Bits and Pieces

Steven went to a lot of effort to upgrade our internet connection a week or so ago. We switched telephone companies and upgraded our DSL connection to one that is supposed to be faster. I'm not sure whether it really is faster or not. Sometimes it does seem like pages are loading faster, and other times I don't notice any difference. Somehow every evening around 5pm it seems to slow to a crawl. 

Yesterday I was having issues with pages not loading completely. I never figured out whether it was my computer, the internet connection, or a problem with the site itself, but I was having problems with Blogger, Facebook and Google, while other pages seemed to work fine, so I don't know how it could be that all three of those sites could be having problems on the same day, or how my internet connection can have problems only with specific sites. I got frustrated though, and read an Agatha Christie book instead of blogging.

Somehow in the process of switching telephone companies, our old company held onto our telephone number for an extra week before releasing it to the new company, so for an entire week, our phone number was some random number that no one who knew us knew. As a result, I stopped answering the phone when it rang because I knew that it wasn't anyone important. Interestingly, I don't think it rang any less frequently than normal. Probably 98% of the phone calls we receive on our land line are people asking for donations or political recordings or just robots who hang up on us if we do answer. I pretty much don't answer the phone any more unless the caller ID shows a name that I recognize. 

Incidentally, I apologize to anyone who did try to call us during that week. The phone probably rang and rang, and there wasn't even an answering machine to leave a message. Hopefully there wasn't anything urgent. If you wanted to call and with Hannah a happy birthday, our phone number should be working again now.

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We celebrated Hannah's birthday Tuesday evening. I made a white cake with chocolate frosting, and loaded it with fifteen candles. Her gifts included Divergent (the book), colored duct tape, a checkers game, a cell phone (her first), and official enrollment in a drivers ed program.

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The kids seem to have settled into school. Peter still has a rough time getting up in the morning, but something has changed that does seem to help a little bit. There is a girl in Peter's grade whose mother I have known for a few years. The mother just started a new job this week that requires her to be at work shortly before school starts. She asked me if she could drop her daughter off at our home on her way to work in the morning, and then her daughter would walk with us to school. I told her that would be fine, and every morning when I wake the boys, I remind them that Donna is coming over and they need to be dressed before she gets here. There was only one day this week that Peter wasn't dressed when she arrived, and that is a tremendous improvement!