Long Weekend Relaxation

August 6th, 2006 by Potato

Well, I’m up at the cottage for the long weekend, along with Millie, my parents dog (they’re off to PEI). To keep the dog smell out of my car, I took my mom’s truck, and wow is it ever a different experience to drive that thing. To say the engine roared to life when we first pulled on the highway and got up to speed is completely wrong: it didn’t even purr. The engine yawned, as though saying “yeah, no problem; wake me when you need me.”

Loading the trunk was no problem, but closing it was a little rough as the door was pretty high up when fully opened. Not a problem, as there was a bright red button to press that made the trunk close all on its own. The headlights had harnessed the power of twin suns (I was worried the whole way up that the fusion containment might fail), and illuminated the tops of trees a long distance down the road. It seemed everything in it was tweaked and powered to a ridiculous degree: the 3-zone A/C, the stereo faceplate that flipped up to insert a CD, the no fewer than 8 buttons on the steering wheel (2 of which I still can’t figure out — Wayfare won’t let me press them in case they’re for the ejection seats or to deploy the heat seeking missiles, and with this truck, we can’t be sure they aren’t on there); even the windshield wipers have a funny little shimmy to them to get rid of that little triangle of unwiped area at the centre-bottom of the windshield. I find it difficult to imagine wanting a car where the engineers seemed to sit around and dare each other to find new and creative ways to make something needlessly powered, automated, hidden, button-activated, remote-activated, or covered in leather. That said, it was nice being up high — though I wouldn’t need to be if everyone else wasn’t driving an SUV.

The weather is gorgeous up here after the giant storm cleared the air of the heat and humidity that haunted the region last week (thankfully, I couldn’t make it then :). It also knocked down a tree and a half into our yard, and a rather large tree at that, but it isn’t on the cottage, deck, or driveway, so I’m not too concerned (certainly not concerned enough to actually try using the chainsaw… I’ve seen Evil Dead).

Millie is a bulldog (I’ll try to get a picture after I get access to a camera). She looks kinda sad and kinda tough, but is in actuality the suckiest dog ever. She mopes and whines if I leave the room, and won’t go to sleep unless I come tuck her in. For the first day here she wouldn’t even go eat unless I came with her to the laundry room (where her food is), and she won’t go pee unless I come at least halfway down the lawn with her. She’s one step away from needing a glass of water and a peek in the closet for monsters…

There have been a lot of long weekend fireworks set off out here, and it isn’t even the free day yet (Sunday/Monday). I know that it’s a pretty big tradition across Canada to have Victoria Day and Canada Day fireworks, but apparently no one else has heard of Simcoe Day (August Long Weekend) fireworks except the people who happen to live on the lake here.

My IP has been changing a fair bit with Rogers, so the site has been becoming inaccessable at times. I decided a while ago to just go ahead and get some real hosting, since I don’t think I’m going to stop updating in the next year or so (and hope you will continue to read…), but I just haven’t gotten around to actually doing anything about it yet. I will soon, and hopefully at that point everything will settle down and there won’t be any more outages.

Right now, I’m using dial-up to get on, and SWEET HOLY POTATO IN THE BLACK EARTH BELOW is it ever slow! I thought I remembered dial-up, I used to use it all the time. Back then it was a 28.8, too, and now I’m connected at 46.6, and I can barely use it to check my email. I was expecting images and the like to take a while to load, perhaps some extra lag for text pages, but this is ridiculous. I’m looking at almost a minute just to get to a site, after it times out two or three times. Have I been spoiled by cable? Is dial-up always this bad, or are the phone connections particularly troublesome after all that storm activity this week? I doubt it’s due to conjestion, since it’s the wee hours of the morning in cottage country…

One Response to “Long Weekend Relaxation”

  1. Netbug Says:

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