Some wild mustard and, if you look closely, The Dude – both of them sporting the color yellow. This wild plant (some would say ‘weed,’ though here at the cottage it is anything but a weed) is one of the early splashes of color in the spring.

What a day yesterday! We wanted to save money on our cable package and we wanted to finally eliminate our landline, so we called our cable provider (Spectrum, formerly Time Warner Cable) and, I’m not kidding you, four hours later  we were ready to scream. I won’t go into it, but it took three different calls (with me still  in my pajamas) to get it sorted out. We had a package that was grandfathered in from Time Warner (cable, phone & internet) but no one told us that we couldn’t go back to it if we wanted to. The truth is, we do watch some things on cable – including baseball and TCM – but not a lot, so we were searching for something smaller that involved less of a monthly outlay. We came up with something called Customer Choice, but it turned out that it didn’t include SNY, the local station that airs the Mets games, even though the rep had been pretty sure it would be part of our local coverage. After hanging up, we checked to see if the stations we’d picked were there but four of them weren’t and four stations we didn’t ask for were, which necessitated another call. After endless amounts of time on the second call, we chose another package and were assured that everything we wanted was there. We hung up the phone, turned on the set and…TCM wasn’t there. Another call only to learn that we have to add another package to get TCM. (TCM is our favorite channel, by the way, and my sanity demands it.) Anyway, we started off saving $50/month and now we’re saving about half of that.

We wish we’d never changed our package. It was a giant pain in the ass from start to finish.

To exorcise our demons, we went outside and mowed almost every bit of grass on the property, save the lilac side of the lawn.

At the very least, the property looks great.

I know there are people who don’t have cable, but we’re not quite ready to eliminate it. We like the NBC evening news which is incomprehensible to a younger person, but hey, we’re senior citizens. We like PBS. Maybe something like Roku is in our future, but that involves some research and we have an older ‘smart’ tv, so I don’t know how well it would work.

Things I need for my sanity: TCM and baseball and Jeopardy and old episodes of Seinfeld.

That’s not asking much, right? But cable companies put together packages that are guaranteed to include some of the the things you want but not all the things you want. And there’s no way we need hundreds of channels. The whole thing makes me crazy. I’d like to cut that cord eventually, but my brain can only take so much and those calls fried it.

I’m nearly finished with A Line to Kill  by Anthony Horowitz. Delightful and so well written. Then I have to make a decision: do I attempt to start the Elizabeth George which is SO LONG, or do I return the library books and start another book from my TBR pile?

Thanks for all the links yesterday. I’m not going to order the book from eBay, as many of the listings use a stock photograph and I have no guarantee that it will be the cover I want. And I’m not interested in a used copy. I’ll figure it out. I’m determined, remember?

Today is ‘take it easy day’ after our mowing extravaganza yesterday. One good thing that came out of it besides a beautiful lawn is the realization that we’re getting much fitter. It takes a while to be in good mowing shape and I think we are now.

Saw a hummingbird this morning. Saw the groundhog dining on some grass yesterday.

Stay safe.

Happy Tuesday.