The Qwest technician finally arrived at 4:30pm Tuesday. Some great timing, huh? This was after promising to be here between 8am-5pm Monday, and then at 5:30pm Monday promising between 8am-5pm Tuesday. Anyway, after checking at the network interface on the side of the house, he found there were more errors in the line than there should be (thank goodness. We were worried, because our connection had been working steadily for 3 days by the time he was there.). After checking further at the distribution box across the street, he determined that the pair of wires we had been connected to on the line under the street had a partial ground on one side. An unused pair in the same line was clear, so he hooked our house up on that pair, and then promised to put in an order for a contract crew to come out and replace the line under the street. That won't happen until the second half of February at the soonest, but hopefully our connection will be more stable until then.

Qwest currently provides our internet service via a DSL phone line, but without phone service. Almost since it was installed there have been intermittent unexplained outages. When the installer was here in September, he found that there were some bad connections for not only our house, but also our neighbor's house in the green connection box across the street. The outages seem to be weather-related, so I think the connections in that box are to blame again. A technician was supposed to come Monday between 8am and 5pm, but didn't make it. Scheduled again for Tuesday. I hope he can find something. Intermittent outages are notoriously hard to track down.

This is Daisy. I killed her last week. Not on purpose, of course. Our bed is a queen-size futon on a wooden frame. With all the animals around, the only way to keep any of them from peeing or pooping on the bed is to roll up the futon in the morning after we get up. December 11, Daisy was curled up in the sheet and I did not see her when I rolled the futon. Finding her when I unrolled the futon that night was the worst moment I have had in a very long time. We're having her cremated, and we'll find a way to display her goggles with the urn.

Wow, six months since I posted here. We did find a house -- moved on September 11 to Oregon City, Oregon. That cost about $300 for a U-Haul truck for a few days and about 100 miles of back-and-forth. Not a bad house, no central A/C, but we brought window A/Cs with us and it was fine. Here are some pictures of the snow that fell Monday here. There was a tiny bit more snow today, and temperatures above freezing, and rain mixed with snow. And then it's supposed to get extremely cold Thursday and Friday nights.