wherein Liz regains the internet!

The TWC technician arrived only five minutes late (!!!) and immediately determined that my internet connectivity problem was in their cables rather than my modem. They have a signal scale (not sure what it's based on) that goes at least from +12 to -20something, and anything under -10 is bad. My signal was about -22. O_o

After tracing cords and climbing the telephone pole on the corner, the technician determined that the cable that runs from the telephone pole to the signal box got water damage at some unknown point in the past. He cut out the most obviously corroded section and has scheduled a followup visit to replace that cable entirely sometime next week. (Nobody needs to be home for that.) This noticeably improved my signal, but it still wasn't great, because...

The signal was also going through too many splitters -- two in the signal box on the north side of the house (when there should have been only one), and then a second on the south side of the house, which divided a single cable that runs through the basement into three cables that go to different rooms in my apartment. The technician consolidated the two signal box splitters into one, and then hooked my one in-use cable directly to the basement cable, thus bypassing that splitter entirely.

So my signal is now at -7, which is still not great but I now have internet access and it does not (so far) seem to be flickery the way it's been the past few weeks even when functional. Yay!

the mystical amber ring

the original message



and now with corrected grammar


I posted a month ago about the ring and note my parents found in one of their bookcases, while doing some water pipe repairs. Here are the items in question.

I am confused by my mom's description of the ring as an 'amethyst sort of ring,' because it's pretty clearly orange-brown rather than purple. (Citrine, I guess. Which is what happens to amethyst when you cook it, but since this is obviously colored glass and my mom is a librarian rather than a geologist or gemologist, that should not be relevant.) I mean, it's still not amber, but it is amber-colored, which makes the description in the note much less baffling.

I rewrote the note partly to prove that I can do less painfully wrong archaic grammar, and partly for comparative handwriting analysis. Now that I've seen the hard copy, I strongly doubt that I wrote it. The subtle quirks look a lot more like Vicky's writing -- particularly the joining of the capital O and T to the following lowercase letters, the inward curves on the capital W, the lack of tail on the lowercase E in 'person', and the relatively tidy crosses on the lowercase Ts.

Now, it is entirely possible that this was a collaborative effort -- we played a bunch of very loosely structured games that, in retrospect, verged on LARPing -- and this might have been part of one of those. We did jointly compose a jewelry-based song around the relevant time period. (Well, I did the tune and 75% of the words; Vicky provided suggestions and insisted I add a second verse to include her birthstone since I'd featured mine in the first verse.) But it's also possible this was Vicky's solo project.

Unfortunately she doesn't remember the ring and note either, so I guess the truth will remain a mystery...

[[original Tumblr post, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]