We’ve been back in town since Wednesday, but I have until January 3 before I have to go back to work. That hasn’t kept us from doing a bunch of projects around the house though. We’ll probably be putting our house on the market at the end of winter, so we’re doing a lot of little things to prepare for that. Holly painted the bedroom that I have the computer in yesterday, and we just now got everything hooked back up. We’re also moving out a lot of our clutter and storing it at a friend’s house. I still need to install some ground fault outlets in the kitchen and bathroom, but things are starting to look pretty good. I just hope we can find a house that fits all our search criteria. We’ve been looking for a couple months now, but haven’t had much luck.
Since my parents moved and now have DSL for their internet access, they no longer needed the cable modem that they bought. Foolishly, I had been renting one from the cable company for the past four years. So, my dad let me take his old one and I got that all set up after spending 40 minutes on the phone with the cable company. It turns out that I was on an old plan, and in order for me to use this new modem, I would have to switch to a new plan. Sure I would get 100kbs faster internet service, but I would actually get fewer digital cable channels AND have to pay slightly more than I already was. Here I thought I would be saving money by dropping the $5/month cable modem rental fee. So in order to keep my rate about the same as what it currently was, I cancelled the digital cable and now just have expanded basic. That’s all I ever wanted, but at the time I got the cable internet service, it was actually a better deal to get digital cable as well. I was already feeling pretty screwed over, but Charter had one more bombshell for me when I dropped the equipment off at their office. I wanted to verify my new monthly rate, and make sure it matched what I had been quoted over the phone. It did, but then they told me that the internet service speed that I signed up for would be going up $6 per month starting next month. That’s just great. I’m getting less stuff than I was yesterday, and have to pay more for it. I plan on pricing out a dish when we move, and see if that’s a better deal.
The Bears just beat the Falcons, and I’m way too wound up to be able to go to sleep yet. Thank you Lovie Smith for giving Rex Grossman the opportunity to play tonight. When I heard that Grossman was going to be playing in the second half, my eyes lit up, and I had reason to be excited about the offense. Rex really did not disappoint, and I would expect him to be named the starter for the rest of the season. The announcers touched on it, but you could really tell that Grossman was a spark for the Bears’ offense, and everyone seemed to step it up when he got on the field. The one thing I noticed was the vast majority of Grossman’s passes were on the money. Accuracy was Orton’s biggest flaw.
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The Bears are really getting a lot of love from the national media now. So much so, that I’ve actually read a few articles that are actually talking about the Bears making the Super Bowl. That really still seems like crazy talk at this point, but when you only give up ten points per game, you should be able to win it all. Unfortunately, unless the defense either scores, or sets the offense up for an easy score, it’s been very difficult for the Bears to score more than ten points per game. Unless I start seeing some drastic improvement in the offense, I’m not going to get too excited about the Bears making a big playoff run…yet. 
So after getting my hopes up after last week’s game against the Lions, they came crashing down yesterday when the Bears fell apart against the Bengals. Yesterday’s game was the first one I’d actually been able to see, and there wasn’t much about it that I liked. For the most part, I thought the defense did pretty well. They were put in some tough positions after some turnovers, but for most of the game, they really didn’t do that badly. They kept the running game in check, but I don’t think they were able to put enough pressure on the QB. Things fell apart at the end, but they had been on the field for most of the day. The defense can’t do it all.
