Once again I am on my kick of turning off our cable TV.  That may be a bit drastic, but I am truly tired of the ridiculous monthly bill just so I can sit on the couch and click through countless channels of nothing.  Every now and then I will admit it does come in handy though, and those are the times I cannot decide if I can do without.  Case in point, Saturday evening when I needed to kill some time until my work started at midnight.  I started clicking around and found a Clint Eastwood marathon;  Back-to-back-to-back westerns.  Problem solved.  More frequent still are the sporting events I want to watch.  Most of those could probably be watched for free though, if I could just figure out how to run the big antenna in our attic down to the TV’s.  Or of course I could walk down to the Brooksider and sponge one of their 40 televisions, although the likelihood of me going down there to watch an 8:00 p.m. game is pretty remote.  I played around last night and got Hulu running on both the televisions, so that covers a lot of the series that Donette likes to watch.  We can watch Netflix on both too, although their “on demand” selection is rather weak.  We shall see what the next few weeks bring.  We’re going to run in a “Netflix-Hulu-Boxee-Cable” hybrid mode for a while and then re-assess the situation.

Ahhh, good ol’ President’s Day.  I get this major holiday off fortunately;  Now I have to decide what to do with it.  What I will NOT do with it is sit on the couch playing on the computer.  I’d better make a cursory update though.

I was oncall for the weekend so we kept things rather low-key.  Started things off Friday night at a fund-raising auction up at Donette’s school.  We’ve been the last several years and it is always a good time.  Last year they switched from a BBQ dinner to a shrimp boil, which I have to say was a nice upgrade.  I can eat me some shrimp.  We stayed for the entire auction too, although luckily we didn’t buy anything this year.  The Nigro Brothers donate their services as auctioneers, and they are quite entertaining to watch.  They get going so fast it’s kind of hard to track what is going on.  My favorite purchase of the evening was by a friend of ours.  He came over and told us his wife thought she was bidding on a BBQ dinner, and instead purchased a reserved pew at the Christmas Eve service.  Apparently she had trouble tracking the action too.

Saturday was pleasantly subdued also.  Donette’s folks come down and they joined her at 75th Street for some lunch.  Meanwhile I broke out the bicycle for sort of a “leg stretch.”  I rode to Volker Bikes down on 39th Street;  Just about right for a chilly first ride.  Later in the afternoon, we once again tore apart the house looking for our long-missing drill.  How do you lose a bright yellow power tool anyway?  I cannot really imagine.  Lost it is though, and has been for quite some time.  It’s been holding up several projects around the house.  Finally we gave up and went drill-shopping.  They struck me as being significantly more expensive than when we bought the last one, which was probably 15 years ago.  But, gotta have one, so we bit the bullet and went with a Milwaukee 3/8″.  Hope we don’t lose it too.  It’s immediate use was putting down some decking up in the attic, where we are slowly moving all our “junk” from the basement.  The basement is too damp and moldy, so we’re moving everything to the attic where it will melt instead.  Sounds like a plan to me.

Sunday Martin & Munkirs came over and we took off on our first “official” bike ride of the year.  It went pretty well;  Everybody made it back and nobody threw up at any rate.  I was a little worried, as I have essentially spent the winter laying on the couch watching TV, but we took it slow and I lived.  Got in a nice little 17 mile ride, then went down to the Brooksider and celebrated the opening of cycling season.  Which, from looking at the forecast, might already be on hold for a few weeks.  I have some nice cold-weather stuff, but it’s for like 45 degree cold, not sub-freezing cold.  After that Donette and I made some tasty dinner, then sat on the couch and played an epic round of Photo Hunt on the Wii for a few hours.

It’s a three-day weekend people, who has entertainment for me?  Actually I am oncall so that might be all the “entertainment” I need right there.  Weather looks pretty marginal too.  I’ve got the scooter out though, rode it all week.  It’s pretty amazing how much quicker my trip to and from work is when I’m not riding the bus.

That’s about the best I can do for an update.  I have no news.  Got the new wheels on my bicycle but haven’t gone riding yet.  Went to a cycle shop “open house” last night but it was uneventful.  We are out of milk.  Yeah, I’m done.

So my quest for new bicycle wheels is finally over.  I found a set of very lightly used Mavic Aksiums on Craigslist for a good price.  This same kind of wheel shows up every now and then for sale, as they come standard on a lot of bikes and people swap them out for nicer ones.  They are plenty nice for me though, and a good upgrade from the ones I have now.  (Especially considering mine are bent.)  I’ve always missed out on buying them before, somebody always gets them before me.  This time, after trading a few anonymous emails, it turned out I actually knew the guy selling them so he hooked me up.  Small world.  As an added bonus, he loaned me the tools to swap them out so I don’t have to pay the shop to do that.  I’m pretty excited to get them on and go riding, as I am sure these new black ones are going to be considerably faster than the gray ones I have now.

One of my recent absolute necessities was a “nettop” computer.  These little things are pretty cool.  They are very small PC’s, and most newer models come with HDMI connections so you can plug them into your digital TV.  I’ve been shopping them for several months, and finally decided on the Lenovo Q150.  I almost built one from scratch, but when you price everything out the Lenovo actually comes in cheaper.  (When it’s on sale, which it was last week.)  So, what can you do with this little thing?  Well, it’s first use was to video chat with Ed & Kim and the baby.  I might get a nicer webcam for it someday, but the one I have did OK for the time being.  Since then I’ve installed Boxee on it, so I can use it watch TV shows, Netflix movies, etc.  Mostly I just sit on the couch and surf the Web though.  It’s like having a 32″ monitor for your computer, it works great.  The only downside I’ve come up with is that it sort of makes me wish I hadn’t bought my recent webserver and the PS-3, as the new toy could pretty much take the place of those two purchases.  I do occasionally play games on the PS-3 though, so there’s a little justification there.