Notes:
1. We got a new dishwasher recently, after getting fed up with our old one. It sounded like a screaming animal in our kitchen. So we went and bought a Kenmore Elite that's billed as the quietest dishwasher on the market. So far it's great. I love it. It cleans much better and dries much better than our old one. And it is crazy quiet. Now our microwave is louder than our dishwasher.
2. We also got a new Tivo. The old one was rebooting randomly, and replacing the hard drive didn't help. The new one is a big step up. It has several new features I love, like showing a list of all the movies that are on right now, and a list of all the sports that are on right now. And it has six (six!) tuners. Our old one only had two! On Saturdays I like to put each tuner on a different college football game, so I can jump back and forth between them all and still be able to rewind if needed. I actually feel cheated when the Tivo changes a tuner to record a program for us. "Hey, I was using that!", I say. "Now I've only got five games to switch between!"
3. The only bummer with the new Tivo is that I could never get it to fully work with the new wireless router I bought a couple months ago. I tried the old router with the new Tivo, and everything worked fine. So after exhausting all the ideas I had, and all the ideas I could find on the internet, I went out and bought yet another new router. This time I went with a Netgear Nighthawk. And thankfully it worked with the new Tivo. So it's been a relatively expensive couple of months.
4. It was almost a year ago that I sat down to watch something, anything, on TV, and there happened to be an animated show called Adventure Time that was just starting. The episode was called Simon and Marcy. It was weird and bittersweet and I loved it. Wendy was hooked, too. Over the next few months we watched every episode that aired, learning all about Finn the Human and Jake the Dog, and all the bizarre inhabitants of the Land of Ooo. It is easily the most imaginative show I've ever seen. And after a long hiatus, new episodes began airing this week! Tonight we watched a new episode called Jake the Brick, where Jake fulfills his lifelong dream of being a brick. It was bizarre and charming and lovely.
5. This has been a cold fall from the very beginning. I never got a chance for any more bike rides, which was disappointing. So my season total ended at 129 miles.
Links:
- The eruption of Krakatoa was so loud it circled the Earth four times. There's a great YouTube video in the article showing a volcano erupting in Papua New Guinea. You can see the shock waves as they head towards the camera.
- 90% of people hit by lightning survive, but they often suffer personality changes as a result.
- "He loved to write stories that children loved to read" -- A look at the tombstone of John Bellairs, one of my favorite authors.
- The world's tallest cow lives in Illinois.