Climbing trees, Riding Wheels, DirecTv dumb, Cool Carson, Sub 9

Somehow I managed to spend the vast majority of my weekend working on crap ranging from chores to race timing to remote office things.  I got some fun time in but found myself last night feeling like the two days were too task heavy.  Saturday I weeded the property and then followed up with the gas weed whacker, knocking down the growth accelerated by the unrelenting rain.

Late in the morning I thought I would be proactive and call DirecTV a day early to make sure my Sunday Ticket was working so I could watch the Eagles game the following day.  Because of the non-standard configuration I have where I JUST have the Sunday Ticket and no other programming package I have to call them each year after my account comes off the 6 month service suspension.  I have had this set up for close to 10 years and every year it is a pain in the ass to get it working.  This year set the bar to a new high of frustration.

So I call up and get a woman that sounds like she is from the US.  When I explain what I need she indicates I need to talk to tech support.  She said she would transfer me.  Within the first 3 seconds after being transferred I felt my blood pressure rising as I heard the very thick foreign accent on the other end.  Despite the headaches I have had in the past getting my service working, I always at least dealt with US based support staff.  Evidently part of ATT acquiring DirecTV last year was establishing some cheap foreign call centers, awesome move.

So I literally spent 60 minutes on the phone with a level 1 guy and then his supervisor, with me getting more frustrated by the minute as he kept putting me on hold since he had no idea what to do.  At one point I asked him if he was located in India.  He seemed a bit put off by my question and told me he was not Indian, he was located in the Phillipines.  Sorry, my bad, I still can hardly understand you.  I went through a maddening circus of reboots and being put on hold, despite me telling them that normal corrective actions would not work.

So at the end of the 60 minute circus the supervisor said he was going to transfer me to the Sunday Ticket department.  He had exhausted his ability to correct my problem.  He said please hold and I was promptly disconnected.  Of course I was beyond furious.  I called back ready to destroy whoever was unlucky enough to answer the phone.  The 18 minutes I had to wait for someone to pick up the phone the second time did nothing to help that anger.

So an english speaking woman answered.  I explained the hour plus I had just wasted with the Philippine help desk.  I asked her when Directv implemented foreign tech support centers.  She said it was part of the ATT acquisition.  She apologized for the run around and told me that in the future if I would be connected overseas I can request to be transferred to the US group, supposedly they have to honor that request.  I went through another very lengthy phone call with repeated long hold times.  At the end of it I still was getting 721 errors (not authorized) on the Sunday Ticket channels in the 700 channel range but I was getting channel 212, which she said indicates I was good to go.  She said the other channels should work on Sunday once the game content starts.  I was very skeptical of this and told her as much.  She reiterated it should work fine.  (it actually did work on Sunday)  By the time I hung up I had wasted two hours of my weekend on the phone with DirecTv, thanks!!

So as I was waiting on hold I was flipping through other menus on my satellite receiver, one of which was signal strength.  I noticed the average level was in the mid 70’s (out of 100) which is less than it used to be.  The satellite dish is on the west side of the house and unfortunately is aimed right through one of our oak trees.  Years ago I cut out a bunch of branches in the middle to give me a clearer view of the sky with the dish.  It appeared I needed to do so once again.

In the past I did this work with a pole saw which was a pain in the ass.  I decided to get up close and personal this time, grabbing a ladder and my battery powered reciprocating saw.  I used the ladder to just get me up into the main body of the tree, after that it was me just climbing around, reliving my childhood tree climbing days, something I used to do extensively.  An oak tree body is sort of a gnarled mess with lots of tiny, crisscrossing small branches.  It didn’t take long until one of them ripped open one of the brush burns on my knee, unknowingly sending a stream of blood down my leg.

I first cut away some of the small stuff to give me more room to stand and work without getting scraped/impaled.  I then started working on the large branches that were in the dish line of sight.  I had to be careful with the angles I cut, making sure they made the branches fall in a  way that would not clip the house roof or gutters.  A couple of the branches were sizeable, easily 10-12 feet long.  I diligently hacked away, doing my best to estimate the invisible beam the dish uses to grab signal.  By the time I was done there were over a half dozen large branches on the ground.  When I got down I walked over to the dish to take another look.  The center of the tree had been thinned out considerably.  I verified the success of the work inside, seeing the average signal strength had jumped up to the upper 80’s, good enough.

I then had to dispose of all of the discarded branches.  I pulled the tractor out of the shed and used it to drag the branches to the rear pit one at a time.  I would drive up to a branch, reach down with my hand and grab it, trying to wedge it against the side of the tractor body the best I could.  The branch dragging put my grip strength to the test as some created a lot of ground resistance as I pulled them along.   Eventually I got the mess cleaned up.  Between the nightmare phone calls and tree trimming I have put a lot of effort getting my 2016 Sunday Ticket up and running.  I hope the Eagles are worth it this year.

Saturday night we stayed home and watched Black Mass, a real life story of a Boston based crime group, the head of which is portrayed by Johnny Depp.  The movie gave a very brutal view into the organized crime scene and pulled no punches in depicting the violence involved.  It had a pretty well known cast that helped the level of the film.  Despite it’s very dark background, the movie was  a quality B+ flick in the end.

Sunday morning I once again had the 6AM alarm set so I could get out and run.  This time there was no bald eagle on the light tower to cheer me on but I still covered the four miles at a recent personal best pace of 8:52 per mile.  I again stuck with the shorter stride, faster cadence strategy and it again seemed to work for me.

For the past three weeks I have been the first to show up at the track.  I had been always running in a clockwise direction.  Each week a group of walkers show up later and each time they decided to walk the opposite direction I was running which I found annoying.  I didn’t want to be running at people twice per lap.  So on Sunday I thought if you can’t beat em, join em, I ran counter clockwise.  Once again the group showed up and you guessed it, they decide to now walk around clockwise.  WTF …..

Later in the morning Cindy and I took out the Minipro and the Ninebot One.  We went to a new spot, the Naples Greenway, a beautiful walking/running/trail that was opened up in 2014.   It was the PERFECT spot to ride.  The wide walking paths were great for buzzing along on the Minipros.  We put in over 4 miles on the Minipro.  I then pulled out my EUC and rode another 5 miles while Cindy chilled and read a book.  It was quite the nice way to spend a couple hours in the morning.

We got home shortly before the kickoff for the Eagles game.  Like I said I was pleasantly surprised that the game came through on my receiver without a third call to DirecTv.  I really had no idea what to expect, despite the Eagles 4-0 preseason record.  The surprise trade of Sam Bradford and equally surprising naming of the rookie, Carson Wentz as the day one starter left a whole lot of things up in the air.

Well it didn’t take long for me to start feeling better about things.  Carson Wentz lead the Eagles down the field quickly for the first touchdown pass of his NFL career.  I immediately got a good feeling from the rookie QB.  Despite his lack of playing time in the NFL, I never got a deer in the headlights sense about him.  He seemed calm and in control.  It was also a breath of fresh air to see such a balanced running and passing attack from the Eagles, which resulted in monster time of possession dominance, something that NEVER happened under Chip Kelly courtesy of his hurry up offense.

The defense gave me a really good feeling as well.  Much like Wentz, they just seemed in control.  At no point, even when they were up by 19 points did I get the feeling the Browns had a chance to come back.  The D just seemed to do everything fundamentally well.  During the last decade whenever the Eagles were up by more than two touchdowns it was almost automatic that they would roll into a soft prevent, giving up yards and points by the bushel, not yesterday.

It was one of the best feeling opening day games I can recall in the last 15 years of Eagles football.  Of course this is tempered by the fact that the Browns are not a good football team but even so, the Eagles many. many times have found ways to lose to bad teams.  On Sunday they got ahead and then slammed the door, just like good teams often do.  Of course this doesn’t mean the team is going to excel over the course of the season but I will take it one game at a time.  Based on what I have seen from this one game, I am optimistic.

I usually like to wind down my weekends just relaxing or screwing off.  Instead I followed the Eagles game up with paying my bills followed by mowing the yard, finishing up just as the sun was setting towards the horizon.  When I started mowing I felt grumpy about having to end the weekend with yet another house chore.  By the time I was done my mood was elevated from watching the chickens following me around on the tractor, hoping to devour any bugs the freshly cut grass exposed.  Chickens are funny.