A Percussionist's Notebook

 Patti noticed an insect bite on her ankle. This was on Monday and by Tuesday her ankle was swelling, the area had turned red with a small circle around it. At this point we decided that it should be dealt with by a doctor rather than just taking antihistamines. As we suspected, it was a spider bite and it had become infected. But what kind of spider? Thursday night I found a Black Widow crawling on the floor which I squashed. Since the symptoms of a Black Widow bite are much more extensive than what she was experiencing, we don't think it was from this. Even so this caused us to call our favorite pest control guy who will be coming next week to deal with all of this.

 About 3 years ago we purchased a ROKU stick to do some streaming. We usually watched ACORN that had the Murdock Mysteries and Foyle's War, but it wasn't until the pandemic came around that we started binge watching. Brokenwood, Pie in the Sky, 800 Words, Rake, Mystery Queens, Whitstable Pearl, just to name a few that was on the menu. Everything was great until Saturday when in the middle of one show an alert showed up on screen. "ROKU is overheating".   I didn't know that could be an issue. Doing a Google search I found that it was a quite common issue. The most common cause is the location of the 'stick', ours was in the back of the amp for our home theater and being very close to the air vents it wouldn't dissipate the heat properly. The fix is to locate the 'stick' further away from other sources of heat. I had another HDMI cable that was long enough to put the 'stick' on top of the cabinet but I quickly realized that I had connecti...