My sister’s birthday this week & some other random things

 

This upcoming week is my sister Shawn’s birthday.  (I won’t give her age here, but I’m turning 58 in a couple months and I’m less than 2 years older than her, so…)

Shawn & her 10th birthday cake on our carport, our brother Steve, me

I always liked Shawn’s birthday, it had a ‘holiday’ feel to it.  Coming at the end of August it was always a nice summer day, with an end-of-summer cookout and some excitement about the new school year ahead.  Happy Birthday, Shawn!

I’m just realizing as I type this, the last time I was at my sister’s house was on her birthday last August when I surprised her with a cake.  It seems like even longer ago than that.

It was also a year ago yesterday I left Facebook.  (I wrote about it here.)  I was hanging out there too much and often felt guilty for not having more to share, but it was also making me a little crazy reading friends and relatives support of Trump.  I’ve been giving some thought recently about rejoining, I miss a few of the voices there.  Plus for all the blogging I do, I feel like I’m talking to an empty room here.  I should probably ease back on my blogging.

The other day on Mental Floss, I read that only 8% of single males DON’T watch sports on television.  EIGHT PERCENT.  I don’t watch any sports.  Why am I so weird?  Growing up, my dad was a big Steelers fan.  I often tried to sit there and watch football games with him, just to BE with him.  I could never get thru an entire game. 

(I like sports movies—Remember the Titans, The Blind Side, Rudy, The Fighter, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own—I could go on & on here.  But not actual sports.)

Speaking of movies, this week I quit Netflix.  Yes I’m aware people quit (or join or rejoin) every day, nothing new there.  But I’ve been a loyal subscriber (to their dvd plan or their streaming plan or both) since June 1999.  In their heyday, they were great!  They had 300 dvd distribution centers, one here in Pittsburgh.  Now they only have 30.  Everyone’s streaming now, I guess.

This is how my streaming screen looked on it’s final day.  (They do make great thumbnails, but looks can be deceiving.)

Over the last year or so, it was becoming more & more a chore to find good things to watch.  There’s the occasional gem (American Factory, an amazing documentary recently produced by Netflix) but if you’re a Netflix subscriber, you KNOW you spend more time than you’d care to admit wading thru dreck.  Redbox, here I come.

Speaking of tech, a couple weeks ago I thought I’d do a little research on Xfinity smartphones.  (Why?  I don’t need one!)   I stumbled across this funny, angry blogger who hates Xfinity but admitted she liked their phone plans and signed up for one.  But in one of her earlier posts, she wrote if you’re an Xfinity customer, your router is used (by Comcast) as a ‘wifi hotspot’ by default.  They claim it doesn’t affect your own broadband, but she always seemed to lose her laptop connection—UNTIL she disabled her router from being a public hotspot.  

That’s funny… my laptop often loses its connection too.  I wrote Comcast Support and got this:

We encourage you to keep the XFINITY WiFi Home Hotspot feature enabled, as it allows more people to enjoy the benefits of XFINITY WiFi.  This xfinitywifi WiFi signal is completely separate from your private XFINITY WiFi home network and won't slow down your home broadband connection.

WHAT THE—!!  I didn’t disbelieve them, but I still googled how to deactivate the public option on mine (easy peasy) and for the last 2 weeks my laptop hasn’t lost it’s internet connection even once.  That can’t be a coincidence!

And finally… something goofy is showing up on my blog September 4.  I know little more than you, other than it promises to be a blast from the past.  A couple days before that date, I’ll give a little more backstory.  

Like my Netflix announcement, I’m sure it will be nothing to write home about!