• The neighbor in one of the adjoining townhomes was home, noticed the problem early on, and called a plumber right away.
• My wife was at home on maternity leave, and this neighbor let her know what was going on.
• The flooding in our basement was minimal, flowing over the furnace room floor and soaking a relatively small area of carpet before the blockage in the line was repaired. No insulation or drywall was wet at all.
• We called a cleaning company and got them to come out on the same day to begin the drying/disinfecting process as soon as possible.

So now, Klake waits at home with baby Plake for a cleaning company dude to come out, remove the drying equipment, and hopefully also get the carpet cleaned so that the whole process is complete before the weekend. At least I hope that's how it goes. I imagine it's possible they'll have to come out another time to do the cleaning.

The constant hum of huge air moving/dehumidifying equipment from the basement is adding to Klake's already growing sensation of being bored as hell with stay-at-home-mom-dom. She adores Plake, and is kind of happy to have time off work to take care of him, but neither of us is the kind of person who is accustomed to spending entire days stuck in the house, and waiting around for the cleaners just adds an extra level of trapped-in-your-home to the equation.

Moving on to the news you are on the edge of your seat waiting for: What is Clake doing on the internet lately? How about this sweet-ass poo, my friends: chime.tv. Now, near as I can figgur, this here site aggregates content from a number of major video hosting sites (most of which I had never heard of before) and makes it easy to create playlists, and watch continuously without all the clicka clika. In fact, the service currently has twenty "channels", or ever-growing playlists of videos hand-picked by someone or other (so they aren't just the random results of search strings). The indie music video channel is definately worth taking a look at. I haven't watched the documentary channel at all, but that seems like a winner as well.

This, of course, serves to answer the question of why I don't get cable: There is a ton of good, free content out there that I already don't have time to watch. Between that, over-the-air TV (Allow me to take this moment to mention Doctor Who on public TV again), and our minimal subscription to the fine services of the Netflix company, why do I need more?

Oh, and I'm thinking of upgrading the RAM on my laptop - any suggestions? The current plan is to wait for the official, Dell-manufactured 2gig upgrade kit to go on sale on their website and then drop 250 smakers on it POW! It's more pricey than going with off-brand hardware from ebay or something, but the whole point of this upgrade is to make my computer last as long as possible before it becomes necessary to buy a whole new one, so I'd like to be able to ensure the quality and durability of the chips I'm adding.

Memory for laptops is a tricky thing. But, if you know the exact type you need, you can usually do much better price-wise than ordering from Dell. If you want, you could email me the model of your lappy and I can do some research to try and find you a deal online.
# posted by  Unknown : 5:07 AM  

I have no suggestions on the computer stuff, but I concur with you on the cable TV. Cable is excessive and over-valued for what is available outside tv world.
# posted by  juBlie : 1:21 PM  

we have basic because it only costs us $5 more with high speed internet. Jay misses HGTV and the Discovery Channel, but we have discovered a channel previously unknown to me called Ion. They have reruns of the Wonder Years every night from 9 to 10. Who could ask for more?
# posted by  Anonymous : 11:41 PM