And we dated for six years before getting married. By my account, we never had a serious argument. (To her credit) If you’re only going to get one thing right in life, finding the right partner is at the top of the list.
Category Archives: Personal History
Professional wrestling is returning to Kennett
In the hierarchy of professional sports, professional wrestling is just below shooting rats at the town dump. But for some reason it was extremely popular where/when I grew up in the 50’s. Live coverage every Saturday morning by one of the Memphis TV stations. And these guys would take the show on the road, performing before packed houses. (I wrote about this ten years ago) And they’re back!
“Professional wrestling is returning to Kennett. Fall Brawl presented by American Hostile Championship Wrestling is slated to take place at the American Legion Building in Kennett Oct. 6. American Hostile Championship Wrestling owner Mark Manley said wrestlers scheduled to be on the six-fight card include: WWE Hall of Famer Koko B. Ware, Memphis Wrestling icon Superstar Bill Dundee, young up-comer Marko Stunt, the Missouri Bad Boys, Austin Lane, Meklakov, Naughty by Nature Rude and Kennett native J.T. Ice.”
Please note that Bill Dundee is now 74 years old.
UPDATE 10/9/18: Here’s the follow-up story on the “Fall Brawl” with accompanying photos. And just who are these small town fans of professional wrestling?
Goodbye DSL
I remember my excitement, all those years ago (2005), when I upgraded from dial-up internet access to “high speed” DSL. It was never great but it was the best thing available (we can’t get cable). The local phone company (CenturyLink) advertised 10mbps download (1mbps up) but we never got more than 8 and that was good enough. But for the last six months we’ve had continual problems. Good fast connection one minute… then almost nothing five minutes later. Lots of phone calls and two visits by technicians (image of large man scratching his head) and the service is still unreliable. So today is the day we cancel the service (which only costs $45/mo).
I’ve replaced it with AT&T’s wireless internet service. I’m now getting — on average — 35mbps down and 5mbps up. More than 4x faster! And almost certainly more reliable.
I’m paying $60 per month for the service and that gets me 50gb of data a month. Because we’re also DirecTV customers, they give us an additional 50gb. 100gb/mo should be enough but if we run over, we have an additional 30gb on our phones which can serve as wifi hotspots. I’ll monitor this for a few months to see what our usage looks like. DSL is ancient tech and while it has been mostly a good experience, I happy to see it go.
UPDATE 10/17/18: Or maybe not. Looks like we’ve used three quarters of our 100gb just halfway through our billing period. The overages could mount up fast. And we just don’t want to have to watch and budget. So we’re going back to DSL and will learn to live with slow speeds and unreliable service. But hey, I remember dial-up.
DSL vs. AT&T Wireless
We have a DSL line from our local telco for internet access. We pay $45 a month for 10 megabits download speed (never get more than 8) and less than 1 megabit upload speed. Not great but all that’s available where we live.
Been having problems for the last couple of weeks with technicians coming up to check lines, etc. Keep thinking they have it fixed but the problem persists so we’ve been using the hotspot feature on our iPhones. Yesterday I stopped by the local AT&T store to talk about our data plan to avoid getting surprised by a huge bill.
We’re currently paying $130 a months for 15gb that Barb and I share. Historically, we use very little of this but if we start making heavy use of the hotspot feature that could change. Without getting any further into the weeds here, I upgraded to an “unlimited” data plan for $150 a month. But the plan lets us stop paying for HBO and we get some other discounts so the faster service winds up costing me less than I was paying.
I’d never checked to see what kind of speeds I get from our AT&T wireless so I figured this was a good time to take a look. We’re getting 18 mbs down and 5.6 mbs up. More than twice as fast as the DSL line!
We don’t stream a lot of movies but do have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. I’ll keep the DSL service for a few months while we monitor our wireless data use, but I’m thinking I can adios the DSL.
This is might be more noteworthy to me because I remember the dial-up modem days. 2400, 14,400, 56K. Dark days? An exciting time? Could never have imagined I’d be able to connect to the internet with a mobile phone. Could never have imagined a mobile phone.
700 Days
I started meditating in 2008 but didn’t make it a regular (daily) part of my life until November 30, 2014. At least that is the date I started keeping track. Since then — as noted here previously — I have missed just two days, for a total of 1,343 days on the cushion. Today’s practice was 700 days without missing.
I sit for either 30 minutes or 45 minutes depending on what’s going on. I am a firm believer in making meditation a daily part of one’s life, if only 10 minutes.
I hope to share “1,000 Days” with you next year.