The No Service Conspiracy

I planned on posting a book review yesterday—not a major review, but just writing a little bit about a book I checked out from the library. I went down to the Dungeon after church, life groups, taking recyclables, and a quick visit to Wal-Mart to be parted with some of my money. Book in hand, I called forth the Internet to bring up this blog, but the Internet didn’t answer. No service. I rebooted the computer. No service. I tried the other computer, the nice new and powerful one that neither of us uses. No service, so it seemed it wasn’t my computer. I piddled around a little, reading some things at hand, checking back and still finding no Internet. We frequently have Internet service lapses of a second or two, sometimes stretching out to a minute.

When this came to 30 minutes, I decided to do something I hadn’t done on a Sunday for a while: take a nap. I should have gone out to the nearby blackberry patch and see what was ripe. The temperature was okay, and this should be the peak season, but my heart and legs weren’t in it. I had an hour of restful sleep. Or was it restless? I can’t remember now, but I then got up and came back to the computer. Still no Internet service on either computer.

Now for some reason it never dawned on me to write my book review in Word and save it until service was restored. I looked at various writing project sitting on the computer desk and work table, and decided to pull out the Harmony of the Gospels I laid aside a couple of months ago. I found it easy to get back into, first writing the passage notes for the post-resurrection day events.

I then began writing the appendix on how I harmonized the resurrection, and found that easy to do, even though I hadn’t thought about this for at least three months. I found the right place in my workbook, re-read a portion of my notes, then started typing the appendix. I never did go back to my notes. The words flowed, as I explained how I reconciled the way the four different gospels described Easter morning. An hour and a half later I had a good start on this appendix, maybe as much as half done.

At 5 PM we still had no service. I went upstairs, found Lynda up, and her not able to get on the Internet on the wireless laptop. So I called Cox and learned we had a service outage in our area (duh) and that technicians had been dispatched to restore service. After supper I went back to the Dungeon, and service was restored. However, by that time I had lost interest in posting to this blog, lost interest in writing an article for Suite 101, and so just spent the time working through a backlog of e-mails and catching up on the two message boards I read.

For the rest of the evening I set aside library books and went to my regular reading pile, now almost a year old, and pulled out the next one. It’s a harmony of the gospels, originally written in 1891 and updated for several decades as new research and manuscript finds came up. I read it through the time Jesus was in the temple as a twelve year old, and was gratified to find their conclusions were the same as mine, or since they were first I should say my conclusions were the same as theirs. It’s good to know that you worked independently and came to the same conclusions as an expert.

I got to work today intending to write this blog post, and found our Internet down. It must be a conspiracy. So I did what I didn’t do last night: I typed this in Word for later posting. Actually our service came back about twenty minutes ago, but I decided to complete this in Word, as practice for the next outage at home. This evening I’ll come back with the book review. I know you all can’t wait.