I love watermelon in the summer. It’s one of the few things about summer I do like. As the days go on, and the leaves start growing tired and dull, and the heat skyrockets, and the bugs grow more aggressive, I fall out of love with summer. Not that I’m pining away for winter, let me assure you of that, but my favorite times of year are the–what? three days of spring and four days of fall?–we get around here. Winter gets a couple of months, Summer takes up the rest of the year, but that’s Texas for ya.

I didn’t plan to write about summer. Didn’t plan to write about anything. I kinda forgot it was Friday/post day until around four-thirty this morning. I’ve been up for an hour and my back’s starting to hurt, but I still don’t really know what I want to write about. So . . . this’ll just be another random-writing Friday. I do that now and then. Just write about nothing in particular or anything that’s distracting at the moment.

Like small-town commercials. I have the news on, and in between weather and local interest clips are a variety of commercials apparently written by the same advertising firm who uses the same group to sing the jingles. This is gonna sound awful, and to any soprano or tenor who’s reading this, let me apologize now—but I’m not a fan of high-pitched sounds. I don’t care how high you can get, I want to know how low you can go. I love baritone and bass (think Trace Adkins–or better yet, George Beverly Shea). A good alto wins my heart every time. But anyone who actually is capable of singing in the key of C is just too high.

And for some reason, local commercials featuring the family kids or grandkids grate my nerves, especially before I’ve had my coffee. Don’t get me wrong, I love my grandkids’ voices–every one of them (although most are older now and have lost that tinny squeal). But something about the kids’ voices on TV early in the morning makes my teeth cringe.

And commercials with shouting/screaming/squealing announcers? That’s why God invented the mute button.

Yes, I’m a terrible person. Have I ever told you otherwise?

AT&T is going to find out how terrible I am if they don’t fix my phone soon. We put up with static forever thinking it was the cheap phones we bought, and we were either too cheap or too lazy (or both?) to get a better product. That was before the phone line died completely and we had to call to get service again. They found a place in the line several miles from here and fixed it and voila! no more static! For a couple of months now, we’ve enjoyed the wonderful “you-can-hear-a-pin-drop” quality of our new line and cheap phones.

Until Monday. Static’s back. And I’m stayin’ in AT&T’s face like a bug splattered on the windshield until they fix it again.

I bet you’re wondering why we have a land line at all. Well, our cell phones don’t work at our house. Guess whose fault that is? AT&T’s. We have four towers in our general vicinity and not a one works for us. I used to call about that on a regular basis and was always being told repair work was in process. After several months of the same song and dance, I garnered the impression that repair work meant driving to the tower and napping in the truck. Fortunately, my Blackberry does the WiFi thing–although I’m sure there’s another word for it–and though I can’t make calls on it, I can check emails, Facebook, and Twitter.

Well, until my phone decided to stop working–taking my camera and calendar with it. That’s when I found out that AT&T will charge me $35 and make me sign a new 2-year contract to give me a new phone at a discounted price. Since we’ve (foolishly) been with them over 20 years, I call that a rip off–and told them so.

Okay, so now I bet you’re wondering why we stay with AT&T. Well . . . I don’t know. Part of it is the idea that most phone companies use the same lines and same towers AT&T uses. I think the lines originally belonged to Southwestern Bell–and may still, I don’t know, or I may be wrong about ownership–but the companies rent ’em somehow. Otherwise, we’d have a different set of phone lines for every company offering service. Same with towers. Each tower has several receivers, if I understand correctly, and each receiver belongs to a different company that rents space on the tower.

Now–that’s the way I understand it. May not be true, I don’t know, but this understanding, or misunderstanding, has been enough to keep me from doing the time-consuming task of finding another company, which brings with it the time-consuming bonus of telling everyone our new phone numbers.

Then again, I’m not too crazy about phone calls when I’m working, so the number could go out to only a precious few. Maybe that would mean we wouldn’t get anymore “spam” calls. That would be a plus. A definite plus.

But what I said earlier is true: I’m too lazy. It’s so much easier to write my complaints here than it is to battle the actual issue. Maybe I’m not fed up enough.

Fed up.

Fed.

Feed.

Hungry.

Breakfast!

Yeah–end of post.

If you’re lucky, maybe next Friday I’ll actually have something more specific to write about.