Oh….my….GOD, what a blur the last few days have been. Got back from my sister’s place in Santa Fe late Thursday night, with a throbbing head, blurry eyes and mucous membranes like parchment. (In case you were unaware of this, New Mexico is to “arid” as Rush Limbaugh is to “fond of painkillers”. My second act upon returning to our home—just after petting my cat [I’d already kissed my wife, so spare me your indignant comments]—was to vault into the hot tub. My pores immediately began slurping up the water like a sponge, bringing my shriveled, dessicated body to its original moist and meaty dimensions. You don’t get boogers in New Mexico, you get Nose Stalactites.)

I only seem to have really serious, ulcer-causing trouble with computer setups at my sister’s house. Last time, the computer that was running fine and dandy before I left home fizzled the second I got to New Mexico (on contact with the dry air there no doubt, being a good Seattle computer and all). I ended up UPSing her my (at the time) current work computer and getting myself a new one, so I suppose it all came out all right in the end.

This time, Dame Fortune had a different but equally nefarious package of whoop-ass planned for me, probably because I took the precaution of having a brand new iBook to set up, instead of a 4-year-old SuperMac J700 Mac clone. Since the “computer fuckup” avenue was largely closed down, the old bat chose her next best option, the “broadband Internet service fuckup”. Always a winner.

The Earthlink DSL service that was supposed to be active before my arrival seemed not to be. I couldn’t get sync-up—or any activity whatsoever, in fact—with the local Telco to save my life. Many hours were spent on the phone with Earthlink tech support, much of it on hold. Covad, the subcontractor for the line, was called. Qwest, the subcontractor for the subcontractor (how in hell does anyone manage to make money on this crap, with all these middlemen?), was called and sent out a tech, who arrived and told me that it wasn’t Qwest’s issue because the service hadn’t been ordered through Qwest. (To give the guy credit, he was nice enough to test the phone lines and confirm that, indeed, we had good signal and were more than capable of receiving DSL.)

By this time, it became necessary to extend my visit by two days to make sure that I had time to take care of everything. I had hundreds of megabytes of software updates to download, both for my sister’s iBook and for the Insignia D300 I talked my brother-in-law into buying to replace his geriatric Compaq Presario 5724, which couldn’t seem to handle the processor overhead of even antivirus software. (In case you are in the market for a really cheap desktop computer, the Insignias seem like a very good choice. They are available through Best Buy.)

Soooooooo….another call was made to Earthlink, who contacted Covad, who sent out a tech from Albuquerque, who arrived four hours late, who checked everything out and informed me that….the DSL was working fine. Had, in fact, been working fine the whole time. Qwest had just put it on the wrong of two phone lines coming into the house.

Oh, sweet Jesus. Four days of phone calls, hand wringing, headaches, more phone calls….it was there all along, right under my nose; I’d just been using the wrong nostril. Boy, did I feel stupid for not checking that in the first place.

So, with our high-speed Internet access firmly in place, all I had to do was spend six or so hours downloading software updates, run tuneup utilities on both computers, and teach my sister and her husband how to use them….all before Thursday noon, when I had to leave for the airport.

My “vacation”, so to speak, consisted of twenty minutes spent gazing into the peaceful arroyo my sister’s place overlooks, on the day I was set to leave. That, and this photo of the front of their house.

Santa Fe is a beautiful place to visit. Maybe I’ll get a chance to someday. 😉