IT Hero

Sweetie and I finally caved and bought a wireless router for our house and a laptop for Sweetie (well, Sweetie bought the laptop for Sweetie but I picked it out). I was a little apprehensive about the whole router thing, particularly as the reviews for the router, while sterling, said to all sorts of mysterious things like: "I had a little trouble getting it to work.  It turned out that there was an IP conflict. To fix it I did the following: In ''DHCP Settings'', I changed the ''Start IP Address: 192.168.0.100'' to 192.168.0.1. I also cloned the mac address with the one I had on my last router. Finally, I changed the ''Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1'' to 192.168.0.1. After that, everything was working fine."

O-KAY.  

Yeah.  And, I did also recall that I paid approximately $100 extra to have my router in Israel installed by a professional and I do recall that it took Techo Geek roughly 3 hours to install it.  So, quite how I expected that I would be able to install this darn thing, I don't know.

Well, I followed the instructions and booted up Sweetie's new computer and NOTHING.  Then, I plugged it directly in my computer, ignoring the whole wireless aspect and... NOTHING.  Then, I plugged my computer directly back into our modem and....NOTHING.  Crap.  So, now, not only did the router not work, but NOTHING worked.  We had NO INTERNET WHATSOEVER.  Lovely.  

So, a small (okay, large) marital meltdown ensued as Sweetie was nastily (he will agree, it was nasty) accusing me of screwing everything up and declaring that he wanted me to repackage the whole lot of equipment and send it all back.  Meanwhile, I was crying and screaming in indignation: "I was just trying to improve our lives!!!!"  

Apparently, this is all very normal human behavior surrounding a non-professional attempt at self-installing a wireless router.

What I didn't know is that sometimes it takes up to 12 hours for the router to kick into gear.  

So, the next morning, Sweetie turned on his laptop and had an internet connection.

And all was well in the world again.

I told Sweetie he could call me "Hero" for one month.  He said he would go for "IT Hero," which I actually prefer.

The Last Straw

You may remember my tirade about our crazy neighbor "Rodeo."  Well, he just returned from one of his jaunts on his ear-blastingly loud motorcycle and is now "dusting" his motorcycle with a leafblower.  Not joking.  Wish I were.  I am about to lose my mind entirely.  The sound carries through the entire neighborhood when he has that thing blowing.  As if the nightly 11PM blasts from his motorcycle going past our house were not enough.