I promised myself that I wouldn’t write political posts. After all, this blog is supposed to be about our sex life. Right now, sex isn’t working well for us. It’s my fault. I have atrial fibrillation. It’s making me fall asleep at odd, usually inconvenient times. On the other hand, I’m getting more and more frustrated by the sad state of the American government.

We face some extremely serious challenges. Instead of focusing on them, our leaders are battling in a war of personalities. For example, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are disturbed by the flood of aliens trying to cross our southern border. To their credit, both parties forged a bipartisan bill that gives the president the tools he needs to keep them out. Good news, right?

Former president, Donald Trump is urging his party members to vote against the bipartisan bill. Why? He says that it makes it harder for him to win the upcoming election. He obviously thinks that his political success is more important than solving critical problems. I’m disgusted with this sort of crap.

That doesn’t mean I’m happy about Joe Biden’s management. He hasn’t found the strength to take decisive action on most anything. The good news is that he’s finally ready to close the southern border if Congress lets him.

I’m unhappy about the lack of choice I have. I’m a political moderate. That doesn’t mean I support open borders. I do believe the government has an important role in coping with climate change. It also needs to help support the modernization of our infrastructure. For example, over a decade ago the Chinese government poured billions into support for research, development, and manufacture of solar panels. As a result, thousands of cheap, good-quality, Chinese solar-powered products are for sale here in the US. We have no serious ability to compete.

Taiwan has a virtual monopoly on making advanced chips. No one else has the ability to make these strategically valuable inegrated circuits. The Biden administration convinced Congress to add a few billion dollars to the budget to help close this gap. Too little, too late. The extreme right Republicans oppose any government programs to help such things.

Another huge issue is climate change. Global warming is powering unprecedented storms that have been making people miserable. The Trump Republicans deny global warming and want to subsidize oil and gas exploration and exploitation. We need to find ways to quickly advance electric cars. To do this, we need rapid charging stations everywhere. Private industry can’t afford to do this on its own.

Trump paid lip service to controlling the cost of prescription drugs and made little progress while he was president. Biden made a little more. Still, big pharma is allowed to gouge Americans while they sell the same drugs in other countries for less than half of what we have to pay. I want that to change now. Neither party is willing to promise that.

Another huge problem for me is Biden’s age. He is an old man, and if he is reelected, there’s a good chance he will die in office. That would leave Kamila Harris in office as president. She’s way too progressive for me. I absolutely don’t want her to lead our country. I don’t want Trump to get another term. He’s announced that he expects to suspend the constitution so that he can consolidate power under himself and suspend future presidential elections. Nope, Kamilla is better than that.

I suspect that most undecided voters are like me. They face unpleasant alternatives in the upcoming election. Like most of them, I’ll probably vote for Joe Biden. If I don’t, I worry that the 2024 election will be the last we’ll ever have.

On Friday, our Internet provider (Comcast) took down the network for some equipment updates. We were warned, but I forgot. Mrs. Lion remembered. Fortunately, our T-Mobile 5g Internet gateway arrived on Thursday. My plan was to set it up in our new home (see my post from yesterday on that.). I decided to unpack it and use it in this house to get Mrs. Lion back to her job; she works from home. We had the T-Mobile box working in less than a half hour.

I haven’t been very interested in sex. I think the looming move has us both distracted. There is a ton of work to do before our scheduled move. I’ve been no help with packing. My low vision and poor balance make it dangerous for me to pack boxes. Instead, I’ve been working out our logistics. It’s surprisingly complicated to organize a move. Part of me wants to get rid of everything we haven’t used in the past year or two. Mrs. Lion is more of a pack rat.

We’ve been streaming “The West Wing.” It’s surprisingly relevant today. The storylines track very well all these years later, and the writing is amazing. If you haven’t seen it, it’s available on “Max.” Mrs. Lion and I haven’t been very physical lately. We have some “prescribed” kissing that comes when Mrs. Lion puts medicine in my eyes or brings me a drink. Otherwise, we haven’t had much contact at all. That has to change. We both need to feel close to stay balanced. Hugging the dog only goes so far in that respect.

Spanking is another physical contact sport that has also fallen by the wayside. It’s probably related to the absence of sex and affectionate touching. I don’t think it means that we are losing love or interest in one another. I think we never developed the necessary habits that make physical contact almost automatic. Another big factor is that Mrs. Lion has very sore shoulders. I think that the devastating experience I had with rotator cuff surgery is keeping her away from the doctor. It’s true that we would be in trouble if she was out of commission for seven or eight weeks. Still, I don’t want her in pain.

We will find a way to get back on track. We always do. That’s the good thing about being with your soulmate.

Because we have to move, our attention has been focused on the obvious needs of such a massive effort. Sex has taken a backseat. I’ve been spending a lot of time working out how to support our ability to live without disruption despite inevitable external problems. Mrs. Lion works from home and has to have a broadband Internet connection at all times. We get all of our TV from streaming Internet sources. Our smart home devices also need Internet.

The last time I considered our home network, I looked for the best router/WiFi access point I could buy. I didn’t believe I could protect us from Xfinity or electricity failures. We lease our houses. Buying never made sense to me. That means we have to limit the investment we make in a new home. At minimum, we require an electric vehicle charging station and a way to connect our portable generator to needed house circuits. I wrote about those solutions yesterday.

Until very recently, there was only one viable Internet provider around here, Xfinity. Our local landline phone company also offers rather slow broadband service at a high price. Xfinity is reasonably priced for a 200Mbs connection. T-Mobile recently introduced 5g broadband home service. It uses their cellular network to provide about 50Mbs service. Since this service comes via the cellular network, it is far less likely to fail due to a storm or other natural disaster. This service comes in at $50 a month.

Mrs. Lion’s work gives her about $50 a month for our Internet bill. We’re using that to cover the T-Mobile service. Xfinity costs us $30 a month for 200 Mbs service.  The problem was how to combine the two services. Yesterday I wrote about how we are solving the power failure problem. Today, I thought I would tell you what we are doing to provide uninterrupted Internet.

It turns out that TP-Link makes a $50 router that integrates multiple Internet connections. It has far more features than I need, but will easily solve our problem. This router doesn’t have a built-in WiFi setup. We needed to buy a separate WiFi access point. That cost $80. The total cost of $130 is far less than I paid for our current Asus combination product.

Before Mrs. Lion started her current job, supporting two ISPs seemed extravagant. If the T-Mobile’s speed were reliably high, we wouldn’t need Xfinity at all. Working from home changes the importance of the Internet connection. The home network becomes the office net too. Mrs. Lion loses pay if she can’t access the Internet. Our smart home gets dumb if we aren’t online. I’m glad that I’ve been able to get the education I need to keep up.

I have been working on the design of our new home network. We are moving next month and I’m taking the move as an opportunity to update our network. Because our part of the world suffers occasional power outages, I’ve decided to try to harden our house against power loss. When the power goes off, we have several UPS units to keep our PC’s and network alive for a while. The problem is that the power lines and cable Internet are on the same poles. When one goes off, we lose the other.

We have a 30 amp generator that is sufficient to keep our basic power needs going during a power outage. Since Mrs. Lion works from home and needs Internet to do her job, I want to keep the Internet even if the cable provider fails. Also, we get all of our TV on the Internet. We want to keep our streaming services as well.

Our cable company offered a two-year contract for $30 a month. We get 200 Mb service for that money. T-Mobile offers a 5g Internet service for $50 a month. The cell service tends to stay up during power outages. Ideally, we should have both Internet sources available without having to plug and unplug them. It turns out that there are multi-homing routers that manage multiple Internet connections simultaneously. Best of all, a really good one costs only $50.

Of course, buying a router is only the first step. We also need a WiFi access point. Most consumer routers also include the WiFi access point. The more specialized multi-homing products don’t include the radios. Fortunately, it doesn’t break the bank to buy a standalone access point. The new house will have two separate Internet suppliers. This configuration should give us broadband even if the power goes off.

Last night, I realized that I may have planned myself into a corner. Once we go on our emergency power, how will we know when the utility power comes back on? Our generator interlock uses the main panel for the house. That means we won’t see anything change when the utility power returns. I fretted about that. Would we have to go outside and see if the neighbors have power? Are there streetlights that will come on?

It turns out that we can get an alarm that will go off when power is restored. It’s an easy hookup in our power panel. When we are on generator power, we arm that alarm. When utility power returns, a 100DB alarm sounds. Cool beans!

When the power goes out we will have heat and hot water. Our refrigerator, freezers, general lighting, computers, and TV, including streaming programs will be available. Best of all, Mrs. Lion won’t have to run extension cords all over the house. All she has to do is drag the generator out of the garage and plug it into an inlet we are installing outside of the house. Once the generator is running, she simply turns off the main utility power and turns on the generator circuit breaker on the panel. Voila! Power is on all over the house. We can’t use the stove or microwave, but we will have light, heat, and entertainment.

We are lucky that LED lights that use small amounts of power, are installed everywhere in our house. Our TV’s are OLED models that are also light power users. We replaced a plasma TV that used 250 watts with a larger screen OLED that only draws 40 watts.

I know that all this has nothing to do with sex or spanking. It’s an important issue for us. Even though we don’t lose power very often, when we do, our lives are impacted. With more of us working from home, strategies like this can be important. Back to sex tomorrow!