Originally posted by deadheadbelle
Hey! Where is [COLOR=66FF00]iluvtink[/COLOR]??? She hasn't been around for a few days. I hope we didn't run her off!!!![COLOR=66FF00]iluvtink[/COLOR], COME BACK!!!!!!
Here I is!!!! No,
Lewskididnotrunoffto
Disneyandnottellyouiwouldnotdothat Y'all missed me, you really really missed me!!! It took me almost 3 hours to read the posts I've missed since Friday, and I was crushed that no one noticed I was gone.
Then this morning I found this message and got some PM's and now I'm
Grab a cup of cocoa java and hear my tale of woe... it's long... sorry!
On Friday afternoon, I posted that a big thunderstorm was coming ... boy, was that an understatement. I had just started my B. Fairy thing for May 21st and heard a loud clap of thunder and decided it might be prudent to turn off the computer. Not 2 minutes later, lightning hit the big shagbark hickory outside the window behind my computer area next to the kitchen! I was about 6 feet from the computer and it was a simultaneous blinding flash, a deafening boom, and the sound of exploding glass. I screamed, yelled for the girls to head to the basement, and then came back upstairs to see what had happened. It smelled like burning wood, and since it was dark outside I couldn't really see what had happened, but I had shattered glass and pieces of wood on my floor and window seat, and 3 of my windows had big holes in them! They are double pane insulated, and two of them were broken all the way through, the other one only was broken on the outside pane.
After the storm passed, I went out to look and my next door neighbors were also out looking... their big screen TV and surround sound were fried. Apparently lightning struck the top of the tree, ran down the side, and exploded big pieces of shagbark off of the tree, and some of the pieces were blown into my windows. Fortunately, all of my wood blinds were closed on that side of the house, so the majority of the wood and glass was contained. It could have been really bad otherwise. As my niece said, "Aunt Kim, you would have looked like a glass porcupine!"
My computer is fine, but the modem was fried, and I spent all weekend on the phone in Roadrunner He**. I called service as soon as I had cleaned up all the glass and we had taped plastic on the windows (4 hours later), and the guy had me run a bunch of diagnostics. Then he told me I had to call the local office in the morning, which I did. That smug and snotty person told me that it had to be my computer and not the modem, because the cable light was lit, and all that was dark was the PC Link light. So, I loaded up the harddrive, went to
Best Buy and waited for an hour while they worked on it. They put in a new ethernet card (?) and I was able to see yahoo on the monitor before I brought it home. Plugged it in... PC Link light was still off. I called again... they said, "Did you take your ethernet cable with you to be checked?" Heck no... no one told me to! So I went and bought a new ethernet cable... still no PC link. As you can imagine, I was not a happy camper. Now we know it's the modem, and now they will do a service call and now they will be able to come out on Thursday afternoon.
(Sorry if this is boring y'all, but I need to vent!) Then Sunday afternoon, after many hours of talking to idiots, I got this nice kid named Andy who suggested I go buy a new cable modem and call on Monday and have the local Roadrunner company set it up to use over the phone until they could come fix my fried one on Thursday. He said then I could take the other modem back when mine was fixed, because you can return them for up to two weeks after purchase. I was so happy... until I called the local office on Monday and they insisted I plug in the old modem and run the same diagnostics I did on Friday night. Did that work? Heck no, and they put me back into the national help desk cycle. After explaining 6 times to William Hung's brother what all had happened over the weekend, he connected me BACK to the local office, where I was told that they couldn't hook up the new modem because I still had the old one and you can't have two modems on one account!!!!!!!!! If I drove to the office and turned in the old modem, then they wouldn't come out Thursday and replaced the purchased modem with one of theirs!!! !$%!%#$@#$%@#^#$!%
So, I went to the post office and picked up an AOL disk and am on dial-up until Thursday. Not only is it slower than an old turtle's patootie, it's using my one and only phone line, I can't stay on for long periods of time in case someone is trying to call me.
Fortunately DH is out of town, so my butt being glued to the computer chair was not an issue last night. It took me almost 2 hours to post the belated birthday messages and birthday PM's, and another 3 hours to read the 20+ pages of posts I had missed. (I missed a call I was supposed to get from a new Disney customer, but hey, I have my priorities straight!!!)
Just as I was about to post and ask for a pity party because no one on the Island had missed me (at about 10:00 p.m.), the dial-up connection quit and I couldn't get on line again all night. And so this a.m., I downloaded an earlier version of AOL that I found, and now I'm back, smilin', floating in the pool and making up for all the 'ritas I've missed. (Can someone pour me into my bed tonight?)
I can't do colors or cute smilies, and it takes forever to load one page, but I'm here, more or less!
Neither lightning nor fried modems nor William Hung's brother can keep me from DIS'ing!
.
you in person.
I'm a cotton freak. I think it's a Taurean thing. I don't like anything itchy or scratchy. Flannel season is now over, so I've been wearing drawstring bottoms (which always must be two sizes too big) with a tee shirt. 
Can we talk about it or will it spoil the fun of those who haven't seen it?
:thewave: 
