The pros of California weather: long summers, lots of sun, warm days that aren't humid, mild winters
The cons of California weather: no snow days, no days off for hurricanes (reading all the updates on Hurricane Sandy is making me oddly envious), and you become a complete wimp when it comes to dealing with bad weather whenever you travel
We're having a few people over tonight for a simple night in: drinks, food, and video games. Nothing complicated. Except that I'm counting calories, Boyfriend is avoiding carbs, one person doesn't eat mammals, two people are vegetarian, and one of the vegetarians is also avoiding all gluten and sweets. So instead of ordering pizza, we're making four kinds of burgers (beef, chicken, chicken-stuffed beef, and veggie) on three kinds of buns (normal, gluten-free, and English muffin). We've turned into a sitcom about California.
Death will come eventually, and we all have to come to terms with that. I actually don't really mind paying taxes. I think of it as kind of like paying for someone else to deal with a lot of problems I wouldn't want to deal with or know how to deal with. Life has been kind, and it seems fair.
However, I will never stop feeling indignant, injured, and insulted by American cable providers: the mulish service, the random price hikes, and in this case, right as the fall season is kicking into high gear, the sudden disappearance of most of my channels, replaced by a screen saying that I now have the wrong box.
If I call them, I'll probably have to wait on hold, talk to someone who will try to sell me more channels (god, I hate those conversations), and then wait around until I can get my channels back somehow (and probably miss work to do so), and miss a bunch of shows. And they'll still charge me for the missing days and keep creeping the price up later.
I've seen more and more of my friends cutting the cord and finding other services like Hulu+, iTunes, Netflix, and Google Play to be sufficient. I suppose it might require a some more legwork and wires, without the loveliness of TiVo, but I'm starting to think it might be worth it, if only to get out of this frustrating cycle of cable providers sucking every last bit out of what customers they have left...
