Guess I’ll figure it out for you, slept like a baby, furry family

So I was pleasantly surprised that my replacement DirecTv receiver was at my door already yesterday.  On the phone I was told it would be 2-5 business days, it got there in one.  Gotta love under promising and over delivering. So last night I hooked up the new receiver which is a much newer model than what I had.  I got everything connected and started going through the set up screens.  When it tried to connect to the satellite service it would repeatedly fail.  I backed up and ran the signal strength test.  It showed straight zeroes across the board , wtf….

So after screwing around some more I finally decided to call DirecTV support.  After verifying that my dish and switch type selections were correct he had me try to connect repeatedly and again had no more success than I did.  He said maybe my dish was out of alignment but I assured it had not been touched.  I did not tell him that I had a likely lightning strike however.  The rep said the only thing he could do was schedule a tech to come out to check stuff out.  Ok, fine. I scheduled a visit for Sunday, yes they work 7 days a week.

So after I hung up I still was not satisfied with the troubleshooting.  Just for the hell of it, I decided to remove the “B-band convertor” that is inline between the satellite coax feed and the receiver.  I reconnected the line to the receiver and tried to connect again.  It worked.  Evidently the convertor which is used to gain access to a number of HD channels was also damaged from the electrical surge.

So I called DirecTv back, hoping I could skip a service call and just have the convertor sent to me.  We went through some more set up screens and verified that even though I was now talking to DirecTV satellites, I did not have access to all of the stuff I should because of the lack of this little grey box.  The rep said the tech will have a replacement convertor if needed.  Well it was obviously needed.  I wound up staying out there until 10 getting the problem sorted out.

It looks like my new 70 inch tv is going to be the last thing to get replaced or fixed.  I got a call from the service that does the repair.  They said they had to order a main board for the TV and that was back ordered.  They probably won’t even have the part for a week, meaning we will be limping along with a TV less than half the size of what is normally sitting there, oh well.

So last night there was some gusty winds and brief periods of rain but overall the effect of Matthew in our area was very minimal.  We slept through the night without hearing any severe weather.  I was glad to see when I woke up that the eye of the storm has stayed comfortably off shore to this point, keeping the worst case scenario off the table.  From what I can tell the biggest problem as of now is large scale power loss but even that is much less severe than it could have been.  Florida is not out of the woods yet as it will be scraping along the northeast coast during the day.  If you look at the long term forecast there is a chance the damn thing could go out to sea, loop around and smack us again.  Let’s hope that scenario doesn’t play out.

Dad, Teresa, Maggie and Clara should be arriving this afternoon for a weeklong visit.  Of course we need to be very cautious with a yard full of chickens.  Until we get a feel for any potential aggression level from their dogs towards the chickens they will be kept separated.  If the chickens are free ranging in the yard the dogs will not be and if we have the dogs off leash the chickens will be inside the coop/run.  Of course we hope everyone just gets along.  I plan to have Sadie out for the weekend as well to add to the fun.

This will be the first time they will have visited my place without me having a large conversion available to shuttle both humans and dogs around the area.  We will likely just have to do the dual car thing when animals are involved with wherever we wind up going.  My step mom and Cindy are planning to go to Key West for a couple days next week which will be fun for them.  Outside of that we have not made firm plans we will just go with the flow as we normally do.

Oh I forgot, we dropped off the Prius to get the passenger wheel bearing/hub replaced since the part I ordered on Amazon showed up yesterday.  The repair took on a more urgent nature since Cindy and Teresa plan to take the Prius to Key West to maximize mpg.