Zapped

The Keed.

So here we are, quietly waiting for the power to come back on, and the cable (Internet) to come back on.......
No matter what the almighty Bluster-King blusters, when neither I nor Linda can get the Internet, and the cable-TV is dead, that tells me the problem is on their end.
We are running on the stand-by generator — which is to say, the electricity dove about 45 minutes ago. We are having an ice-storm; freezing rain. Which probably means a tree-branch fell across the power-lines and took them out.
Such an outage usually tanks the cable too: TV and Internet — the cable-station out here has also lost power.
Our cable feeds a cable-modem, which feeds a wireless-router: hard-wired to my MAC, wireless to Linda’s PC.
No Internet limits what I can do; e.g. the famblee-site, and anything else that comes off the Internet. Linda upgraded her Button-site at MyFamblee.com, and got a print-out that doesn’t give the exact amount they charged. To get that I need to fire up the Visa site — but that’s Internet, so updating my Quicken-Visa is on hold.
My ‘pyooter-clock says 1:09:57 a.m. 1/1/1904; and I can’t update it for lack of Internet.
We also wanted to install our new combination DVD/VCR, and probably will, but can’t see if the cable works when it’s dead-bro.

The Keed.

So what I’ve done so far is what I can do without Internet; like print my Excel tax-spreadsheets for 2006, which per usual took about 3-5 attempts each. We have to select the print-area (i.e. not miss anything), and then scale it so that the horizontal content of a spreadsheet fits on one page. All my income-spreadsheet fit on one page scaled at 60%. My expenses-spreadsheet took two pages taped together, scaled at 55%; but all horizontal content fit on one page at that scale.
I also learned that turning the paper-feed 90° isn’t what you do when you print landscape. The paper still gets fed portrait, but prints landscape.
Trouble is, I only print this once a year; so probably won’t remember the drill next year. It’s like the mighty Mezz; do things every day, and things go hunky-dory. Not do it for a while, and your faced with a monstrous learning-curve.
One of the things I could do was process all the ice-piks I took. That’s not Internet — it’s PhotoShop, an in-home app.
While taking the ice-piks, a giant willow-tree in the woods behind our house collapsed. It was a wye, so was an invitation to collapse. Snap-crackle-pop! Sounded like gun-shots, but “TIM-BERRRRRR!!!!!!!” Both sides collapsed. Thankfully it’s not on the mowed part; so there it will sit. The last ice-storm pruned the willows on our trails — we had to have a guy process it all; chips from those trees are on our paths.

“Dead-bro” is one of the comments of Stevie Circh, a former editor at the mighty Mezz.