By Irene Conlan -
Yesterday morning I got up and began my morning routine which goes something like this: Get up, shower, etc., make a cup of tea, meditate, play Trivial Pursuit and do the crossword puzzle on Pogo to get my brain awake and then I’m ready to work on the blog for awhile before breakfast. With the preliminaries finished I sat down to begin my morning battle with Trivial Pursuit and . . . nothing. No Internet. I went to the family room where we have the modem and router and, even though they looked fine – all their lights were on and blinking – I unplugged them, waited, and plugged them back in.
No Internet.
I had my breakfast and checked.
No Internet. Now the red X was on my Internet icon on my computer/
I repeated the procedure with the modem and router because that’s what Cox tells you to do before they have you do anything else.
Still no Internet.
I called Cox.
After going through the menu and pushing endless selection numbers I received this message, “We are experiencing an outage in your area.” That’s strange because the TV worked and the Internet and TV are on the same cable. Well, I’ll do something else for awhile. A couple hours later I checked again.
No Internet. My best friend who lives at least five miles away had no Internet. She couldn’t work, either. Hmm. A large area.
No blog. No email. No Skype. No Pogo. No Internet.
The interesting thing is that I got a lot done yesterday. Some of the boxes still unpacked from our move are almost all unpacked now. I spent some time outside enjoying one of the most beautiful Arizona winter days I’ve ever seen – the sunshine was glorious and the sky one of those ultra blue, cloudless skies we have here so often. One of those “no temperature days” is what my youngest son used to call it – the temperature so perfect you didn’t notice it being hot or cold – no temperature. I brushed the dog, cleaned the kitchen and did two loads of laundry – none of which were on the “to do” list for yesterday.It was wonderful.
At first I was upset. I couldn’t work on the blog and I can’t remember when I failed to post at least one article and the daily quote. This blog is my baby and I love putting new “stuff” on it, finding things that are interesting (to me, at least) and sharing them with my visitors. When I finally came back to the computer in late afternoon I decided to let it wait until today.
I know that sometimes when things don’t go according to plan, something better is just around the corner. I try not to get upset and wait for the “good thing” to unfold. I had a glorious day off. Yes I worked all day but at something different than usual. I didn’t sit in front of the computer all day and I can thank Cox for that. They are certainly not my favorite company – they have a monopoly on cable here and when there’s no competition – well, you know how it goes.
But they gave me a day off.
No Internet. A special gift, actually. A break in the routine.
Sometimes a day without Internet is a day WITH sunshine.
