It took me convincing an engineer that yes, this is a house and no, it doesn’t have an address but it’s still a residence before I finally — finally! — got internet hooked up today.

…aaaaaand my router promptly died. Motherf***er!

At least the install was free. Considering the amount of swearing that was going on when the two engineers were installing it, I’m pretty sure I was glad it was free. What was supposed to be a 20 minute job (their opinion) took over a hour and a half. I warned them that this house had never had any type of cable before, and once had a phone line (20? 30? years ago), but did they listen? Noooooo. They knew what there were doing. I mention that the house is older than dirt. They knew what they were doing.

I mention the bees in the tree behind the house. They knew what they were doing. I also told them about the hornets. They knew what they were doing.

I warned them about snakes (I saw two copperheads yesterday down by the river). They knew what they were doing

An hour later, I ask them if everything is all right.

They had no flippin’ clue what they were doing.

But it’s active, I’m happy, all is well. Now I can communicate with my coauthor without trying to run Facebook through my phone while responding to emails from various publishers and writers and juggling my life on a smart phone that insists on locking up every 6 hours or so.

Relief. It’s palpable.

I did get a lot of writing done the past three weeks, however. Almost 40,000 words. Didn’t get anything done today (too busy laughing at engineers who knew what they were doing), and tomorrow I need to finish clearing the path down to the river (where I met the overly friendly copperheads yesterday). Eric did send me the final bit of his part of Rockfall, however, so I have more stuff to go off of. I really like this book. It’s gritty, fast-paced, with lots of explodiness. Plus, Eric is a blast to work with. Lots of give and take, which is always good.

Hey, I’ll probably even be updating more, now that this is working well. Huzzah!

Who knows? I might even know what I’m doing now.