hour or so ago so I had to leave the computer in order to check for mexican gas rustlers and was met at the door by... yep you guessed it... an isp drone... He was here to "repair our internet connection" so I informed him of the latest developments and told him that we canceled the call when the automated system called us to check the status. He shook his head, looked around and wound up buying a cane I carved for fifty bucks... good, now I can get almost a full tank of gas... We talked about his employer, wood carving, polished off the rest of the breakfast leftovers, he checked everything out just to justify his time, then we ended the "service call" by enveloping ourselves in aromatic clouds of cigar smoke while discussing the usefullness of kawasaki mules. He was a nice guy, he gave me his cell number to contact him directly when we have our next issue, and you know we will. It's always good to have a contact thats willing to bypass company directives and work for cash. So I must be off to get the place cleaned before the supplies begin to roll in...