Well, back to work again, with high hopes of having Internet access at home by the time I get there tonight. Though it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if I didn’t, which will mean yet another night of boredom and torture. OK, not quite that bad, I guess. Good thing I switched to Dish, though, or I’d have neither TV (except OTA, I guess) nor Internet, and that’e really no way for a person to live. You know what’s nice about not having Internet access, though? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

The problem for those who are curious, lies with the cable itself. In my situation, there’s a pole out on the street (nothing unusual so far), then another pole on my land about, oh, I dunno, I’d guess about 80 feet from the street. Here the cable goes down the pole and to the ground, where, I thought, it was buried before heading on over the, oh, I dunno, maybe 40-50 feet to the house.

Turns out, though, It wasn’t buried all the way. In fact, it goes maybe 10-15 feet above ground before getting buried, then pops up about another 8-10 feet from the house (and runs across the front walkway, which seems terribly stupid, and which I somehow never noticed before – though, to be fair, there’s been a few feet of snow covering everything for most of the time I’ve been living there.

So, anyways, turns out a piece of the first part of unburied cable is skinned, and the ground and shielding are exposed. The cable dude (real nice guy, BTW) said it looked like squirrels. Sounds good to me. So, apparently it got wet and that was that, signal wise. Anyhow, this is one run of cable from pole to house, and, I guess, can’t be spliced. So they need to run a whole new line from the street, which is gonna take a couple of guys (and a whole lot of cable).

Maybe they can do it today, maybe not. We shall see. There was no talk of it costing me money (and, really, the cable should have been buried the whole way, IMHO), so it better not. I didn’t ask (sometimes don’t ask, don’t tell really is the best policy). If they do try to charge me, and it’s something more than a nominal fee, then I will, sadly, have to rethink the situation.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that.

Anyhow, despite a day when it precipitated in pretty much every way conceivable (rain, sleet, snow, hail, them little brown frogs, you name it), I managed to get a fair amount of stuff accomplished, including digging a couple of fence post holes (by hand, mind you) and setting posts for what will soon become an eight foot gate in phase two of the home fencing project so that the dogs can have the the front yard to hang out in, in addition to the back and the side. Phase three will involve the woods, and that may take a while.

So, anyways, I guess I better get to work. If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know why.