Black Friday

A most decided introvert, I shudder at the mere approaching, even only in thought, of the Temple of Mammon (the mall) on the busiest shopping day of the year. No holiday bargains for me, sadly, but the day was a rousing success, nonetheless!

I spent Friday untangling phone line, snipping wires from a defunct security system and crawling through the attic, my elbows and knees balanced precariously on the joists to keep from falling through the ceiling, in order to run a wire from our existing phone line to my computer downstairs.

I love playing with electricians tape and wires and electricity and getting everything all hooked up and ready to go and the phone still works and you're covered in isulation with your hair looking like Nicholas Cage's in Raising Arizona and you don't even get shocked this time because you remember not to lick your fingers to twist the little copper wires together after you've stripped the plastic insulation off them without turning off the current at the outside box and then at last you're standing with the phone line in one hand and you put the little pluggy dohickey into your computer and. . .

it won't work.

And you do a little checking and then discover that your computer has no modem.

And you feel a bit foolish.

And your phone won't work for some reason, either, with this little pluggy do-hickey plugged in. Hmmmmmm. . .

So you call up your computer genius father who is smarter even than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or any of those guys, the computer genius father who built a computer from pieces-parts when you were little and taught you to count in binary when you were eight and how to solder circut boards when you were twelve and how to play Hunt the Wumpus back when computers used cassette tapes instead of floppy's or CD's. . .and you call him up and he says he's probably got a modem lying around somewhere, so you run errands to get movies and groceries and swing by to see him while you're at it and he shows you a thingy a lot like the little pluggy do-hickey that goes on the end of a phone cord but is just a little bigger, and you say, "Yes!!! That looks more like the size of the hole I plugged the phone line thingy in, but it didn't work!" And he raises one eyebrow and grins and tells you you plugged the internet line into the networking hookup place and then he finds a modem and gives it to you and says the phone should work a lot better if you put THIS in your computer and THEN hook up the phone line to it, and you go home and do that and. . .

Voila!! It works!!!

And you go watch really cool movies with Great Scott and The Princess and The Fairy for the rest of the evening and are very, very, very happy.

The end.