Good news, bad news, inside upside downside dizzy

Well, the great good news is that we made goal on the blog-foundation fundraiser! Even better news, there’s still at least a little more on the way.

You’ve already ensured that the blog keeps going for at least two years and that new beyond-the-blog features will be added. I’ll keep the donation button and thermometer graphic up until the end of this month. You can still contribute if you want to. (Far be it from me to deny you the pleasure of giving. 😉 )

And remember, anybody who gives $20 or more is eligible for membership when the membership features come online.

But we’ve done it, we’ve done it, we’ve done it!!!

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More good news: my home Internet connection returned this afternoon. No more plugging in at the library amid yowling kids or Mr. Stinky. No more sitting on the steps of the library when it’s closed.

But the re-connection came about because of some bad news.

When I initially put the six-month seasonal suspension on the account, the library worked great. But the last few months, trying to make so many things happen, it’s been chaos. I’ve spent way too much time running back and forth and way too much time working on those steps or in my car, unplugged.

I ended up abusing the computer’s nearly new battery to death, and by yesterday I had no trustworthy battery function at all. A few minutes to check email, then I’d be lucky if the machine didn’t give me a rough, graceless shutdown without notice.

So finally, 13 days before service would have come back on its own, I called Comcast and asked them to reactivate.

Another piece of good news was that their customer service was exemplary (not what you usually hear about Comcast). Friendly, efficient, helpful, U.S.-based — and it worked. Three hours later, I had ‘Net. I’m now working from home, plugged in, and giving the computer’s poor, exhausted battery a well-deserved rest.

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The next bit of bad news is that it’s only a wired connection. Sometime during its six months of downtime, my wifi router decided it’s no longer going to talk to the cable modem or me.

Maybe it just needs updated firmware. OTOH, maybe it needs to go to the Wifi Router Retirement Home. It’s seven years old now — a computer-era Methuselah.

I’ll work on the problem over the next few days. Meanwhile, I’m attached by short cable in the most uncomfortable little room of the house. But I’m online and that’s a big glory hallelujah.

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Another “bad news,” which I hope is at an end now is this: recently my online time has been so hectic and some of it has been so unreliable that I’ve been hasty and have made more than my share of mistakes. Failing to check facts or do thorough enough research, for instance. Or sometimes just a lack of clarity. Fortunately (though also embarrassingly), Commentariat members Laird, s, and a few others are always on hand to correct my screwups.

Now that I have unrushed time online, I should do better. Um … I’m still human, so I can’t promise perfection. But improvement for sure.

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Finally, I did manage nearly to catch up on my thank yous to donors. Still need to thank the latest four. But if you donated before yesterday evening, you should have received a thank you by now. Only three exceptions: emails to the PayPal addresses of WT and ML bounced. And one nice couple who sent me a book and a check haven’t been thanked because I have only a snailing addy for them — and if you think I’m slow with email, you really, really don’t want to know how bad I am when I have to snail!

Otherwise, everybody should have heard from me and if you didn’t, you might need to check your spam filter. But please consider yourself thanked — big time.