Cable Television

It would appear we don’t watch cable television at our house very often.    Before we left for vacation I went to get something from the mechanical room and there was a loud whine from something in the server rack area.    It’s a spot on the wall where my husband has drilled some shelves directly against the plywood and put some shelves.   On there we have our cable modem the file and movie server and  a few smaller things.    One of them was making a noise, and it was loud.

This was the night before we left to go to Florida so we didn’t worry about it and did that thing where you hope it will go away but know that’s only wishful thinking.   A week later and we’re back and the noise was still there and my husband planned on looking into it but we got busy and with the door shut, you couldn’t hear it because it was a high-pitched noise that didn’t penetrate the walls.

Two days ago I noticed the cable box in the bonus room wasn’t showing the time.   Well, the power had been out for hours due to a fire down the road so maybe it was that, I thought and rebooted the box.

We’ve been back most of a week now and last night my husband came upstairs and said, “I figured out what that whine was.   It was for the cable modem.   We must not watch much cable television because no one’s noticed it.”

We’re switching away from cable shortly,  meaning as soon as my husband gets around to making the switch.   He’s been talking about it for a good while and said he’s doing it any day now.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl On Their Own Update:   I was on a phone call this evening while my husband was out.   The children wanted to know if they could ride their bikes.   My daughter decided she wanted to drive, “my little car” meaning her Radio Flyer Tesla and I said sure.    Then they asked if they could go around the corner two houses over and I said to stay on the sidewalks and be careful.  

Twenty minutes later I got off my call and went outside.   I found my son speeding up our road in my daughter’s car and my daughter on a skateboard they’d gotten from the garage with her arms out, saying, “weeeeeee!” going down the road into the cul de sac.   The ramp my husband had made was out in the driveway, conveniently aimed at the loaner vehicle we had while our car has an annual service done.

I went to ask my daughter to head back up the hill and she told me, “we went to Nicholas’s house and then we came back the long way.”    I sort of gulped.   They had gone all the way around the block—a half mile, passing the entryway to the neighborhood which has a lot more traffic than our safe, short, dead-end street.    She said she stayed on the side walk and my son stayed on the sidewalk, “some, well most of the time”.    It wasn’t a big deal to them and I was pretty proud of them too.