Leelanau Whippersnapper

The Northwoods Is No Place For A Pink Flamingo

Got an email from my Realtor tonight telling me that the owners of the house I want to buy have dropped their price another $2000 as of this morning.  It’s killing me because I have to wait until at least June 7 before I can run my credit report again which will then indicate whether or not I can obtain a mortgage.  I’m stressing about it because it’s a great little house that would be perfect for me, in a great location very close to work and no further from the folks than I am right now.  It’s a 2 story (something hard to find up here in the northwoods) Colonial styled but contemporary home on a corner lot in a nice area and it’s just the right size for me and Gavin the Wonder Dog.  It’s been on the market now for 89 days and has not sold yet although at this point I am starting to ask myself why but that might be beside the point.  My Realtor continues to tell me they are very motivated, the short of it is, I want this house but I have about 3 weeks yet before I will know for sure if I can get a mortgage for it and I have made the decision not to pursue anything until I have a guarantee on financing, something I still realize may not be possible at this time.  Stay tuned, you can be sure I’ll be writing about it here if I end up buying a house this summer.

On that note, with this pursuit of home ownership, I have in many ways now officially committed myself to living in this area for at least the next 5 years or more.  This of course makes the parents happy but at the same time they are not necessarily the reason I’ve chosen to stay up here.  Regardless of all the bitching I do about the people around here, I do actually like this part of Michigan.  It has done amazing things for my photography skills and I like the fact that pretty much my entire extended family lives up here even though I don’t get to see them all that often.  I’m not the type of person that just randomly goes out and makes friends with people and knowing that, it’s important to me to have family near me so that I don’t cocoon myself which I would be very prone to doing if I lived in a city where I did not know anyone.  That’s not saying I don’t have friends, but it is saying that I place more emphasis on my immediate and extended family than I do many of the other random people that I know.  I deal with the public 50 hours a week which is more than many people have to deal with people in a month.  It’s nice to be able to go to my folks house and not be forced to make small talk about stupid shit.  I can have quality conversations when I feel like it.  So, even though my boss at work has started pushing me again to promote with Menards and move into store level management, at least for the next 5 years I’ll be working on my management skills here in Traverse City.  I refuse to buy a house and not live in at least long enough to make a little money when I sell it. Lord knows, I’ll need a profit if or when I decide to take that next step at work which I think can happen any time I want it to.  It’s a nice feeling knowing that you have a steady job with very little chance of loosing it unless I fuck up in a big way and I’m just not the type of person to do that anymore.  I’ve become old and careful before my time and it’s paying off.

So tonight is Saturday night and I’m home enjoying a couple of cold beers and a little internet time before I head off again to work tomorrow.  It’s going to be in the upper 80′s for most of this week which means it’s going to be CRAZY busy at work.  Tuesday is my day off and it promises to be the hottest day of the week.  It’s of course the day I am acquiring new furniture from the relatives but oh well, free shit is worth a little sweat.

Anyhow, just a short update, you know in the summer it’s very hard to find time to write or post things.  Most of you reading this follow me on Facebook anyhow and thats about all I have time for right now.  I’ll leave you tonight with a recent picture taken this past week.

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Ok, I know I rant and holler and bitch and whatever else all the time about Charter, my Internet provider and yet I continue to use them.  Well, I’ve finally had it with them.  I won’t say where I’m getting the connection right now to write this blog post but it’s not coming from Charter, all I’ll say is there are some pretty dumb ass people living around me.  So, likely this next Tuesday I will be making phone calls to AT&T, Verizon, and any other DSL service provider I can locate in town to see what kind of deals I can get for Internet.  Any way I look at it, the new service I find will mean shittier speeds meaning I won’t be able to watch as much video in as high a quality, and I won’t be able to download things as fast, I won’t be able to stream music as flawlessly and it will just all around suck donkey balls.  The cable TV is going away entirely at this point, perhaps if I decide that I really do need TV in the future I will get satellite service.  The folks down at the Charter office are going to get an ear full from me, I’ll say my peace and just be done with them forever.  I suppose if living up here means being able to sit on a boat in the summer, it also means putting up with the fact that this town is not set up for geeks like me who actually understand how to utilize technology to our advantage rather than just putz around looking at porn and reading blogs.  It’s no wonder at all to me why there are no significant tech companies located in Northern Michigan.  They would simply collapse given the lack of understanding people have about the Internet and how it works and how it could work SOOOOOOO much better up here than it actually does.  Charter has this region by the balls and they are not going to let go for any reason.  My best choice is to rid myself of their horrendous services before it just drives me fucking nuts.

To top off my day today, I came home and received a summons for Jury Duty.  This is just the qualification questionnaire at this point so I’ve not actually been selected but shit, this could not be a worse time to have to do that.  I am buried up to my eyes at work right now and my team is a mess mainly because of their inability to live up to my standards.  I’m pissed off at most of them right now for various reasons and they know it which makes working with them rather tense at times.  All I want them to do is do their fucking jobs.  I want them to work the hours I schedule them, sell things to people when there are people there to sell to, and put stock away when there are no customers.  The job could not be simpler.  I can’t leave them for a single day without walking back into a disaster.  Thank GOD it’s just an internal one and they are so far not pissing off customers.  The sad thing is, most of them are so comfortable in their positions that they don’t understand they can be replaced at the drop of a hat….for that matter so can I.  300 applications a week STILL coming in from people looking for a job.  It’s unbelievable how big the prospective employee pool is at this point but yet, those who are applying?  Out of 300, maybe 5 are potential candidates AT BEST.  When you aren’t even qualified to work as a stocker in a big box store there is a problem not only with the economy but with the entire job pool.  I digress.  So lets all hope I don’t get called to sit on a jury right now.  I really just don’t have the time or the patience to put my life on hold in order to determine someone else’s fate.

I have been able to do a little photography lately.  So click on over to leelanauphotography.com and take a look at the gallery.  I’ve been adding to it recently.

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I’ve not weighed in too much on this topic but with the news below I figured I’d put in my two cents.

DSLReports that Cablevision will be offering subscribers 101-Mbps download service, a new US record. That’s fast enough to download an HD movie in less than 10 minutes. The package, known as “Ultra,” will launch on May 11 and will cost $99.95 a month. Upload speed is 15 Mbps and there are no monthly limits. Cablevision is also doubling the speed of its Wi-Fi service, which is available free to subscribers using hotspots across the Northeast.

OK, for those of you who think your 3-5Mbps download speed on Comcast or Charter (or any other high speed Internet provider in Michigan) is fast, you might want to think again.  The cable companies want you to think it’s fast.  The fact is, the United States lags significantly behind in broadband deployment NOT because cable companies don’t have the means to provide it, but because they refuse to make the investment and they don’t want to take away revenue they get from advertisements on cable TV.  When it comes to high speed Internet, the United States ranks at the bottom worldwide for both speed and coverage.  Even poor and developing countries offer faster service over a wider area than the US does.  Cablevision has finally seen the light and deployed a world competitive broadband package with super fast download speeds for the same price I am paying right now for what I would consider to be pretty shitty service using old and outdated cable lines on a network that caps my speed at 5Mbps download.  I could pay more for 10Mbps service but that would be another $40 a month for really not much better speeds.  Not even remotely worth considering.

Broadband as a medium that consumers actually use is headed in the direction of what Cablevision is now providing but it’s going to be a VERY long time before the rest of the cable companies follow suit.  It’s going to be up to private investors to push things along or it will be up to the government to make it happen.  I’m sort of an unwilling fan of the later option.  My own feeling is that I would rather not have the government involved in Broadband deployment because there are just too many places the government can and will stick it’s ugly-ass nose but if that is what it takes to force cable companies to get their shit together and get the ball rolling than I am willing to put up with it for a while.

Next time you are on the phone arguing with your cable company about their piss poor service and lack of options, make sure you mention Cablevision and the 101Mbps speeds they are offering…do this especially when the cable company tells you they can’t fix your piss poor connection speed because the cable lines are just too old.  FUCKING UPDATE THEM you pathetic dip shits!  It just amazes me that cable companies can steal $125 a month from me and MILLIONS of other people and at the same time just sit on their hands and completely ignore their infrastructure deficiencies.  Someone is getting VERY rich.  WORK ON IT…especially CHARTER CABLE IN TRAVERSE CITY, MI.

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Well today sure was an intersting day.  It started actually last night when I fell asleep on the couch and woke up with with a horriable back ache around 1am.  I transfered that to the bed where the dog had been keeping my spot warm and decided I needed to get up at 4:30 so I could leave early for work.  I don’t have to show up for work on Sunday until 7:30 but becuase it was 30 below zero with the windchill and snowing like a bitch, I figured I had better give myself lots of time.  Good thing I did.

I managed to get all the way out of Leelanau and over by Traverse City West High School before out of nowhere (well not really) I could not see anytying in front of me on the road.  I was going quite slow to begin with so I did as I would normally do when you can’t see, slow down more and keep the wheels on the car straight.  As I slowed down, I must have hit some ice in the road becuase within 5 seconds the front of my car was heading over the side of the road and into a ditch.  There was no way I could stop the situation at this point so I kept my hands on the wheel, put my foot on the break and just let the snow stop me.  For the first time since I’ve lived up here, I ran myself off the road, or Mother Nature did anyhow.

No airbag explosion, no damage to the car, just a big fluffy pile of snow with my car burried under it.  I had to get my balance since I was sitting at an angle.  I flipped on the light in the car and started looking around for a phone number for a tow service.  This would be interesting I thought at 7am on a Sunday morning out in the country.  Called Mom and Dad, thankfully not to inform them that I was calling from beyond the grave, and they got me a tow truck phone number.

I sat there in the ditch with my car running for about 45 minutes before the tow truck came to haul me out.  In that time I’d say about 10 people stopped to ask if I needed any help.  I’m very grateful that people actually stopped but I could not help but notice something about those who did.  80% of them were women and of the 2 men who stopped, 1 was a county snow plow driver who was not allowed to use his plow to tow anything and the other apparently lived near where I was.  Again, I am thankful for those who stopped, if I had needed help, I know I would have received it.  My question though is for all the people who just kept on going.  Why did you slow down, look, and then speed away?  Next time, do people like me in this type of situation a favor.  Don’t stop, don’t look, don’t gawk.  If you have no intention of helping or asking if anyone needs help, get the hell out of here.

Anyhow, by the time the plow arrived it was light outside so I was able to take a look around.  I’m actually lucky to be alive and writing this.  About 10 feet behind where I went off the road the ditch kept right on going….down about 50 feet.  Had I been going any faster and that white out happened any sooner, I would have ended up parked in the top branches of several old cherry trees.  They might have broken the fall but they would have never been able to support the weight of my car and thus I would have ended up at the bottom of the ravine, likely in pretty bad shape and out of sight of the road.  Call it what you want but I call it luck.

So tomorrow, I get to wake up again at 5am and do it all over again.  I just love working for a company that doesn’t care what happens to you on your way to work, only that you get there on time.  Like I said in my previous post, I’m about done risking my life just to get to work and sit on my ass because EVERYONE in their right mind is at home and not out driving in the first place.   This is the reason I need to be closer to town.  This is the reason I will not be saying at this house past August of this year.

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