Everything Old is New Again

Some of my friends say I'm cheap. In reality, I don't mind spending money but I do demand one thing in return: Value. If I don't see value in something, I generally pass. When it comes to household bills, like others, I don't like to overspend in comparison with others. There are, to be certain, some household bills that are not easily managed. Property taxes, car payments, food and utilities are some of them.

Or are they manageable? The house you live in is taxed on its value. Lesson here is, live in what you can afford. Don't buy more house than what you need and can reasonably afford. Car payments? Ditto. Don't buy an S Class Mercedes if you're tight on money. The Chevy will get you to the same places just as fast. Food? This is a rough one. We all like to eat and we all have favorite foods. But again, with care you can manage your grocery bill. Grocery stores have sales every week and it's up to you to figure out where you're shopping that week.

Ah, utilities. Electric, phone, natural gas or oil for heat, and cable/internet.

You can lower your electric bill somewhat. I replaced all the bulbs in my house with LEDs. The bill went down. I turn off lights and the TV when I leave a room. For heat, I use a setback thermostat with a program to turn down the heat when we're sleeping and in the days we're not here. I also replaced all my windows and bettered the insulation; this will pay for itself in savings in just a few short years.

Up until last year, I bundled my phone with my internet and cable TV supplier in a combo plan. My anniversary with them was every March, and I could count on Time-Warner (the predecessor to Spectrum, the current company) to send me a letter telling me how much money they were saving me while raising the rate.

So every March, I would call up T-W and complain. The representative would always try to find me another "promotional" package; this approach was wildly successful. Somehow, they managed to roll me back to where I was and often, they would throw additional product to me at the same time. I got my bandwith increased from 30mbs to over 100mbs and I got a free DVR.. A few times, they got me to a lower-cost package for the 3 things they provided me. And I confess, the DVR was a nice touch. It allowed us to record some daytime TV shows we would otherwise miss. We grew fond of it quickly.

When Spectrum took over T-W a few years ago, things changed. The March phone call was a waste of time; it became a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. I didn't care for this. But I lived with it for a year while researching my options. And there were options, as there usually are.

I've had the same landline phone number since 1978 and didn't want to lose it, so I took it back from Spectrum and put it into a Trac-phone. The phone cost me $20 and the prepurchased 1-year time card was less than $100. FWIW, my other cell phone (a smart phone) is also a Trac-phone, ditto on the cost. 

I boned up on antenna TV. I bought a small plastic antenna (Clear-TV) at a garage sale and tried it. Surprisingly, I got 28 channels on the living room TV and 32 on the TV in the den. Shortly after, I took the cable box back to Spectrum and told them ... well, I kept it polite. I told them goodbye. I bought a high-speed gigabit cable modem and took theirs back also. My cost dropped from almost $200/month to $65/month. Doing the math, I think I'm saving almost $1500/year now.

When I built my house, there was no cable TV on the rural road I live on. First I had an old Radio-Shack antenna shoved up in a crawl space and when satellite dishes became popular, I installed one. For years this was how I watched TV. When cable arrived (and how it arrived is another story for another time, one in which I played a definitive role in), I signed up. I canned my dial-up internet provider and went to high-speed cable. And I bundled my phone into the triple-combo platter they offered. And for almost 20 years, I paid the bill they sent me every month.

I've been tethered to the small plastic antenna for over a  year. But I did climb up in the attic and take down that old Radio-Shack antenna. It sat there for a while until the next light bulb went off in my head: What if I put that antenna up and tried it? I'm quite used to living with 28 or 32 channels, even with the handful of shopping channels that my TV stumbled across when I scanned.

So I tried it. I put the antenna up on the chimney via a mast that holds my weather station (you can find it on Weather Underground). I pointed it Northwest at about a heading of 300 degrees and rescanned the TV.

I got more channels; quite a few from Syracuse (~60 miles away). Remember, I'm up on a hill at about 1100' above sea level. But I lost one set of local channels I was used to getting: WKTV, channels 2.1 through 2.4. But I liked the increase in Syracuse channels and didn't really want to lose them, so I climbed back up on the roof with a good military compass and tried again. With my wife watching TV, I moved the antenna to the south until I lost Syracuse, and then brought it back. The antenna now faces about 260 degrees.

I rescanned ... and to my surprise, I got 43 channels. A handful of them are home shopping channels, and maybe 3 or so are straight religion. But I never got 43 channels over the air before.

Sadly, I still lost the NBC/CBS local Utica feed (WKTV) ...but I have them from Syracuse. I have all the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox) along with plenty others. In quite a few cases, I have channels I could not subscribe to on cable TV, namely:  Grit, Comet, Charge, AntennaTV, Cozi, and Heartland.

Yeah, it's not great looking. But it's functional, and it's free. Johnny Carson reruns are on Antenna-TV every night at 10pm, and he's way better than the hateful malcontents who rag on Trump every night at 11:30. Nostalgia is great, isn't it?

I plan on constructing a small add-on to this antenna to see if I can recover the local NBC-affiliate (WKTV) by aiming it to the north where their towers are. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.

But still, with 43 free over-the-air HD digital channels ... color me happy.

Here's a picture. That contraption above the antenna with the anemometer is my Wx station.

Yeah, I know, the chimney needs some work. Thanks for reminding me.

-Don

I Changed my Mind. I Want Reparations

Sanity is history; the inmates are running the asylum now. Ideas that wouldn't have seen the light of day only a  few years ago are now in mainstream discussion, and sadly many of them are now etched into law where I live (a blue state and yes, I'm pretty blue about living here).

As the Presidential election season starts, we are seeing some really radical ideas coming from the left. One of them is the idea of paying reparations to those we wronged long ago. Mostly, it's about paying off descendants of slavery. Judging from my Ancestry DNA test, I don't qualify. So if reparations are going to be paid, it looks like I and other Wonder-Bread skin colored people are going to be cut out of the deal.

Harrumph, say I. If there's gonna be free dough, I want some. And after considerable thought, I've figured out a convincing way to get some: If we're going to pay off millions of slave descendants, then we ought to pay off those that fought and died to free the slaves also. It's estimated 2% of the US population died fighting in the Civil War. In real numbers, that's said to be about 620,000 human beings. NY State had the highest number lost, and of the 51,000 lost at Gettysburg, my maternal grandfathers uncle was lost in the early hours of fighting on 1 July 1863.

Private William Cameron Fox enlisted in October, 1861 at Cortland, NY in Company A of the 76th NYS Volunteers. He was all of 19 years old at the time and Abraham Lincoln needed him, or so he was told. From his muster and payroll papers I've obtained from the National Archives, he spent time in NY City and moved down through Maryland. He was in the DC area for a while, but fate called him along with many others to the northwest corner of Gettysburg in June of 1863. Unfortunately for him, Robert E Lee descended upon Gettysburg in the early morning hours of July 1, 1863. Lee sent a massive force in from the west with a pincer movement from the north and by 10'o clock (or so) in the morning, Private Fox took a rebel bullet in the throat and died shortly after.

He was one of 51,000 casualties in the 3 days of fighting at Gettysburg. He was one of those 620,000 lost in the Civil War. The north won, the slaves were freed and generations did their thing which brings us to the present day.

Ah, reparations. I've already written about these in a previous blog. Yes, I don't take a liking to the idea of them. But if there's 1 cent doled out in the name of reparations, damn sure I want some.

Private William Cameron Fox was all of 21 years old when he was KIA. He never married, never had children and his future was robbed from him. In all reality, he probably forfeited 3/4 of his life.

What's worse? Being a slave or dying to end slavery? I don't know.

But I do know one thing: If the kooky and utterly insane idea of reparations ever really sees the light of day (and not as an election bait issue), it would be unfair to pay one group without paying the other. And in that light, where do I and all my sibling descendants of the Fox family sign up?

Yeah, I'm being sarcastic. In reality, I am still 100% against reparations. But again, if 1 cent is ever doled out for them, color me deserving of them also.

I scanned in all of William Foxes paperwork I got back from the National Archives. They make for good reading. Here's a few pages of them: