family visit

[cellio]

Today we went to my parents' house to do the holiday get-together. (The rest of the family is my sister and her two kids.) Things went reasonably well, though both of my parents were more distracted than usual (my father by a football game, and my mother by a string of small things). So we didn't spend all that much time talking, which was unfortunate. I can sort of roll with stuff like that because I've known these people a long time, but I could tell that Dani was feeling somewhat on the outside and I didn't know how to fix that.

My parents gave us a George Foreman grill. Woo hoo! I wondered if they were fishing for possible reactions at Thanksgiving when they showed us theirs, but it turns out they bought this for us back in August, before we ever saw theirs. I'm looking forward to using it. It looks like a good size for two people.

They also gave me the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD (I suspected they would, so I held off buying it). They gave Dani an anime movie (on DVD) that I have failed to retain the name of. We got my mother a season of X-Files, my father Band of Brothers (but it's been delayed, so we had to give him a promissory), and my sister the Back to the Future trilogy and the first season of Buffy. It was the year of DVDs in our family. :-) (We all acquired players within the last year, so this was forseeable.)

(There were other gifts, but it's not my intention to catalog everything here. I am pleased that almost all of the gifts we brought were well-received.)

Dinner featured a lamb roast (I really like lamb), which my mother hasn't been making much lately. My sister doesn't like lamb, so they threw some chicken into the GF grill for her. It's about as fast as nuking, I guess, but a lot more tasty. My spice cake went over well. My sister seems to have had a Martha Stewart moment; she fabricated a train out of candy, crackers (small ones for wheels), and assorted other stuff. It was novel. Apparently she got the idea out of that Pilsbury cooking magazine that we both subscribe to; I haven't yet read the recent "holiday desserts" issue.

My father is currently wrestling with DSL from Verizon (sound familiar?), apparently the only carrier serving their town. (I just sent email to Telerama to check on that, as he hadn't heard of them.) He had some problems getting it set up, and spent a while on the phone with a guy with a script, and eventually he got a connection. Then he rebooted the machine, and ever since he has been getting an error (number only, no text -- I thought Macs were supposed to be better than that), and no network connection. And whatever is happening is also hosing his modem, so he can't dial out. I hope he's able to get some help from Verizon tomorrow. Dani and I tried to debug it but didn't get very far. Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line. I knew that Verizon required something like that back in 1999, but I was told that they'd eventually fixed that. I wonder if, when they enter new service areas, they start by recycling all the hardware they've stopped using elsewhere. :-) (My parents' town only got DSL recently.)

My niece has become rather sullen and rude, particularly in the last year or so, and I don't know why. I hope that going away to college next year fixes it, rather than making it worse.

Comments

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line.

We have to use filters as well (get DSL from Bellsouth, the local phone carrier). Without them the connection gets lost a lot... that also happens more as we hook up more phones in the house. We have 3 phone jacks, one goes to the computer, one to the answering machine and two phones, and one empty. Plugging a phone into the empty jack causes a loss of connection several times an hour (even with the filter) so I gave up. ::shrug::

[cellio]

That problem with dropped connections sounds weird to me. I assume you've asked them about it and they've shrugged (or otherwise failed to help you)?

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Their tech support sucks. We got a new modem that did the same thing, and that was when I unplugged the weird phone outlet. It still drops occassionally, but immediately picks back up (which it wasn't able to do before). The tech support really doesn't know what's going on.