Ensuring that things work well
As a parent, I wonder if my own kids have acquired any of my (better) personal habits. Among them, the desire to self-educate sits high on my list of skills worth fostering. This afternoon, when I lobbed a bit of a softball question concerning IPA (he’s a brewer), he came back with a detailed answer. He reads, to self-educate. He knows why those long ocean voyages required insurance against spoilage in the cask.
Insurance is one of those things that is best purchased before need. A good analogy involves horses and barn doors. I’ve been getting wind of changes in the attention paid by IP holders to IP hunters, so I did some quick reading (see the self-education mention in an earlier paragraph). Turns out, my home network needed some reinforcement, and now it has just that. In return for a monthly fee, worth about a Big Mac and fries (that is a recognized measure of costs, worldwide), and some rather tedious reconfiguration to the firmware of my router, maximum distraction is in place.
Heavy rains overnight. In response, the sump pump has been running at regular intervals (the winter ice block is gone, happily). I don’t care to learn if water does find its own level; certainly not in my basement, thank you. Until the fields thaw, the water level remains high, and I have to react.
Which reminds me… south of Quebec City, the river has risen. A lot. The aerial footage from a drone showed just how much people are willing to pay for their “river view”. Or maybe it’s the insurers. Whatever. When the ice dams, you had better have a backup plan in place.
