Cancer come back, Dexter done, Directv Down, Cell phone charges, NYC encore

So I had a voicemail to call back the dermatologist for the lab results of the suspect spot on my face.  I already knew that it was going to be a positive result since they were making me call in.  As expected the skin tested positive for basal cell skin cancer.  The spot is right in front of my right ear.

I had almost the exact same spot on the left side worked on a couple years ago.  I will be undergoing the mohs procedure for the third or fourth time.  Basically they cut away skin and then test the edges to make sure no cancer cells remain.  If you get lucky they get everything the first time, if not you wind up going under the knife repeatedly.  If that is the case not only is it annoying, it’s time consuming as well as there is a large gap in time while the testing is happening.

Of course I am not happy about getting cut on once again.  The fun is scheduled to go down in about two weeks.

Last night after work I headed outside with the intentions of doing muscle up training.  Well that lasted all of 5 minutes.  The marshy backyard is infested with countless mosquitos.  They were all over me in no time.  They were all over the dogs even worse.  I HATE this time of year.  I can’t wait for winter.

I finished up season 5 of Dexter last night.  It was an exciting finish which makes me anxious to get my hands on this season, unfortunately it won’t happen anytime soon more than likely.

In the second half of the season a character named Stan Liddy was introduced, a crooked and nasty cop.  I knew the guy looked very familiar to me but I didn’t quite place where I knew him from until last night, it’s Robocop!  Stan Liddy was played by Peter Weller.    It has been at least two decades since I saw Robocop in anything hence my difficulty in placing the face.

Anyway the bad guys got what they deserved and there are a couple dangling plot lines that should prove to be interesting as this season unfolds.  Dexter kicks ass.  My buddy at work insists that I need to also check out Breaking Bad, he gives it marks as high as Dexter.  Trusting his judgement I now have the first 4 season lined up in my Netflix DVD queue.

With the NFL season set to kick off this weekend I figured I would be proactive and fire up my Directv receiver to make sure everything was ready to go.  After the season ended last year I suspended my service for 6 months since I only use it for the Sunday Ticket.  the receiver has been unplugged since then.

I have done this in the past so I knew when the receiver is first plugged in after being off for a long time it typically is a long process as any updates that occurred during that 6 month period will need to be applied.  I plugged the receiver in and walked away.

Well when I got back to it I saw a 771 Searching for signal error… Great this means the dish sees nothing in the sky.  I did basic troubleshooting steps like resetting the receiver which fixes many problems.  Well it didn’t do anything.  I then tried to remove the access card, a credit card sized piece of plastic that slides into the front of the receiver.  I could not pull it out with my fingers.  That’s odd, normally the card slides out with no more resistance than you would experience at an ATM machine.

I went and got the needle nose pliers I use in Roomba maintenance and grabbed the end of the card.  Even with the pliers it was difficult to yank the card out but it eventually let loose.  I immediately noticed on the top of the card what looked like a burn mark.  The data chip was aligned with the mark on the other side.  Hmm well that can’t be good.  So I decided to give Directv a call.

I described to the guy that my receiver had been off and unplugged for 6 months.  I also described the problem I had with the access card as well as the apparent burn mark.  The tech had me run through some diagnostics.  Ironically the access card seems to still be functional and readable but there was still no signal coming in to the box.

While the tech was having me go through some additional routine steps like disconnecting the coax line I theorized what could have happened.  There were two scenarios that ran through my head.  Perhaps lightning somehow hit the dish ground connection which is shared with the HD antenna causing damage to the receiver.  It seemed unlikely but the burn mark on the card with the hardware unplugged doesn’t make much sense otherwise.

The other theory is when the house was painted in March the painters bumped the dish out of alignment.  The dish is locked firmly in place by a number of nuts and bolts but this is possible as well.  The rep on the phone said they could send a tech out to figure out what is wrong, of course they don’t do this for free.  I told him I would like to do some more checking of the outside equipment before sending out a tech just in case it is something stupid.

Today I am thinking I will just bite the bullet and have them send the tech.  If I play the shell game I might be able to get away with it only costing me $15 to do so.  I can sign up for monthly maintenance for $5 and then cancel it for $10 as opposed to paying $49.99 for a service call.

I got my cell phone bill for last month which included our overseas usage.  I knew this bill was going to be a pig but I didn’t expect it to be a $283 dollar pig.  I dug into the bill details and saw I got double charged for the international data package.   I called in this morning and got that removed.  The extra $30 or so was a result of charges for text messages and a couple brief phone calls.  They dinged us $21 for 42 text messages, a ridiculous fee for something that costs them basically nothing since in Europe they don’t charge extra for text messaging.

Ali and I had discussed after our trip how cool it would be to take a few days near the holidays and go back to NYC since we had such a nice time in our 24 hour whirlwind trip in August.   Yesterday I started laying the groundwork to make it happen.

The first issue was scheduling a free block of time to do it.  Pretty much every weekend in December was booked with either race timing or race participation.  I realized that the trip would have to more or less occur during weekdays. This less than ideal in efficient vacation day usage but that is the way it will have to be if we are going to pull it off.

I was happy to see that the date range I was looking at had some cheap Jet Blue flights available, a little over $200 round trip which is sweet.  I was not quite as happy when I looked into hotel accommodations.

I first checked out the Sheraton we stayed at since we both liked it.  I was encouraged when on the front page of their website I saw the date range I wanted listed as a date that had “deals”.  Well their idea of a “deal” was $400 a night, f that.

So I am thinking I will secure the cheap airfare now and then turn my attention to finding nice but less expensive accommodations.  It will be an awesome thing to see NYC around Christmas.  It will wind up being basically the lion share of the birthday/Xmas presents for Ali and I based on what it will cost.