Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Yesterday was like Christmas in my world, a geeky girl's dream come true! I know I'm probably the last computer literate person on the planet to do it, but I FINALLY got a DSL internet connection! I have no idea why it took me so long. Well, yeah I do. Resistance to change, the comforting and reliable sound of the static and whining of a modem connecting to its server, and the fear that getting switched over was going to involve extreme pain and suffering at the hands of a telephone repairman, with a Snake River Canyon butt crack, poking around my computer and phone line .

There was a repairman involved, but I never saw him. Apparently the rocket scientists at the "Central Office" cut off my phone service while they were enabling the DSL. So they sent someone over yesterday to check the service coming into the house, couched with many dire warnings of the extreme charges involved if the guy actually had to go into the house to do any work, due to my (utterly irresponsible) lack of insurance coverage on the inside lines. The repairman called me at work mid-morning and told me the problem had been fixed, no inside-the-house-butt-crack-revealing activity or home equity loan required.

When I got home, I had my phone line back AND my DSL up and running. A short while later I was all hooked up and actually sent an e-mail and made a phone call AT THE SAME TIME. But wait! That's not all! I had a router that I got free with my laptop, never thinking I'd actually use it, but hey, it was free. So I found my box of mostly useless old computer stuff, dug around til I found the router, connected it, and now I have WIRELESS access, too! To test that, I sat IN MY BED with my laptop, unconnected to anything, really far away from the router (well, it was probably about 15 feet), and sent an e-mail WIRELESSLY! So I sat in my bed for the rest of the evening sending wirelessly generated e-mails, just because I could! It boggles the mind. My mind, anyway. Not ONLY because I'm blonde, but because my house is over 50 years old. Nothing EVER happens this easily in MY house.*

I wonder if I'll be able to cancel my dial-up ISP account that easily.


*My new cooktop, for example, is still seated inside an opening that's approximately 1/4" larger than the cooktop. That is to say, the opening in the counter is 1/4" larger than it's supposed to be, so now I have to figure out how to shim the cooktop in, somehow, without it looking like, well, like I shimmed it in myself.