This is it (short form). The week prior to the 12th my phone line had been acting up (cutting out for minutes at a time). Finally, the afternoon of the 12th, it was out for three hours, and using my uproad neighbor's phone, I called it in. Repair scheduled for the 18th. Please stay home between 8 o'clock and 5 o'clock. (my experience is 8 to 8.) My son and his daddy came for the birthday weekend, so staying home was no problem. The phone line however was not fixed. I assumed Monday. Nope. Went to the store in town after five on Tuesday. Turns out there was an area-wide outage beginning at six on the 13th, which was cleared on the 14th. At which point they *assumed* my outage was cleared also. No repairman was sent on the 18th. Deeply apologetic, they promised the next day, the 23rd. Of course, no repairman showed. Waiting until after 6 on the 24th, line still out, I went to country store again. And asked what I needed to do to get them to repair my line. And was informed in a hostile fashion that "a repairman had been dispatched". . . . At 7:30, a hot, sweaty, tired and frustrated repairman, Mike, knocked on my door. Evidently in the area wide repair, my line had been physically disconnected and a good bit of my actual phone line had been removed. He didn't think he could finish last night. I gave him a glass of water and two Tylenol (his head was splitting) (mine too, lol!), sent him home to bed with a promise that I'd be first this morning). He called at 10:30 this morning: I was good to go. The Verizon computer called shortly thereafter to inform me that *they* had found the problem and corrected it.

My son had removed my stove in preparation for a new one, and I couldn't go to town to arrange the delivery of the new one. So have been cooking with a crockpot and a waffle iron (makes very fancy grilled cheeses)(can boil eggs in a crock pot, but not macaroni, which just dissolves). So Monday, I go to town and get delivery together.

Some days one understands why "May you live in interesting times" is a curse.