First Sign of Over Indulgent Parenting

You buy your kid a snake.

Yes, that's a snake - a corn snake to be precise - and it's my son Sean's, who's twelve.

We ended up clearing out an aquarium full of fish for the snake's new home (whose name is Wilbur, by the way). Don't worry, we didn't flush them. The place where we bought the snake was more then happy to take them off our hands, I'm sure to be resold. Some were getting fairly large. In fact, they feel the Chinese Algae Eater we had was too big to sell and they're going to but it in their display tank. I was actually very happy to get rid of the fish. Deb and I have had an aquarium almost since we married, but I was personally quite sick of the thing.

Anyway, in may last post, made four days ago, I promised to post again tomorrow. Oops! We actually had Internet issues at the cottage. We've got a bit of an involved system with a satellite ISP coming in at my brother-in-laws, and a 200 ft Ethernet cable extension cord taking the signal to a wireless router which is sitting in an old tool shed that has been abandoned since the place was a fishing camp half a century ago. We can then pick up the signal from the router in our cottage. Anyway, a storm reset the router to its defaults and, unfortunately, changing it back has to be done from my brother-in-law's computer and he wasn't up. It was alright though, as I could still pick up the signal from another wireless router off the same system, this one intended for my sister-in-law's on the other side of the island. The only problem - I had to walk half way there to pick up the signal. This was fine for doing my school work (which is just a lot of uploading and downloading between off-line work), but kind of cut into my more leisurely Internet activity.

Oh well.

I'm back home now with a more dependable DSL this week. Sean's got robotics camp that I'll be driving him to in Oshawa (it's about 45 minutes from here). I plan on dropping him off and then using the time to crash a library and finally finish off this last bloody assignment for my Java course. Wish me luck.

Mike