This Is Just Crazy!!

If it weren’t sliding so far into the absurd, I would probably be curled up in a corner having a pity party somewhere!

I was SO ready to yell in joy to the whole world that there was indeed a Santa Claus!! I got a call late yesterday afternoon that the logic board had come in and that my computer was ready to come home! I took a whole plate of Christmas cookies over to the computer shop as a thank you and was absolutely giddy until I got home and plugged the eMac in. Everything turned on perfectly, but it was absolutely unable to connect to the Internet! I called Aliant (our internet provider) for help and they walked me though everything, but had no explanation for why it wasn’t working other than it could be a hardware issue! By this time of night it was too late to do anything else or take the machine back to the store, so I stomped up to bed.

This morning, I decided to see if the problem was with Safari or with all of the web browsers on the machine, so I snuck down to the office as soon as I woke up and turned on both machines. It was then that I discovered that I no longer had ANY internet connection on EITHER machine. No email, no FTP access, no web browsers of any type at ALL!!

Trying not to panic, I called the help line at Aliant and they tried to help me check the modem that they provided to us. It began to look as if the ADSL was not registering at all on the modem, no matter how many times we unplugged it, counted to 20 and plugged everything back in. So, the helpful person on the other end suggested that I try the power supply and phone line parts of the modem in another phone jack elsewhere in the house. As I was cutting the zip ties to release those cords from the bundle of wires at the back of my machine, I accidentally cut through the modem’s power cord!! This sent us out to find a replacement cord from one of the Aliant service centers around the city on one of the busiest shopping mornings of the entire year…

Since the computer store is right near Zellers, we went in to see just what was on sale for the special early bird event… and I thought I would faint! First, let me set the scene properly. Way back in late October, Bethany and I were checking the Littlest Pet Shop website and she discovered that there was a Chinchilla Littlest Pet that had the cutest face she’d ever seen. We’d never seen that one around here so we checked the Hasbro site and discovered that it was unavailable. The hunt began and I was finally able to find the Chinchilla and Ferret as a pair on ebay (listed as VERY RARE) and won the bid for roughly 2.5 times what these little plastic toys sell for in the store… but that was what Bethany had put on her list to Santa, so I felt it was worth the price for a little Santa Magic. After a communication snafu, the items finally arrived at my stepfather’s US mailbox late last week! My Mom mailed them off to me via Priority Courier and they arrived late Wednesday. I was smug that Santa’s reputation was saved for another year for my youngest who still believes with all her heart…

So here we are in Zellers in the toy department where a new shipment of Littlest Pet shop toys have been brought out just in time for last minute Christmas shopping and I find myself looking at over 20 of the little Chinchillas, all smiling at me with their $4.97 price tag. If I could have screamed I would have. Bethany immediately went into acquisition mode and begged for one in case Santa couldn’t find it for her! I was able to calm her down and reassure her that Santa would come through for her and that she needed to wait until Christmas morning to see for herself. AAAAAaaaaaargh!

We brought the new power cord home, hooked everything up and tested the modem out in a new phone jack. No solid ADSL light. Finally, after testing quite a few configurations and possibilities, the nice helper at Aliant decided that we needed to have a technician come to our house and check everything out… but the earliest day said techie can come is the day we leave to visit my Mom!

So, I couldn’t even set up the little surprise that I’d planned for stitchers to tide them over. A friend DID help me get a newsletter update up this afternoon with his FTP and my passwords, but now that I’ve checked the site, I see that two files are still missing… so maybe I can be a total pest and get those files up to him on a CD tomorrow afternoon between the morning and evening church services so that he could send them over.

I can still blog though Nick’s computer and I will be able to do the same from my Mother-in-law’s and my Mom’s, but I will be basically blind and deaf on the Internet until January 5th at the very earliest.

That’s just the way the cookies crumble. As I said at the beginning of this blog entry, it has become such an absurd adventure that I can only try to laugh or groan. At least I’ll be able to spend time with my family guilt-free because there isn’t anything I can do to fix this over the holidays!