for the last few weeks i have been bitching and complaining about my isp. slow connections, no connections, connections that are dropped in less than 5 minutes (sometimes less than one), etc etc etc. so, earlier this month i bought my ethernet card and ordered my dsl, finally sick of the dial up experience. then a truely weird thing began happening with my modem: it wouldn't pick up the dial tone. now, this i knew NOT to be the fault of my isp. so i called dell, we performed all kinds of wondrous tests that said everything was ok, but when we tried to dial up, no click on the phone line. my modem died. totally died. it would claim to be trying to dial in while doing no such thing. what was it doing? no clue. regardless, it wasn't doing what i needed it to do: connect to the internet.

for the past week my computer has been the most frustrating place for me to be. why update my web pages? i couldn't upload them, i couldn't stay connected long enough for my home page to load into my browser 90% of the time. mail? what's that? if i connected to the server at all, it wasn't long enough to download a scrap of mail. and considering that all i get at the moment are scraps, that's pretty bad.

to add to this, i caught my husband's cold. the good news is it wasn't very bad and it didn't last long. i did remind him quite frequently where i got it from, however, and how much i despise being sick. finally, to add insult to injury, we had a deposit down on the new final fantasy game and the store owner took an extra couple of days before bringing it in for us to pick up. so far i am not impressed. (however, the movie, as seen from the trailer at the site looks like it's gonna rock...but that's 6 months or so away). maybe it gets better later, but so far my favorite is ff8. so add disappointment to the list for the week.

and i think i am making saxy sick of the new collective soul album. (but it REALLY rocks!)

so, all in all, a frustrating week. the good news? i did spend time with saxy and family to some degree (sick as we were, him more than me for once in my life).

finally, two days ago, the "no dial tone" became a persistent "you wanna do what? connect to the internet? now why would you want to do a silly thing like that?" problem. every attempt came up with "no dial tone" uh, WRONG. i checked. it was there. i hung up firmly, so i KNEW it was there. my modem? refused to acknowledge it what so ever. bad modem. REALLy bad modem. time to call the wonderful people at dell, where they ran me through a series of tests, then a heart attack. they thought i may have had a virus on my system. so then i paid $40 (!!) to have norton help run through some tests to see if i had a virus. no virus. back to dell. this time tests were run specifically for the modem. everything passed. but when i attempted to dial up, there was no click on the line to indicate the darn thing was even TRYING to dial up. so, due to my wonderful 2-year on site contract, they replaced it...for free (well, as free as you can imagine with the cost of the 2-year contract paying for it so far). it arrived today. as luck would have it, we kinda had a few other plans today, and ff9 finally came in, so it is just now that i am actually on.

but, oh the freedom to actually be able to CHOOSE to be here!