23 July—Yesterday, for the second time in a week, Altice tried my patience. Really the third time, but when on Wednesday night the television picture came in upside down, a simple reboot of the cable box (without my even having called Altice) solved the problem. Reboot solves everything. Or not.

Late Thursday, one of the two VOIP phone lines screwed up and was unusable. Two modem reboots didn’t cure the problem, so my contact at Altice corporate got a tech to look into it. Suffice to say, he called to ask which line wasn’t working properly—on the unusable line, of course. And it was working fine. No idea what happened.

Yester-morning, on the desktop computer I could receive email and send individual messages, but I couldn’t send out the mass email with the quotidian link to the Daily Disquisition through either of my servers. I couldn’t even send the same email to two addresses. And the assorted error messages all referenced the Altice IP address. Moreover, the laptop kept demanding my “new” Optimum password even though I didn’t have a new one, but wouldn’t accept the old one.

But a nice Filipina at an Altice phone center in Neverneverland assured me that everything on her screen was fine. So she scheduled—expedited and escalated—a tech intervention for Monday. Suffice to say, by Saturday afternoon all was fine. When I try to send out today’s link, we’ll see if it still is.

So I must remind faithful readers that if you don’t get the quotidian link, just go to LitchfieldMonitor.com and you’ll find the Daily Disquisition link on the home page—assuming, that is, I was able to post one.

That said, the big news is that daylilies aren’t really lilies at all and don’t close at night and open in the morning. After the last big rain, I rescued a daylily stalk with several latent blossoms that had been blown down and I put it in a vase. With water, of course. Sure enough, on the first morning, one daylily blossomed. Only one. Second morning, it was dead and lying on the table and another one had blossomed. Third morning, that one had croaked and another had blossomed. And so on.

So the fact is, daylily blossoms open for a day and then die, to be replaced by another every day until they’re all used up. What was Mother Nature intending with this deception? And why hadn’t I noticed this sleight-of-blossom in the half-century I’ve been living with daylilies?