Time for a little peevish whining

I'm comfortably middle-aged at this point, and I know one trap that's easy to fall into as you get older is to let life's little annoyances become your "small-talk filler" in lieu of anything interesting you're no longer doing.  Wouldn't want that... luckily, I have this mostly-barren blog to dump that sort of thing into!

First off, of greatest interest to any potential readers out there... apple pears.  Yes, this is a single fruit, a cross-breeding of two similar kinds of fruit.  I picked up a five-pack at Costco, just to give them a go.  My verdict:  don't bother.  They combine the worst aspects of their respective parents, giving you an oddly-colored fruit with a thick, not-quite-furry skin over a crisp-yet-almost-flavorless flesh.  I didn't even half-finish the one I bit into, and I tossed the whole batch.  You've been warned.

Then, after a long hiatus of pretty much just doing what I expect without issue, Comcast, specifically their Internet pricing.  I've been a constant customer of theirs for a great many years, since they first brought high-speed internet to my neighborhood, so I'm more-or-less "grandfathered in" on a 15Mbps downstream connection, where their closest "regular" speeds on their billing schedule are 10Mbps and 25Mbps.  As a bachelor living alone, 15 meg is plenty for me (since if there's any streaming going on, I'm the one doing it), so I'm in no rush to switch up.  Standard pricing for my area is $49.95 for 10 meg, and $59.95 for 25 meg, and my connection has been $52.95 for quite some time... setting aside any issues of pricing-structure validity in general, that price fell at a reasonable mid-point between the two values, based on what I'm getting.  For some reason, last month, that went up to $56.95, without any sort of notice... in fact, I missed it until I was balancing my credit card statement, even though I check their online billing system every month, so I've even got a little bit of nagging doubt that their system showed the increased price at the time of increase.  In the grand scheme of things, no, I'm hardly going to miss the extra $4 a month... but a price increase for no better apparent reason than "because we can", and with zero notice beforehand, when literally every other entity I pay a monthly bill to goes out of their way to notify their customers up-front that an increase is coming (yes, I actually went through my bills to determine that), well, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Well, enough whining for the time being... things to do, people to see and all that.