Lost Post

We lost our Internet connection for a while yesterday afternoon. The idiot who lives next door to us was doing some ill-advised excavation in front of his house. He had a contractor out there moving around a bunch of dirt and some really big rocks, and cutting a drain in our shared driveway. It wasn't actually his property he was working on. Part of it is ours, part is a utility easement along the street, and part  belongs to the neighbor on the other side, who was already pretty cranky about this project. I don't know what-all he managed to break, but there were a bunch of utility trucks parked out there and flaggers directing traffic and a bunch of people trying to put everything back together. Since he didn't get a permit, the city is not too happy about this development. This is all going to cost him some serious money. I take some comfort (I think the word is schadenfreude) from the fact that the idiot next door has caused himself a great deal of grief. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. But in the meantime, our Internet connection was down.

No 'net.

You don't realize how much you expect it to be there, until it's not. No 'net. No e-mail. No phone, since our home phone is VoIP. No IM, which is the way I usually let Scarecrow know I need some help, even if he's just in the next room. We don't have a TV, but no streaming movies from Netflix. I've got some real paper books, and a couple of e-books on my laptop, but no browsing the library online. The Greyhound Pets newsletter is on Google docs, so I can't work on that. I can't balance my checkbook, because I can't get to the bank's webpage. I can't update my blog. Why do I all of a sudden want to update my blog?

So I wrote a blog post, figuring I'd publish it when we got our Internet connection back. I shut my laptop down without saving it, and I forget what I wrote. I'm sure it was brilliant, just brilliant, but now it's gone.


But we've got our Internet connection back. Maybe I'll balance my checkbook.