Month: April 2003

Our cordless phone/answering machine went weird on us about a week ago. You would pick it up and it would just beep three times when trying to use the handset. I checked the owner’s manual and all that was mentioned was two beeps and that meant you were too far away from the base, which wasn’t the case, unless 2 inches is too far away. One thing the owner’s manual said was if it wasn’t working at all was to reinitialize the handset to the base. This procedure involved unplugging the battery in the handset and unplugging the power supply to the base for 5 minutes. That worked once – the very first time I picked up the phone I got a dial tone. Hung up and tried again right away and three beeps were it. Bought a new battery for the handset and charged it overnight. It too worked once and then beeps. While in Target this afternoon we figured we should go ahead and replace the phone, the answering machine portion still worked, but we really use the cordless phone too.

Picked up this snazzy looking 2.4Ghz phone for only $55. Got it home took it out of the box and plugged it all up. Broke out the manual for it to see how to set up the answering machine portion and couldn’t find any mention of it in the papers. Read them again slower, still nothing about answering machine. That’s when I looked over the box and it didn’t say anything about an answerer. The picture sure looked like it would be an answering machine, but looks can be deceiving, it was a speaker phone, That is why it had a speaker in the base. Doh! Boxed it back up as best I could and back to Target we went. This time I made sure it said Answering Machine on all 6 sides of the box. Different company and different looks, but $5 cheaper. Got to find a neat recording to put on there, guess I’ll go Googling for a wav file.

At the end of our street in this subdivision there is a stop sign. The road you come to, Two Notch Road, is a through street. It is 1/4 mile away and parallel to a big thoroughfare so sometime we get a lot of traffic traveling on this cross street. And because it is considered a “shortcut” when the bigger road gets busy, speed limits don’t apply, it is posted at 30 mph, but please don’t let that slow you down. In the past 2 years 2 motorcyclists have been killed right near our intersection (1 t-boned a car turning left in front of him and the other just lost control) because they were traveling at a high rate of speed. For the past 10 days or so we have had one of those radar things the cops use that flashes your speed at you on Two Notch near our intersection. We use that road to go to and from work every day so it has been fun to see how accurate it thinks my speedometer is.

Today on the way home the radar thingie was reading the usual 34 (I routinely travel at +5 and the Miata’s speedo was right on 35,) but right before it was a sign proclaiming “One Lane Road Ahead.” As I approached the intersection I noticed to the right a SCDOT truck and there were broad white stripes in my lane and another on the other side of the intersection in the other lane. As I made the left into the subdivision my wife and I speculated on what was coming, a light? Or a 4 Way Stop?

Forty-five minutes later as I went for my evening rollerblade I purposely went in that direction to check out the intersection. As I rolled up I noticed under the usual stop sign there was a little addition that said “4 Way.” Sure enough there were stop signs up on Two Notch Road. That didn’t take long to put those up. Or did it? With the new sign, new stripes and the Department of Transportation truck to distract me at a very familiar intersection, were they already up and I missed them? Was I the first to these new stop signs?

I’m not a fan of NASCAR, I believe until proven otherwise that NASCAR is to auto racing what the WWF is to wrestling. I’m not a fan Domino’s Pizza either preferring Papa John’s when I’m just to lazy to travel the 3 miles to a local pizzeria. But the two of them make a fine commercial, I just love the way the “pit crew” hop over the couch to “set” the table, nicely done folks.

I found a place where somebody hates this commercial, it is amazingly enough on a forum entitled, “Commercials I Hate.”

Today we got all 4 of the Netflix movies in the mail due to the weekend before last’s movie marathon. So tonight we watched one of them, Playing Mona Lisa. Funny movie but the main attraction for me was watching Alicia Witt.

What is it about us men that makes us terrible that way? I am sitting on the couch enjoying a movie with the one I love, but I am thinking about being with Alicia. If you know the answer let me know.