Royal Flush

Or, Royal Pain in the You Know What

I’m probably not even calmed down enough to be writing this. But I’m going to. I’ve been wanting to write another blog post, as I promised a couple of days ago, and there’s certainly something on my mind at the moment. So I guess I’ll write about it.

About an hour ago, give or take, I went to help Edison finish his business in the bathroom. Things were going fine and dandy until I flushed the toilet, at which point the bowl started to fill with water and make a gurgling, bubbling sound rather than sucking everything down and belching in satisfaction as one would normally expect. It was obvious to me that nothing I had just flushed could be causing the problem, but that wouldn’t have been my first suspicion, anyway. Not lately. Because, after about a two-year hiatus from putting things in the toilet, Edison has started “accidentally” dropping things in there again. And flushing. Two years ago, I found Eddie’s habit rather frustrating. Being that he is almost four-years-old, I now find myself absolutely livid with each new occurrence. Over the last two or three months, we’ve permanently lost a couple of small toys down the toilet. That’s better than, oh I don’t know, a pair of eyeglasses, such as he flushed down the toilet in Atlanta. But as irksome as it has been this time around, tonight was the worst. Not because we lost anything of value, thankfully. No, tonight I am beyond upset because I don’t think I’m going to be able to fix the toilet on my own. I’ve always been able to plunge the toilet enough to get things running smoothly, and sometimes even retrieve whatever was flushed. But tonight, Eddie has flushed a small ball that is basically the perfect size for getting wedged quite tightly, right where you can’t really get to it without just pushing it even further out of reach.

To make matters worse, the toilet water started overflowing, spreading all over the bathroom floor. That’s also something we’ve been fortunate enough to avoid until now. I know this is the kind of thing you eventually laugh at, but right now, the only thing I can imagine bringing a smile to my face is sticking Eddie’s head into the toilet and flushing him a few times. Sigh. Maybe next time.

Ping

I’ve made it through the first major bump in the semester, where papers are coming due in my classes as well as in the class for which I’m a TA. I spent the last couple of weeks grading nearly 60 by and large poorly written papers. I say it every time, but it’s astonishing (and a bit disheartening) to see the writing abilities of undergrads. We’re talking run-on sentences, sentence fragments, blatant confusion of common homophones that should have been mastered by this point in life (e.g. to / too, their / there), and inconsistent, sometimes seemingly random capitalization. Some might argue that the ability to write well is not very important in today’s world, at least for the majority of the population. There is probably some sad truth to that statement, but I think it constitutes a dangerous state of affairs. It means that those who can write well will decrease in number, and the bar for writing well will drop. Eventually, even the best writers will not be all that clear and, I’d say, wisdom will become threatened. But that’s not the point of my writing this. It’s easy to go off on a tangent about the kind of crap I put up with as a TA. I’ll try my hardest to bite my lip and say no more about it for now.

Hmm. Well, crap, I don’t know what to write. I actually did write some crap about feeling busy, but it’s boring and pointless, so I’ve deleted it. I think I just need to write this post in order to get back into the flow of writing something other than comments on horribly written student papers. (Oops! Okay, no more!) I’ll try to get my thoughts (and my act) together and write something worth reading in the next day or so. Thanks for listening, whoever you are!

Drive-Thru Service, Indeed!

You know your city has serious prostitution problems when you see a sign like this…



(See? I knew having a camera in my cell phone would come in handy!)

Now Look Here

If you sincerely care about me and what I do, you should click the below link and read the (fairly brief) news story to which it leads.

Click here if you love me

Unrelated, if keeping drug addicts off of welfare sounds like a good idea to you, as it initially did to me, you should click the following link and read the thought-provoking post by Sarah, whose blog I’ve followed for a few years now. You owe it to yourself to read such a thoughtful—and bravely personal—response. Regardless of where you final judgment falls, Sarah’s post will ensure that you’re not holding your opinion ignorantly.

Click here for Sarah’s post

That is all.

You Get What You Prepay For

Up until a few days ago, Melanie and I had been Sprint cell phone customers for several years. Initially, we both had cell phones, but after moving to Atlanta, we dropped down to one. We kept to a fairly minimal plan, one that allowed for unlimited nights and weekends as well as unlimited calls to other Sprint customers (all of which is pretty standard nowadays). That allowed us to keep in touch with our families and friends back in Utah (and elsewhere) without worrying much about minutes. After moving to Tallahassee, however, we got set up with Comcast’s Internet and home phone service, the latter of which includes unlimited long distance. This significantly reduced the need for our lone cell phone, and over the past several months, it has become increasingly clear that spending nearly $50 a month for me to have the ability to call Melanie three or four times a week and tell her I’m on my way home from school is rather stupid. Sparingly is the cell phone otherwise used. And so, as happy as we were with Sprint’s service over the years (and we were), we decided to call it quits.

Not feeling completely ready to abandon the notion of having a cell phone, Melanie and I have now become part of the prepaid cell phone service community. For about the price of one month of cell phone service with Sprint, Melanie and I have both received new cell phones, complete with accessory kits that include car chargers, and, between us, well over seven hours of talk time. That may not sound like a lot, but seven hours could easily last us a month or two. And having prepaid cell phone service should prove much cheaper in the long run. I’m estimating that, even when we have to start buying additional minutes, we’ll be spending less than half of what we were spending per month for one phone with Sprint, and yet we’ll both have cell phones. That should be true even despite the fact that you have to pay not only for minutes, but to keep your service active. (Every time you purchase minutes, you also add 90 days to your service period. If you don’t use all your minutes within 90 days, you still have to add minutes to keep your phone active. However, if you use all your minutes within, say, 30 days, then when you buy more minutes, you’ll be extending your original 90-day service period another three months into the future, thereby having five months of service remaining. You follow?) The only thing I’m worried about is the quality of service. So far, it’s been great, but that’s based solely on my making calls in Tallahassee to other people in Tallahassee. I’m not sure how great the coverage will be if we’re ever on a road trip. That could be worrisome. But not worrisome enough to stop us from making the change.

Here are some additional cool things about us making the switch to prepaid service. First, due to what I presume is a glitch involving minutes and time rolling over from inactive accounts, when I activated my phone, I was told my initial service period would end October 31, 2014 (rather than in 30 days, as was promised). In other words, I won’t have to worry much about adding minutes to my phone in order to keep my service going. I can use them at my leisure. (Melanie also received more time than promised, though only 60 days. We both received at least ten times more introductory minutes than promised.) Second, sending or receiving an individual text message deducts only .33 minutes from your account. If I want to tell Melanie something as simple as “I’m on my way home,” I can just send her a text, thereby using one-third of a minute (rather than a full minute for a voice call). In theory, that means I can use as little as one minute per week without dramatically affecting the purpose for which I use a cell phone. And finally, simply getting newer phones is cool. Our Sprint phone was several years old and starting to act up. Our new phones are sleeker, although not quite as user-friendly. For the first time, we have cell phone cameras—which, judging by the quality of pictures they take, is almost worthless. But you never know when you’ll see a UFO and be happy you’ve got some kind of photographic apparatus on your person.

For anyone who’s interested, we got our new cell phones from TracFone, directly from their website. (They are also available from Wal-Mart, and I think I’ve even seen them in Circle K. As I said, there are reasons to feel less than 100% confident in the quality of service we’ll be getting.)