Me, Unplugged

It was a lazy Saturday afternoon and I was multitasking on the computer as usual.  I was updating and sharing photos on Snapfish, looking for kids' shoes on eBay, reading status updates on Facebook, and getting ready to balance the checkbook online.  That is, until I was unplugged from the world. 

My neighbor was doing a little digging.  In his defense, he did call before he dug.  Aaaaand they told him to go right ahead and dig.  However, Verizon does not like to bury their fiber optic cables too deep, and as my husband said, "Yeah, shovels cut through those real good."  I guess  my opinion of Verizon in this situation cancels itself out, because I was happy with how quickly they fixed it once they arrived, but NOT happy that it took them almost two days to arrive.  My husband was happy that they replaced the whole cable from the box to the house instead of splicing it.  So maybe we're leaning slightly in the positive direction with Verizon.

As far as my assessment of the whole situation, I'm kind of glad it happened.  Shhh!  Don't tell anybody I said that.  But with no computer multitasking to turn to, and by the way, no TV to watch, either (unless it was a DVD or something), we spent more time together as a family.  We played games with the kids.  Okay, they were Wii games, but the kids were just happy we were playing with them.  And I actually gave the older girls a piano lesson for the first time in weeks (it's just too easy to skip the lessons when I'm not paying someone else to teach them).

So it was not possible to "just check e-mail really quickly" and then get sucked into the Internet for hours.  It was kind of freeing to not have a choice about that.  A blessing in disguise, if you will.  And I really wasn't that far behind in things once we did get reconnected, although that was partly due to the fact that I usually get less e-mail on the weekends. 

Oooooh, and Verizon gave us free HBO and Cinemax for three months!  So maybe in about oh, mid-September or so I'll have to convince our neighbor that he needs to do a little bit more digging.  Until then, I'm going to try to muster the self-discipline to learn from this experience by having some computer-free days.  'Cause I could get used to this being unplugged thing.