Mynocks

Chewing on the power cables. OK, actually it was squirrels.

We haven't had more than a few sporadic minutes of internet access since Wednesday. The cable guy showed up this morning (yes, on a Sunday), and determined that our signal was being degraded because a squirrel had chewed almost all the way through the woven outer conductor. He was surprised that our TV even worked. So, now we have a shiny new cable from the pole to the computer.

Having to rely on the TV for breaking news was painful. I don't know how anyone can stand it. They just show the same two or three stories over and over. At least with the internet you can move on to the next thing. I understand that Hurricane Ike was a big story, but come on! How many times do I have to watch Anderson Cooper standing by a seawall in Galveston saying, yup, it's windy. And wet. Oh, and everybody should get out of here. It's really dangerous to be standing in the path of a hurricane.

Surprisingly, I didn't watch any movies. But I did read a book. One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. It was about... well, I guess the title kind of gives it away. It read like an early Tom Clancy novel, but with forty pages of footnotes. It's a good thing Curtis LeMay wasn't President!