It's Raining on my Internet

I haven’t posted in a few days, but with good reason. Last Thursday we had a storm hit that blew out our Internet connection.

Since, unlike our neighbors, we can’t get cable, i.e. roadrunner (Grrr, don’t get me started on Time Warner), we have DSL with AT&T. DSL is not bad except that watching any kind of video online takes forever since every fifteen seconds you have to wait thirty seconds for buffering. Anywho… we lost DSL for the first time. Gone. Kaput.

They got it re-established on Saturday, but we, personally, are still down. Something went haywire. From what I understand – and, mind you, that’s very little – the DSL comes in at my husband’s upstairs PC, then his computer acts as the server so that the rest of the house is wireless, specifically, my laptop. Well, after hours of re-connecting things in every configuration conceivable, my husband came to the scientific conclusion that things were screwed up.

As it stands now, he can set things up so that one of us can connect, but not both. And since he has a business Internet phone, guess who gets the connection?

Did you know Starbucks is wireless, but not free? Drove into town Saturday, thinking I could have a non-fat Chai while I cruised hyperspace only to discover that all four of their available wireless connections required either a pre-paid card or an account. Another Grrr.

But it looks like I’ll be able to get on a couple of times a day by kicking off my husband. So, I may be slower than usual to respond to emails. Sorry.

Speaking of storms, we had a doozy last night. The wind was blowing like a hurricane coming in, or, in this part of the country far from the coast, a tornado. Despite the fact that this past winter my husband re-sealed the doors, we had water pouring in every window and door on the west side of the house. At our upstairs bedroom door, water was waterfalling around the top. Downstairs in the living room, it took three beach towels to soak up the pool on the floor. We could hear shingles breaking loose. Checked this morning and found shingles lying around the yard, front to back. Looks like we were fairly lucky, though, since they all seem to have come from the overhang over the back upstairs deck. We’ll see how lucky we are once we get a repair estimate.

Man, we’ve had rain in central Texas over the past month or so!

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the workshop I went to this past weekend. Right now, I gotta go wash towels.