Welcome to a New Year

By Al Horn

WHBG is back on the air! Well, traveling the cyber-waves anyway. Moving to a new house, problems with the phone company and the holidays have kept me from posting the past few months.

The Barmaid and I had a new home built on the other side of town this past year. We had to close down internet connections at one house and wait a week to get things set up at the new one. The transition was not a smooth one. The phone company got us hooked up and we discovered our DSL line didn't work despite assurances from all party's involved. After a few days, the internet provider said that the modem we had would not work in that part of town. They promptly sent us a new one. It didn't work any better. They immediately pointed their finger at the phone company.

The phone company said that everything was fine on their end. When they found out we had an alarm system installed they pointed the finger at the alarm company. I called the internet provider and they told me that was a possibility. Under protest, the alarm company came out and disconnected from the phone line to show it wasn't them. We still couldn't get out. The phone company said it must be the internet provider.

After three and a half weeks and the Barmaid getting desperate to get on line and pay bills, the phone company and the internet provider got together and compared notes over the phone. Oops! The phone company threw the wrong switch in another state.

During this time period I had fooled with the wall plugs a few times and had eventually shoved a desk covered with equipment in front of the internet ports. Two lines snaked out from behind the desk waiting to be used. When things were finally resolved between the phone company and the Internet provider, I only had one good port and a ton of stuff in the way to repair the other port. The Barmaid claimed the useful connection while my computer just sat in its box. By the time I was ready to make things right, new furniture arrived. Between getting the rest of the house arranged and keeping up with the granddaughter's activities, time was not my friend.

Before I knew it, the holidays were upon us. My family recently introduced a tradition of having the holidays at the newest house in the family. The time period between Thanksgiving and Christmas would have worked had my father not passed away the second week of December. Family obligations and another granddaughter coming to stay through the New Year meant my free time would be limited and reserved for more important things. I had resolved to make things right after the holidays.

No such luck. Church obligations, the arrival of more furniture for our office/study, and a long weekend to rewire my mother's home kept me from getting to my Internet connection. In fact, if it hadn't been for the Barmaid's insistence to paint the walls a different color, my computer would still have been relegated to children's games.

I wasn't idle as far as writing was concerned. I wrote plenty, just didn't have my computer for posting. As such, I have a backlog and will be posting twice a week. I will also be finding the time to replace some of the stories with some new ones or some that have been unsuccessfully peddled to paying publishers. Hey, it's good to be back.