No Power, No Internet. All In a Normal Day...

Well, as I start writing this, our internet is down, so I’m writing in Word and will copy it over later.  Our power went out for about 1 ½ hours this morning, but it was really strange:  I could hear major humming coming from the power substation that is a few blocks away.  The lights flickered, dimmed, and then surged more than I’ve seen in quite a while.  For some reason it reminded me of those scenes in a movie where someone tosses a toaster in on some guy in a bath tub. [As an aside: Seriously?  A toaster?  In a bath room?  You could try a hair dryer or maybe an electric razor.  But a toaster???]

Anyway…

It was still early, just after 5:30am, and I hadn’t taken my shower yet, so that meant a pila shower:  get some buckets of water from the pila and take a cold (very cold) sponge/bucket shower.  I didn’t feel like heating up water on the stove.  Brrr…

I also hadn’t brewed any coffee yet, so I was very thankful when I went over to Sandi’s house and found out that, not only had she brewed some before the power went out, but she had put it in her thermal carafe.  Ah, coffee.

Well, the power came back on just before 7:00am.  All in all, not bad for a power failure.  However, it left another problem in its wake: The internet was down.  Our network had come back up, but without internet access.  I went over to the bodega to check on things and reboot our modem, but that didn’t help.  There were only two lights working on our cable modem. I talked to Daya and asked her to call the cable company and see if they were having problems.

The problem was with the cable company.  We didn’t have cable TV either.  Not that any of us were watching TV, but I turned it on to check.  Snow.  (Hey, just like Kansas today!)  After about 5 hours, the internet came back.  For 30 minutes or so.  I guess the repair is a bit more involved than they thought.

So, I’m sitting here writing this in Word and will copy it to my blog sometime later when the internet is back up.  It’s interesting that, even here, we’ve come to expect “always on” internet service and feel quite cut off from civilization when something happens.

I was going to say something like, “Such are the difficulties of living in a Third World nation”, but the internet goes out everywhere.  We may just have to put up with the outages a lot longer.

1:40pm and the internet is back up.  For now.