and things went downhill from there

I'm not sure if I have complained here about our internet provider, but I'm not going to let that stop me from complaining again anyway.

In this case, it's not a problem with our service that I'm complaining about - ah heck, maybe I'll complain about that too.

Back when our main provincial phone provider was still an independent company, we signed up for a very competitive phone/internet package. It gave us an unlimited data plan shared between our home internet and cell phones. Thanks to regulatory capture, the federal watchdogs saw no problem with letting one of the huge national oligopolies swoop in and take over our provider. To the surprise of nobody, after a mandatory year of "change nothing", they promptly cut the number of services offered, and jacked up our rates to match the higher rates in the other provinces where competition had been eliminated.

Since we were grandfathered into our "unlimited" plan, we decided to stay with that. If we try to change anything in the plan, we will lose it, and it's a plan that (the last time I checked), none of the big carriers offer. They would like for everyone to switch from these plans to one of their limited ones, as there is good money to be made in milking people for going over their miserly data limits. To that end, they have been jacking up the cost of our plan every quarter to try and encourage us to switch. As good as this plan is, they are approaching usury levels for the rate they are charging for it.

It's not like people here didn't see it coming when Bell bought our main provider. They are one of the most vile, shady companies in Canada. At some point we will probably switch providers. It's not that we will save anything, given the collusion between the big three here, but Bell is the most crooked of them and I'm not a big fan of giving them any money if I don't have to.

Anyway, on to the original focus of this post. One of the other things they have ruined since taking over is the email accounts that are tied to this account. Very recently it started receiving levels of spam and phishing emails the likes of which I have never seen - even on my old Hotmail account at its worst. (While I was typing this line, I just got another email come in saying, "Quit your job. Trade in Bitcoin"). atara started getting them at the same time. They all come in exactly the same layout and most of them are in suspiciously broken English. My hunch is that Bell got compromised, and probably know that they did, but they're staying quiet about it and just hoping people don't notice the huge influx of scam emails flowing through on their service.

I used to have almost everything tied to that email account, but I've been slowly migrating it all to my main Gmail account.

I think that I will never not hate Bell, and nothing they have over the years has made any move to allay that.

Though I am not being as aggressive with it as I was last year, I have undertaken another "picture a day" project to keep duncandahusky company. Here are some (not entirely random) samples of it.

The eggs I picked up last week look a bit concerned.


I used one of them to make some pasta dough from scratch. I think that I have waxed poetic here in the past about how good home-made pasta is for so little cost and effort. If not, I'll make it the focus of a future post.


I employed half of it to help use some old tomatoes I found in the freezer. We had two bags of roasted tomatoes dated from 2013 that atara was in favour of throwing out. I am loathe to throw out food that might still be good, and these tomatoes were definitely good.


I rolled out the pasta and cut it into fettuccine, which I cooked to an al dente finish. While those were cooking, I dumped the frozen bag of roasted tomatoes with rosemary (also from our garden) into a small frying pan with some garlic, tomato paste, olive oil, and some frozen asparagus that I cut into short lengths. When the pasta was ready, I used a slotted spoon to transfer it in with the sauce, along with enough pasta water to help finish cooking the noodles. Finally, I served it with some ground parmesan.

And she wanted to throw these tomatoes in the trash. Puh. She missed out - this was really good.

My alarm clock didn't go off this morning.  I think.  That is, it should have gone off this morning but when atara checked on me 40 minutes after it should have rung, I was still comatose.

I know that I set my alarm last night.  I was extra vigilant about it because I'd forgotten to set it the night before.  atara saw me set the alarm because I made a show of it.  I even double-checked after setting it to make sure that the switch was in the "on" position before I shut off the light.

When she woke me this morning I checked, and it was clearly in the "off" position.  It's not like I could have just bumped the switch in the night, because it's on the bottom of the clock and slightly recessed, so I have to lift the clock and flick the switch.  In retrospect I'm pretty sure that I set my clock on Sunday night too.

Either I'm losing it, or I'm turning off my alarm clock in my sleep (though the two are not mutually exclusive).

An added, surreal twist was the dream I was having just before she woke me this morning.  It started off with us playing a strange melange of golf/mini-golf with some friends - that is, you had to drive the ball up the fairway, but the greens were set up like mini-golf, with bumpers and windmills and the works.  I don't know how the transition went, but from there I somehow ended up in the kitchen helping my in-laws cook dinner.  I don't know what they were preparing.  It smelled good, but it looked like it belonged in the gallery of regrettable foods.

This stuff could be best described as beef stroganoff soup.  My mom-in-law had just finished glorping some from a huge pot into a fair-sized glass serving bowl, while my dad-in-law was mixing up some cornstarch and water to thicken it.  While he mixed it up, he was grousing about how he didn't like corn starch (couldn't stand the texture).  He was pouring the mixture into the already-brimming bowl that I was carefully stirring as it thickened.  It was just taking on an interesting mucilage-like texture when atara woke me.

I should thank her for sparing me from actually having to eat this stuff.  It smelled okay, but think of noodles and ground beef in a pudding-like gravy and you've got a general idea of what we were mixing up.  Nasty.