I should have known how the day would go when the first thing I saw in the kitchen this morning was a dead chipmunk on the floor. I’ve lost count of how many this is now–maybe the fifth or sixth. I’m just thankful I didn’t wake up with the chipmunk on my pillow.
Yesterday, I was out for several hours doing my usual weekly errands and several additional ones, so I made a lot of stops. It was a mix of frustrations and positives. I didn’t get gas because every station I saw was full of cars and I didn’t want to wait or come back. On the other hand, I got called “Miss” by a sales assistant in Best Buy who was at least twenty years younger than I am. 🙂 I also sold another Kindle edition of Mortal Touch. June has the highest number of sales since last November and December.
I had a rather full agenda for today. This is transfer station week, so I needed to change the litter boxes, clean the bathroom, change the bunny cage, and get over to the transfer station with the trash, recyclables and a dead VCR I had to completely rip apart to try and get a tape out of it. (It was an old VCR of my dad’s and he is very, very attached to this tape. If it gets stuck in a VCR again, I’m buying him the damn movie on DVD. Man, they built VCRs like TANKS twenty-five years ago!) I also vacuumed the house–which doesn’t really take long with a four-room house–because the little tufts of fur everywhere had reached insanity level, and tomorrow is the New Moon and I usually vacuum the bedroom before I do a ritual, anyway.
In addition to those chores, I had not just one, but two conference calls scheduled. At 4:00pm IPNE was hosting a member call-in with a guest speaker. At 7:00pm was the monthly IPNE Board meeting. The person who organizes these had a sudden death in her family and wasn’t available. I said I would moderate the member call-in. The trouble was, I didn’t have the Moderator’s PIN number for the conference call service. And nobody seemed to have contact information for the guest speaker!
I was planning to review the IPNE e-mail, the guest speaker’s website, and so on in advance of the conference calls. At about 12:30pm, my DSL connection failed. This happens all the time, but it usually reconnects itself immediately. This time–it wouldn’t reconnect. I waited. I reset the modem and router. I rebooted the computer. Finally, I found the setup CD and reconfigured the router, which I had to do once before, thinking that maybe something about my vacuuming had zapped the router. No luck. I always follow the rule of thumb of exhausting all possible problems with my own system before calling tech support (who in my experience tends to be neither supportive nor impressively technical). Also, my ISP is extremely unhelpful with problems. If I weren’t such a geek, I’d be far more frustrated with them. But on this occasion, when I called their number, I heard a recorded message: there was a problem with Verizon’s DSL, Verizon was “aware of it and working on it,” and they would update the message if there was any change.
That was more than nine hours ago. I still don’t have DSL.
The IPNE member call-in…happened. I called in, and moderated it more or less “blind,” having been unable to get any information online beforehand. I ended up moderating the Board meeting at 7:00pm, as well, but that actually was a rather good meeting. By 9:00pm, I finally went rummaging around for phone cords and phone numbers, set up the dial-up connection on the newer Dell and dialed in to at least pick up e-mail and check news, weather, and LJ.
Return to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when I did everything offline and logged onto dial-up just long enough to download mail, and post/send what I’d written offline (like I’m doing right now). No watching video, minimal websurfing, no Second Life…it’s annoying, because the ‘Net is so integral to what I do. If I’m working on a writing project, I’m constantly looking things up. I shop online, I research online, I communicate online, I live online. That’s why I turned off my cable TV and pay forty-four fucking dollars a month for broadband. I am not impressed with Verizon. They’ve been pimping out their DSL services, especially this new super-high-speed thing, every chance they get–I’ve had phone calls, I get mailings, when I upgraded my phone service I had to sit and listen to the rep give me a spiel about Verizon’s DSL. And this is the service we get–offline for ten hours and counting? It’s only affecting about three towns, too–wouldn’t you know Pepperell is one of them!