Well, here I am, blogging to a text file again. Our Internet is out, and I have turned it off and on again like a good IT Crowd watcher, and it is still out.

The connection is working, but DNS lookup is a bust every time. I am sure there is something simple I could do to fix that, but I am miles away from being in the mood to go try to figure it out, and so today, I just blog to this thing and skip the editing for now.

That’s the silly part of all this. I have dealt with Internet outages and blogging before, so that is no big deal. Do a blog entry to a text document, post it back-dated when the Internet comes back, not that bid a deal. It’s a known thing.

But my book is an online thing at the moment. I have been editing it by retrieving it one chapter at a time from my blog.I nab a chapter, add it to the cumultive OpenOffice file, edit it, and then go get the next one. Simple and effective.

Except for one lil problem. Sans Internet, I can’t go get the next chapter to edit, and so I am a wee bit sunk when it comes to editing anything more.

I can go through the stuff I have already downloaded, and I likely will, if I get bored enough. But I have been enjoying rereading my book as I edit it, and I was looking forward to the next bit today, and so this Internet outage is a real pain in the glutes.

Oh, sorry for the lack of Friday Science Whatever this week. I hope to resume it in the future. I love talking about science and I want to do more of that, it is just that I am not quite used to the whole blogging thing any more. I am still recovering from not doing it for a month while I was pounding out the rough draft of my latest book, and so I totally forgot to collect science stories to share with you lovely science loving folks.

And well, with the Internet out, I can hardly go get some, can I? D’oh.

The Internet is totally a utility now. It’s like electricity or water or garbage collection. You just expect it to be there all the time and only really notice it and think about it when it’s not there.

And just like with a power outage, I keep not quite realizing what it all means. I keep going “Well I could just go play a video game on Facebook… oh wait, nope, no Internet. I know, I will boot up Netflix and watch an episode of…. oh right, that’s Internet too. Well, I will just go edit… “

And so forth and so on.

And it came on quite suddenly, too. I was eating lunch and watching an episode of Bones via Netflix when it just crapped out.

At first, I figured it was just one of those little SNAFUs that occasionally plagues my Netflix.ca usage (Netflix Instant for you Americans). Every once in a while, the Wii Netflix app crashes, or loses connection and I have to reboot it.

Even more rarely, the Wii app crashes so hard, I have to reboot the whole machine. And by reboot, I mean I have to get up and pull out the power connection and then put it back in. That’s how hard the crash is. Even the power button on the Wii console itself stops working, which to my old fashioned thinking should be impossible, but whatever.

So I thought maybe it was that. But nope… all things reset and still no Internet. So then I checked it on this a-here computer of mine, and whaddaya know, no DNS response.

So I rebooted the cablemodem, and still nothing. So I am a little worried. Condition light yellow.

Hmmm, I suppose I should have checked to see if we had cable reception. See whether it a cable outage or something more subtle. Oh well, I am not in a troubleshooting mood.

I am sure that when Julian and I both attack the problem, we can figure something out. Either fix it, or at least get our cable provider working on it.

I have learned in the past that I have around a day’s worth of residual Internet coursing through my veins at any given moment, so I won’t start going through withdrawal symptoms just yet.

You laugh, but I am addicted, it’s no joke! Well, OK.

It’s not entirely a joke, anyhow,

But who knows? Maybe this is just reality telling me that I need to find more things to do with my time than just fuck around online or sleep.

After all, sans Internet, and sans sleeping like ALL the time, I will pretty much have to find something else to do with myself.

Maybe even something useful, like cleaning, or baking, or untangling the enormous knot of cords that have wrapped themselves around the center post of my computer chair.

I am serious, it is getting so that if I move the chair at all, something either goes flying towards me like it is suddenly possessed of a will to destroy, or unplugs itself.

I have been further researching my dietary options. Turns out that one good thing for diabetes is onions. Something about their high sulfur and flavonoid (totally a real science word and not something from a Doctor Who themed candy commercial) contents.

Well hell, I love onions. That is something I could add to my diet effortlessly. Plus, I am going to be adding more cheese to my eats now that we have these cool big packages of shredded cheese from Costco. (We get sliced cheese too, but it is pretty much just good for burgers. )

So I see a lot of toasted cheese and onion sandwiches in my future.

I just have to remember to buy the dang onions.

If only you could buy pre-shredded onions….