Office Ceiling Fan

I installed a ceiling fan in my office yesterday. It's something I had been thinking about doing recently because the room gets about 5-10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house, and with this 100+ degree weather we're having the rest of the house doesn't get below 84 degrees. I got the fan for free from someone on NextDoor.com then picked up a bracket from Lowes. The hardest part was crawling through the attic with it being around 102 degrees outside... a floor-less attic with blown-in insulation and spiderwebs everywhere. Three times I had to crawl through the attic because the first time I found that plastic box for the existing light fixture was nailed into a stud so I had to go back and get a hammer, then I realized I forgot to bring drill bits so had to go back and get those. Once the attic work was complete I found that the hole for the existing light fixture was too small for the new metal electrical box so I had to enlarge it with a utility knife. By that point my arms were exhausted so I had a tough time lining up the screw holes of the electrical box with the metal bracket, but once I got it locked in everything else was easy. Hopefully this will help cool things down.

Cutting Cable

Hard to believe a full year has passed since I last called Charter Spectrum to cancel our cable service. Each time the promo period ends and our rates go up I have to call to get put on another promotional rate. I'm sure many of you know that drill. Last year they initially said there were no promotions available for us so I talked it over with the wife and we decided to really cancel. That's when they offered us a better deal than any before: $75/month for internet, local channels, and 10 cable channels. Of course fees kicked that number up a bit, and those fees increased throughout the year so we were eventually paying almost $90/month.

Part of our promotional rate ended this month kicking our bill up to almost $100/month, so I called like normal but this time they didn't offer any new promotions. They simply asked why I wanted to cancel and when I told them it was just too much money they went ahead and accepted my cancellation request. I wasn't expecting that but I'm glad they did because it feels like the right time. We hadn't really been watching anything on cable for the past several weeks except for having shows on in the background like Futurama reruns or whatever. I liked having that but it's so not worth $30+/month. When we do have time to watch TV again we'll go to Amazon Prime streaming and the various networks apps, and if we run out of content there maybe we'll get Netflix for $11/month.