Things We Think Don’t Need Anymore

Since my internet (computer sorta) strike began – blame Stable Genius Trump news – I’m using these reference books again.  And my old manual typewriter.  And handwritten notebooks.   And layers of Post-It Note corrections.  I feel 20 years younger!

Things We Don’t Need Anymore

Don’t know how long my internet strike will last.  I’m giving myself 5 minutes a day. LOL.  I am on Second Life (a virtual world) , though. I look 40 years younger there!  Let me know if you’d like to meet up there and I’ll try to figure out how we can do that.

Ellespeth ♥

 

Third Verse…

same as the first – and it did get worse.  I should not be hearing any chuckling here….

We might be back online again.  I don’t want to get myself all excited here.  And I’m not really sure what transpired between AT&T and me but:

We lost our connection again.  And again.  And again.  And then this lil Cajun said:  Just an effin minute here!  I have had enough of enough.  So, unfortunately for AT&T, I called them on our emergency cell phone (once we found it in your car, in your trunk, in your hiking sack)

Outcome:  AT&T is going to eat the $180 bill we received for service that a toddler could have provided.  We get to keep the new modem for free.  We lowered our speed.  We kept our land line but limited our minutes to 215 minutes a month.  We don’t use the phone that much.  That’s 7 minutes a day.  Great!  Some days we don’t even answer the phone.  That means we talk longer some days.  Our monthly bill is less than $80 – phone and internet combined.

This didn’t happen quickly.  I had to call back 6 times within 3 hours to get this done.  I had to use the word “SCAM”.  I did not curse.  Or holler.  I just, somewhat calmly, told them what I thought of AT&T.  The last lady I spoke with was fantastic!  She did exactly what any of the other representatives could have done.   I guess we won. 😛

Then, while I was somewhat here or not here, plenty people seem to have visited my blog.  WordPress sent me a message “Your stats are booming…your blog appears to be getting more traffic than usual.”  I have to go see what that’s about!  I’m trying to get better about reading those things that pop up under the quote bubble icon thing.  It’s like a telephone!  Ack!  I think I’m nervous 😦

I have made some serious decisions about where I will post my work online.  It took a while to make this decision..but it’s made.  Something creative has come from that process and I’ll post that later this evening.

Ellespeth   ♥

The Connection That Wasn’t Now Is

Pffffttttt!  Two more days with no internet.  Once again ‘it’s fixed’.  I hope so.  I probably won’t catch up on my reader.  I’ll try but…

I’m reviewing poetry and considering prose to go with some poems.  I’ve edited some of my poems.  I’ve put my work on a memory key.  I’ve steam cleaned the indoor floors and finished mopping the balcony.

I depend on the internet more that I thought.  Research and all.  Plus, with my vision issue, it’s easier to look spelling up…I’m not one to spell check until the very end.  If I’m not sure, I still like to look it up.  I like to be sure I’m using the right word, too.  It’s always interesting to find synonyms listed with the definitions, etc.

Until laterz..

Ellespeth    ♥

The Things We Sanctify

If you’re reading this and following my blog, you’ll recall that I was so excited last week about finally having a proper Silicon Valley internet connection.

Cut!

Our internet was out from wake-up time today  until a bit ago.  I finally had to holler into the phone, to poor Pam, “This is unacceptable.  I expect to have our service up and running today.”  She’d just told me it would be two days of waiting for repair.

She said some company cue card thing.  I said,  “Anything you say is unacceptable until you say you are fixing this problem today.”  Then I said, “Look, this isn’t your fault and it’s not my fault.  Just tell the service man I am unable to spend my entire life waiting, at home for AT&T to fix our internet and phone connection.”

It took over an hour but w were somehow able to fix it remotely.  I felt bad for Pam.  I felt bad for me, too.  I felt shocked that Silicon Valley can bring the internet to the world but can’t keep it going in Silicon Valley 😎 I’ve felt this way before and said this before.

That issue was fixed then:

Kaiser hadn’t sent my premium bill for July.  Their Northern California Pay Your Bill  On The Internet site was down.  Hahaha!  When I finally reached Member Serives, I was on hold for  an hour.  Evidently, Kaiser is having a problem shooting out bills and, with the Pay On Line site down, well…the phones were a nightmare.  When they finally picked up – I was disconnected.  Grrrr.  Called again.  Didn’t have to wait as long.  Paid my bill by phone 😉  Geez.

Don’t get me wrong.  I ‘m happy to have health insurance.  I’m happy to have internet and telephone.  Gimme a break!   It’s 2014.  Companies need to start hiring more people and stop sitting on their mountains of cash.

Ellespeth steps off soap box.  Let me see if I can accomplish anything creative today.

Ellespeth

Fiber Optically Yours

I can’t remember when we last had a decent internet connection.  For months, I’ve been rebooting our modem several times a day.  Then there was that week the cables, outside our condo building, fell to the ground.  After that was fixed, we thought – for a day – that things were better.  And then…we slowed down to a total crawl.  And the rebooting the modem issue became worse.

We’re two rather peaceful laid back people so…we’ve lived like this.  I’m thinking since at least last November.  We’re not in a hurry to get anywhere on the internet.  It was just frustrating as hell.  So…

Yesterday we were set up with some closer fiber optic VDSL something and before we had something called ADSL.   And we went from 3  somethings to 18 somethings.  And no, I don’t know what I’m talking about.  I only know that our internet is so faster and our new modem is working.

You and I met and had a lovely courtship using dial-up internet connections.  We somehow managed to connect and chat enough times to decide to meet in person and eventually  marry.

Our grandparents used to tell us how they walked miles to school everyday.  We’ll be telling our grand kids that it used to take us forever  to connect to  the internet so stop complaining about having to wait 2 seconds 😛

So yay for advancing technology.

Ellespeth   ♥

Welcome to Silicon Valley…

We bring the internet to the world but we can’t bring it to Silicon Valley.

Let’s not name our internet /phone service.  Let’s just say they used to be part of a monopoly and still consider themselves some sort of god.  Our wireless connection, to the study,  hasn’t been working since sometime in November.  I mean if you call disconnecting every 5 minutes working well…yahoo!  Additionally, our computers slowed down to a crawl sometime in November.
Since we don’t have this company’s name brand router – but another that was working perfectly until November – our phone/internet carrier wouldn’t help us.  They did say, repeatedly, that we had a mighty fine connection 😛

Yesterday morning the phones and internet, for those using this particular nameless carrier, went down in our entire condo association.  Eeep!  It’s actually gone down for several thousand people using this particular carrier.  It appears about 125 feet of cable broke and fell to the ground and – I kid you not – they are blaming it on squirrels!  Hahaha!  I knew – from certain WordPress blogs – that squirrels were awful but I didn’t know they liked to gnaw through copper cable.

God knows when our telephone and internet service will be restored.  It sounds like a major project.  I’m particularly grateful that I was born many, many years pre-Kindle and that I have several paper books I haven’t even read yet.  I’m also glad you have a cell phone in your hiking sack and that it was charged enough for us to get information from the phone company.

All and all it hasn’t been horrible to be without reliable internet access for almost two months.  It was the holiday season with all its craziness.  Plus, I bought a Nora Roberts formula novel at the grocery just about when all this started.  I’ve ended up reading four Nora Roberts formula novels.  I’m into the fifth one now.   Another trilogy.  I don’t know if I’ll finish it.  I may finish it to see what happens to the mother!   Nora Roberts is not very deep.  Everybody falls in love and lives happily ever after.  Adult fairy tales about the  princess and her prince.  There’s also a queen in each one.  Sometimes she’s wonderful and sometimes she’s mean.  She’s different in each novel/trilogy.  Nora Roberts has done well in a difficult genre – formula writing.  I guess it’s sort of an extension of True Confession Magazine stories.  The formula part I mean.  Always the same.

I tried to write a True Confession Magazine type story.  In fact, I’ve tried several times.  Absolutely not easy.  I might try again.  Nora Roberts seems to be – from reviews of her work – an expert in the genre.  I’ll study her a bit more and then try again.  (Her sex scenes are not realistic but I suppose they offer some sort of fantasy for younger/less life experienced readers.  Escapism at its best.  Roberts does manage to sneak in educational bits about condoms and birth control realistically.  I’ll give that a plus.)

So…I  may walk over to Starbucks tomorrow and post this to my blog.  I dunno.  I just wanted everyone to know what’s going on.

PS  … Yay! We’re connected!  Everything is working so much better.  I guess the cables had been going bad for quite some time 😦  I’ll be back later.

Ellespeth  ♥