We listen to a lot of the satellite radio on our TV. Since late February it's been getting choppier, with signal cutting out for a couple seconds to a couple minutes. The past few weeks it got really bad, with stations cutting out for partial or total signal loss for five or ten minutes at a time. Not every channel, mind you, just some of them, including the radio stations we prefer and also Turner Classic Movies. This is about 90% of our television use. So, we got the satellite TV people out to work on it. That and resisted their appeals to sign up for a $10-a-month service plan, which would've paid out if we had a second call in the year. Since our last call was in like 2018 we didn't figure that would be worth it. Tracking down the trouble would be hard because, of course, this was an intermittent issue and it wasn't happening when he arrived. But he checked signal strength and did find it low. He went to the basement and spent some time trying to track down which coax cable leads to the TV and which leads to the satellite dish; there's a bunch left over from the guy who owned the house before bunny_hugger, and a bunch more that may have just formed there when the Earth cooled. He asked if he could go in the basement and I told him he could, but he might not like what he saw down there. He couldn't find a specific problem, but identified four things that might be issues. One is that the signal splitter from the satellite and the long-since-lost antenna was ancient, dating to before TV signals carried movement. One was that one of the three receivers in the satellite dish might have been dodgy. One was that a second output from the satellite dish had a short cable on it, from testing the dish's original installation, but no terminus, possibly leaking signal. He replaced all those. The last possible problem is the receiver might be broken. But the signal strength is now considerably higher. So if the problem reoccurs we can say it's the receiver, send us a new one. Which they want to do anyway since our receiver is five(?) years old and they don't want such ancient things out in service anymore. Well, maybe once we've watched all the stuff on the DVR. The service guy was a cheerful, chatty sort, which was all well enough apart from getting on the subject of animals. He was delighted to see and pet and talk about Sunshine, but this also inspired him to tell of a couple animal incidents in his own life. Which should be good except his first pick was about how his childhood pet guinea pig died, because somehow these are never stories about how you had an astounding connection with the animal. When I tried to bring things around to happier animal stories he told another one about his dog killing a baby duck and it's just ... I mean, just tell a story about the dog being confused by the glass coffee table, that's something everyone can get behind. Still, that all went smoothly enough and we haven't noticed a signal interruption since then. And at least we won't have to spend so much time guessing what tree branch is too near the dish's line of sight. I'm still puttering around Motor City Furry Con, Saturday, even weeks after it happened. Please, putter with me. Folks looking on at the charity's rabbits. Rabbit resting on the shoulder while the fursuiters mill about outside. Rabbit who's just glad not to have a more intense job right now. (She'd get picked up and shown around on the presenter's shoulder later. And was picked for being one of the rabbits fine with this sort of public exhibition.) Trivia: John Young was the second astronaut to fly into space four times, the fourth being Apollo 16. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029. (James Lovell was first.) Currently Reading: The Sensational She-Hulk: John Byrne: The Return , John Byrne, many artists. Compilation of the early-90s comic book, this time issues that I never got around to picking up when they were published what with having other things to do. And, mm, the steady self-aware comments at the reader sure seemed like a fresher joke thirty years ago. (But I do appreciate the narrative shortcut of ``let's just take this straining and struggling and final burst of might as read and go on to the chase scene, OK?''. That, somehow, isn't aged so much.)