Just What I Was Thinking

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WAS is the operative word there.

This would have been the perfect LOL to head Friday's post. I had even been plotting some on the theme for if I'd been able to visit icanhascheezeburgers.com when I finally gained access at the Ashland library Saturday. But with our arriving with less than an hour before the library closed, I didn't dare visit my kitties. Minutes just melt away when I'm on those sites.

But my experience of forced withdrawal off the net from midnight Friday through 2:15pm Monday (except for the minutes between 4:15 and 4;55pm Saturday in which I did nothing but put up three blog posts) I learned how pathetic my dependence had become and I'm making an effort not to fall into the same patterns.

For example, in the wee hours this morning before I lay down, I closed the browser which meant that I couldn't just lift the lid of my netbook to view my gmail, which I have been in the habit of doing several times during the hours I sleep and of course the very first thing when I wake up and multiple times per hour throughout my waking hours. During the day today I closed my gmail tab several times and made myself wait a minimum of an hour to check on it.

I also spent several hours on the porch crocheting this afternoon and another after dinner. In the process I crocheted one of the 14 row bookmarks, tucked its 14 tails and crocheted the border around it. Then I tucked the tails and crocheted the border on two more previously crocheted 14 row bookmarks. That makes four of those plus one of the 22 row version ready for blocking and application of their tassels. I have two more of the 14 row ones waiting to have their tails tucked and border crocheted.

At one point I had six of those waiting for tails and borders which was not very bright of me as each one had to stay attached to the spool until its border was crocheted on if I didn't want to have two extra tails to tuck by finishing off and then having to restart the thread later. During the time all those spools were attached to unfinshed bookmarks, I had to deal with about six major and three minor snarls. Because as much as I tried not to handle them, I was carrying them back and forth to the porch in the bag in which my crochet supplies were tucked in between the spools so the spools got disturbed every time I took something out or put something back. Also at least twice the bag tipped over on the bed and one, two or three of the spools would roll out.

I hope I've learned my lesson.

After it cooled down too much on the porch for comfort--which was about the time I lost light enough to crochet by--Ed and I returned to our room where we watched the movie, Fast Food Nation.

Last night after posting, I closed the browser and watched the rest of the extras on the Dr Who series 1 DVDs (watching the 13 episodes had been one of my occupations over the weekend) and then watched an episode of Lost at ABC.com. That last was more frustrating than fun though as streaming videos has never been smooth since I got my netbook last Janurary. Just about every video-even many on YouTube--plays a few seconds then loads a few seconds and plays a few seconds ad infinitum. With YouTube I can pause the vid and wait until the whole thing loads but with ABC streaming that only gains me approximately one full minute of unstuttering video.

I was hoping the new, supposedly faster, modem would have solved the problem which is one of the reasons I chose watching Lost over one of the library videos. Also, I need to watch a couple or loose my chance until they put them back up months from now as they only keep about five or six previous to the current episode available online.

Tonight before posting I was greeted with the news that updates were ready and when I looked at the record of updates since we got connected again yesterday I found there were quite a few--my computer had its own catching up to do I guess. I'm wondering now how much that had to do with the issues I had with the Lost episode. Also with downloading my podcasts on itunes. Because Ed has been raving about how much faster the connection is now but every piece of evidence I've had points the other way. Less speed or possibly the same. Some of the itune podcasts were taking twice as long as usual or more--a 40 minute news show that averaged 60-90 minutes before was taking 3-4 hours!!

One of the upgrades tonight had something to do with Aethernet and another one had something to do with the modem so I'm hoping.... At the very least I'm hoping some of the speed issues had to do with the updating and that that is done with for now.

It irks me that there was never any evidence that downloads were happening in the background.

Well, I'm planning to spend more time with the two novels I started over the weekend tonight. It is not typical of me to have two novels going at once. I was trying to decide between them and kept going back and forth that first night and next thing I know I'm thirty pages in on one and fifty on the other. May also watch a movie as there are two DVD that won't renew on Thursday and if I don't watch one tonight I'll have to watch two tomorrow night.