Sunday, January 17, 2010

sometimes these things just write themselves

yesterday i escaped the house i have been trapped in for the past week with two. sick. kids. but they're not quite sick enough to be in bed or just watch TV, they're just sick enough to have to stay home and cough all over me. and each other. and annoy the living crap out of everyone in their vicinity...

anyway, yesterday i finally got to escape and go to iowa's megalomart equivalent, menard's. i spent about an hour and a half just wandering the aisles, fantasizing about the new bathrooms i'd like to install, trying to withstand the impulse to buy gardening equipment (these stores are starting a bit early--we've got four more months of freezing weather to endure). in the end i bought lightbulbs for my grow lamps, so i guess i didn't withstand the impulse as well as i thought...

...so i returned home to the pesthouse to install my new lights and was welcomed by an agitated rich. he was in twitchy mode and i had no clue what was wrong with him--had the stress of the kids made him snap in the time i was gone? while i was marveling at his lack of coping skills, i noticed he was checking and rechecking all of the phones. apparently they weren't working.

and the reason that they weren't working was because rich had decided the phone wires in the basement looked "messy" (his words), so he disconnected them all. he removed our telephone service while i was at menard's. and, since our internet service runs through the phone lines...you get the picture. we were blacked out and still stuck in the house with two sick annoy-a-trons.

apparently, while i was gone, the stress from the kids had made him seek solitude in the basement (where his weight set is) and, being rich, he decided to control something. he didn't like seeing the disorder of the wires while he was working out so rather than covering them with a sheet he just removed them. i'm guessing his "ignore" function failed due to the stress of caring for his children.

after i refused to call qwest for him and file a repair request (i spend way too many hours doing crap like this for stuff that breaks by itself) and told him he would have to take care of it, rich's stranger danger/misanthropy got the better of him and he spent the next hour or so trying to reconnect those "messy" wires. eventually, he was successful but the internet connection still drops randomly for no good reason. he thinks the "messiness" has something to do with it. his suggestion is that i call qwest and convince them to clean it up; i think building a cabinet over the "messy" wires might do the trick better. send me your advice in the comments (please!).

and, as an aside, he's been googling "proper-looking telephone panel" so i'm quite concerned this is going to happen again...

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