I know that I have not posted for a while....so, um sorry.

The teenager is doing much better, and gaining weight at a steady clip. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers.

This morning I approached my desk ready to open email and what not and it became apparent that it was not going to happen anytime soon. No Internet. None. Nada. I thought I was going to start hyperventilating.

At first I tried all the cords. Everything seemed fine. We have Qwest Internet, so I wanted to check the phone jack. In order to do that the simplest way, I had to hook up our spare phone.

In order to do that, I had to get it out of the deep recesses of my husband's "man room". Sigh... As I mentally psyched myself up for that challenge I put on the garden gloves and grabbed a wooden spoon to use as a possible weapon for anything that might be alive in the shadows of the unknown. I slowly creaked open the door, swatting at the dusty Tibetan Prayer Flags he has hanging over the doorway. (Did I mention my hubby is somewhat of a hippy?) After peering around the door, I inched my way inside, leaving the door open for a possible avenue of escape. Stretching out my arm, my grip on the wooden spoon tight, I prodded at the stack of newspapers piled high on his desk. Nothing that might of been nesting in there rushed out at me gnashing it's teeth to protect it's young, so I took a deep breath, grabbed the phone, rushed out and slammed the door behind me. Whew. I hate that room.

Suffice it to say, I do not make it a habit to enter this domain. This is where he reads his periodicals (Discover Mag., National Geographic, The daily newspaper). This is where he smokes his nasty cigarettes and the occasional cigar. This is where he sprays his anti-fungal foot spray after every shower, before he puts his shoes on and goes to work. This is not a place I voluntarily hang out in. The Man Room.

This is our emergency phone. In case the power goes out and our cordless won't work. It is a vintage Baltimore Colts football helmet, mounted on a trophy-like plaque and made into a phone. You now know why it is stored where it is. When he first got this as a gift he wanted to (gasp) put it in the kitchen. Ugh.

I then had to crawl underneath the kitchen table to get to the phone jack. Lovely. Did I mention this is my dog Daisy's favorite place to sleep? I'm not the best house keeper in the world, so it was kinda fuzzy down there. Anyhoo, it's clean now. And the line was fine.

I just had to do it though. I had to do the dreaded. Call Qwest. Or should I just say India? I have nothing against Indians. Let me just get that said right now. What I hate is when I call a technical help line, and I am already irritated or annoyed because I have tried every avenue I can think of to fix whatever problem I have, I then have to speak with a person I have a hard time understanding. Beyond frustrating.

But I was pleased to speak with someone who spoke slow enough that I could understand. And even though the woman's tone was robotic in the beginning (everyone reading this knows what I am talking about if you have ever called a tech support line), apparently my Prozac must of kicked in somewhere between the Muzak renditions of "Born in The U.S.A." and "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" while I was on hold, because towards the end of the call we were joking around about how she makes her son do all the crawling-around-under-the-table-cord-plugging-in-stuff.

Obviously my Internet has been fixed or you wouldn't be reading this. I won't go into the longer story of all the troubleshooting I had to do, but let's just say it was a lot. I'm just glad it's done and the helmet phone can go back to it's rightful place...buried underneath piles of junk on my husbands desk.