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It’s been windy here lately. Like, really windy. Windy enough that it knocked our power out a couple of times during the last week. Nothing major, just a few minutes each time but the last time happened right during the last half hour of Wedding Crashers on HBO and of course having no power meant the DVR stopped working so we missed the end of the show. I mean, I’ve seen it before of course, but I was really in to it just then and I missed the best part. (You know which part I’m talking about).

Well the wind is blowing again tonight and this time, just for fun, I think it blew out our pilot light. Don’t ask me why the water heater lives outside, virtually unscreened from the elements; I don’t have an answer for you. And while my luke-warm shower tonight totally sucked, it will probably beat my husband’s freezing cold shower tomorrow morning after the water has sat outside in the below freezing air for 8 hours.*  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Foreign Service. It’s a glamorous life, I know.

In other news, Telmex spent the better part of today at our house, monitored by one of my lovely coworkers from GSO. After 3 trips to our house and 3 months of harassing them to do something, they figured out the problem with our internet! As we suspected, it was the lack of fiber-optic cables coupled with poorly done wiring inside the house and a crap-tastic router.  When we came home for lunch today they were out by the curb with a gigantic sledgehammer, beating the hell out of the concrete to get down to the wiring below. And OF COURSE our wiring was buried down an extra foot, just for fun. I kind of want to write something snarky here about how our lunch was accompanied by the dulcet tones of a sledgehammer, except that they actually kind of were dulcet tones to us because they meant that maybe, just maybe our internet was going to be faster than the dial-up my parents had at their house in 1997! Maybe our $75 a month internet bill wasn’t going to be wasted and we’d be able to do crazy things like stream youtube clips of longer than 30 seconds without multiple breaks for buffering, update our computers AT OUR OWN HOUSE, and post photos to our sorely neglected blogs *ahem* (for the record: there is only 1 sorely neglected blog in this family and it belongs to ME).

After literally spending 5 hours at our house sledge hammering, re-wiring, and drilling holes into our walls, we got the news from GSO that the TelMex guys had left the house and to run a speed check when we got home. I couldn’t wait to get home and check it out. Our new router is so shiny! And black! And it was manufactured this decade! After figuring out that the TelMex guys had jacked the cable that we had been using to connect our VPN router to the TelMex router, we found a new cable to use to connect the two, reset them both, and finally, FINALLY, I was able to run a speed check….

AND IT WORKED!! My heart skipped a beat when I watched the little needle on the speed test app pass 512k, then 1 mpbs, then 2, 3, 4 and finally 5! First test out of the gate measured 5.5 mbps!  SUCCESS! I even tested out the streaming capabilities when I watched the tail end of the Bachelorette Special: Ashley & JP’s Wedding online because my effing DVR didn’t record the entire show. (I can feel you all silently judging my television viewing habits but my internet is so fast now that I don’t even care. Judge away. I’m too busy catching up on Misfits on hulu to even notice.)

*Actually, I think we’ll probably end up going to work early tomorrow so he can shower at the gym because his morning shower is a crucial part of his wake-up routine and without it, he’s cranky, groggy, and whiny–3 traits that when combined make for a less-than-pleasant work experience for everyone involved.