Today started off with a picnic at Shawnee State Park. We had some lunch and then Brian and Jake hit the water. I’m not much of a swimmer to begin with (let alone when water that fish are actively pooping in is involved) so I sat under a tree and relaxed while they swam. Somehow, I still got slightly sunburned. Apparently dappled light from the shade of a tree is not equivalent to SPF 45. Who knew?
On the way home, we stopped at Giant Eagle and bought 16 pounds of strawberries. What are we doing with 16 pounds of strawberries you might ask? Well, the girl at the checkout counter wanted to know, so I’ll tell you, too–we were making strawberry wine. I’ve been waiting for a good sale on strawberries, but have not seen one. Giant Eagle had them on sale this week and I didn’t want to miss the summer “strawberry window” so I bit the bullet and bought them today (though they were certainly not at the best price I’ve ever seen by any stretch of the imagination). So, if you see strawberries on sale from this point forward, I don’t want to know about it. Making strawberry wine sure is a lot more work than the grape wine kits I usually make (particularly when your helper is out riding his motorcycle for the first 90 minutes of the process). But, the deed is done and 5 gallons of strawberry wine are currently fermenting in the kitchen.
Now for the computer problem of the week: our cable modem was not working again today. For the average person, the lack of internet access might not be a big deal. But, we have Vonage for our phone company, so it is more than a mere inconvenience for us. Luckily, they have a feature that when the internet (our our network) is down, our cell phone will ring at the same time as our house phone so we don’t have to miss any calls. But, this is certainly not as nice as when everything is working properly. Given this, we went to Circuit City to buy a new cable modem this evening. Before we left, I checked to make sure our cable modem was still broken. It was. When we returned home with the new cable modem, I checked ours again. This time, it worked (of course). So, I left it plugged in for now. I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence that Atlantic Broadband could activate a new cable modem at 9:00 on a Saturday night. What do I hate more than computer problems? Well, a couple of things, but I can’t list them here so we’ll just go with that for now.