Our internet connection has been really crappy lately, and I shamed my tech god husband, saying, "If your coworkers only knew how bad my internet connection was, they would ridicule you so much" and other aspersions against his tech godliness (my shrink reminded me of the old adage about the cobbler's children going shoeless). I threatened to grab a credit card and order up cable, and the husband instead worked at upgrading our DSL.
As part of this effort, the wretched local phone company came out last Wednesday to upgrade our physical phone line (they oh-so-helpfully gave us an 8 am to 8 p.m. window of when they might stop by. This was exceedingly helpful. The children, who otherwise are thrilled to spend a day at home in their underpants, were freaking out with cabin fever by 11 a.m.). The ISP sent a man out on Friday to install a new modem.
After the ISP representative left, I was unable to access the internet at all, and on top of that, he broke the jack and outlet where our cordless phones and answering machine were plugged in (our over-a-century-old home only has one spot, in the children's bedroom, where there is an outlet anywhere near a phoneline, and that one spot was wrecked). I was bitter. I'd even given the internet guy a cup of coffee with real cream. I didn't exactly want to kill him, but I wouldn't have minded stabbing him lightly a few times.
After the Sober Husband came home from his high prestige position as a sparkling gem in Silicon Valley's diadem, he managed over the weekend to get the answering machine and cordless phones back up (after a failed interim attempt where they lived on the floor in the kitchen, which I rejected vociferously). He couldn't get the internet to work, however. It now cuts out for roughly 50 seconds out of every two minutes. The husband has created a computer script to document this and is using my laptop to monitor it, so if I wish to check my email, I need to crouch on the floor in the children's room and hope I can achieve my email-checking between outages. I have resorted to "borrowing" a neighbor's unprotected wifi network, but I don't feel obnoxious enough to play Warcraft on that network.
As we don't have cable, television is usually watched via Hulu.com, and it's been impossible lately. The children are cranky and unconsolable in the evenings, predictably uncomforted by their parents' remarks about how in olden times, there was no television.
Personally, bereft of Warcraft, I've been reading too much. I'm a powerful speedreader even when I don't want to be, and I'm mowing through all the reading material on hand. Sadly I hit a bad patch of several unsatisfying books over the weekend. Lola, who takes after her mother in this regard, finished up her library books and got rather crabby. "What am I supposed to be reading! I read 17 chapters already today!" To put the icing o the cake of crappiness, some of those 17 chapters involved a hammerhead shark, reigniting Lola's shark phobias. For the last three nights, sometime in the middle of the night poor, wretched old Mommy has had to go in and hold both of Lola's hands (an unheld hand could be caught by a shark!) and talk Lola down. The Sober Husband attempted to use logic and humor to defuse the hammerhead phobia, saying jocularly, "Why are you afraid to go to bed? Sharks could be in this room, too! Sharks could be anywhere!", resulting in a fit of hysteria and a cranky, internetless wife.
9 comments:
I DIE WITHOUT INTERNET.
I agree with Victor. Also, you're probably better off not weighing in on the Taconic Parkway massacre. That's grim territory.
I detect some possible insincerity on Victor's part.
I couldn't understand why Time would be interviewing you for the Drunk-and-High Driving Mom article.
But it all makes sense, now that I've read the article on CNN. You point about reflecting on all of motherhood isn't accurate. It more-likely reflects on all alcohol abusing parents.
I'm still wondering what she was doing out of the kitchen.
Because I'm the Drunken Mother, that's why. I don't drive drunk, however. That has always been a point of punctiliousness for me.
The hideous tragedy isn't treated as a single incident, though -- of course it's treated as somehow a product of the Trend of Drinking Mothers and illustrating Just How Bad Mothers Are Nowadays. The 3 Martini author, instead of distancing herself from this one woman, instead distances herself from her own three martini tag. Etc.., etc...
OMG I didn't expect you to actually do it! I'm delighted though.
And I have books here, if you need reading material. Or you can just come over and I'll ply you with liquor.
Drunken Housewife: You don't come across as "over-educated" to me, not at all. A "European point of view" is no excuse for poor behavior. Do yourself and your readers a favor - grow up.
Ah, so it's educated and good behavior to go around leaving anonymous, nasty notes?
I'll stick with my own behavior. Incidentally I picked up my drinking habits while I was living in Europe, studying abroad, acquiring a lot of that fancy education I don't use very often.
I wasn't suggesting you were a drunken driver. Just the opposite. For some reason, I neevr seem to think of you as a drunken Mom. Whacko, hippy, strident vegan who's starving her kids of protein, lawyer-weenie, yes. Drunken Mom, not so much... That's why I was kind of cinfused about why they'd be interviewing you. I hadn't put the whol;e drunken-Mom connection together in my mind.
I had to look up punctiliousness. I thought it meant you were on time for your drunken driving sessions.
By the way, is there some kind of Drunken Mommy blog network? Where did the rag author get the idea for the subject of this article. I googled drunken Mom Blog and didn't get anything good. Methinks the article author is a closet drinker.
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