Lion’s Journal (Page 4)

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!

Mrs. Lion spanked me Thursday night. I reminded her of the need to do it in my daily email. She kidded me about reminding her. I responded that I knew that I was not getting any sex until the punishment was off the books. She didn’t reply. Mrs. Lion never said that I had to accept any punishments due before sex would be available, but it seems that’s how it works out.  It’s a sensible rule to make. Eat your veggies or no dessert. Right? We’ll see if she formalizes this practice.

I haven’t been sleeping well. I manage to get to sleep about midnight and then wake up again at one. I’ve been watching “Sister Wives” until I get sleepy again at two or three. I find that show very interesting because I was in a triad with two women back before I met Mrs. Lion. It lasted about a year and a half. I’ve long wondered what I could have done to preserve it.

“Sister Wives” is about a plural marriage that began in Utah. The spouses belong to a radical wing of the Mormon religion that still advocated polygamy. The show started with a husband and three wives. A fourth was added a bit into the series. One of the wives said that marriages with just two wives often get into trouble. Apparently the third wife offers a balance that shores up the marriage. Interesting.

My plural relationship broke up because of jealousy. I joined two women who had been in a lesbian relationship for a decade. I was invited to join for a weekend “date.” Both women wanted to experience sex with a man. I met them online and we chatted and talked on the phone for over a month before we finally met. By that point, we knew we liked each other but had no plans to get into anything long-term.

Our first meeting was awkward and a little uncomfortable. I drove to their house on Friday night. After an awkward two hours of chit-chat, we undressed and I made love to one of them. They were both virgins (28 years old), and one still had her hymen. There was a bit of bleeding and she was sore for a week. The next night it was the other woman’s turn. Thatwas easier. Both had orgasms and both wanted more sex with me.

We spent nearly every weekend after that together. Sometimes it was in their house, which was a four-hour drive away. Other times, it was in mine. After a couple of months of these long commutes, the women decided to move near me. Both landed local jobs and they got a house about five miles from mine. This is when things started looking like the “Sister Wives” scenario.

After they moved, we got into a pattern of each of the women alternating spending weekends with me. We still did things together like hiking, eating dinners, and stuff like that. We rarely had sex with all three of us present. This is how the Mormons do it. Each wife has her own home or apartment. The man rotates between them. Our situation was a bit different because the women also had sex with each other. Sister wives don’t do that.

The sister wives on TV talked about jealousy. It was a challenge they discussed at length. My partners never talked about it with me. Apparently, they didn’t talk about it with each other until one of the women couldn’t take it anymore. Before they moved near me, they made a private agreement that if one of them wanted to end things with me, they both would.

One fateful day, one of them said, “We agreed that if one of us wanted to end things, we would. If I want to end things with him, will you end it too?”

Her partner said that she didn’t want to. That was the beginning of the end. It wasn’t long before the unhappy member of our triad won her point, and we were done. I’ve always wondered what I could have done to avoid this very painful ending. Watching “Sister Wives” brought all this back to me. Maybe my mistake was going along with the alternating weekends with one of the women. Maybe we all needed to be in the bedroom every night. At least then, we could have avoided any worry about what was happening behind closed doors.

It’s also very possible that there was nothing I could do to fix things. Creating a relationship like that without the support of a tradition of polygamy is nearly impossible. Of course, it’s a good thing that it didn’t work out. I got to meet Mrs. Lion and she is my soul mate. Still…it’s a hell of an interesting memory.