No Internet Sucks

It was the vest of times, it was the blurst of times. The last eleven days with zero internet.....I kept a ranty running diary I'm about to inflict on you all here. This starts last Thursday.
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I'm sitting here, sweating my rump off with a fever of 101 and most distinctly unpleased. Going to see if I can reconstruct the last week, if for no other reason as a reminder to never ever repeat all of this blathering.

We fully lost internet 8 days ago. Before that we had very sporadic connections. Our cable tv went with it. For the past three weeks roughly I've been nattering at Kolbi/ICE to get off their asses and fix this. Sadly the Tico way is to take a report of outage, and if they don't get around to getting out to your house to fix it in the promised 30 hours they turn around and close out the complaint as resolved without doing a thing. Which means it takes a few days before you know, and you have to start the entire process over once again, and pray someone gets out here.

Last week someone did finally make it out here on Thursday, nearly two weeks after our first complaint. He said the entire problem was that the cable from the service point all the way into our house had gone bad. It was 12 years old at that point. We had to find this special cable he kept suggesting, calling it “Hell” cable, which turns out to be “Gell” wiih the G being pronounced as an H. Nothing so exciting as the Devil's Internet, which apparently never dies and is all weird porn. Cable located, bought and the cable repair man said he would be out on Saturday morn to fix it. Nope, called after he was 90 minutes late and asked where he was, said his brothers car broke down. Typical Tico time.

Keep in mind this cable repair guy was doing the switching out of the house cable as a side job, not as part of his ICE repairs. He came out on Monday morning and changed it out, and then proclaimed the problem was the modem and router owned by Kolbi ICE. Said he would be by first thing in the morning as an ICE repair to switch it out.

Tuesday morn comes. No repairman. We stop by ICE. Oh, he's coming. No Jairo all day.

Wednesday morning, call, go by ICE office. No Jairo, he's off but someone will be out on later that afternoon or Thursday morning to fix it.

Today is Thursday. Nope, de nada, niene. Call their complaint dept again and am told that someone filed a service order that very morning. Neither of us did, so it's clear someone, either Jairo, or Mixy, or someone else at the office realizes they flubbed up. When are they coming? Tomorrow or Saturday.

Minutes after chewing some guy in their complaints dept out Jaire suddenly texts us that someone will be out to fix it in thirty minutes. That was five hours ago. Nobody.

Tomorrow or Saturday? Who effing knows? It's just the usual Tico propensity for lying, telling some dumb gringo what he wants to hear without taking any responsibility for a damn thing. They've bolloxed something up greatly because I've twice now switched out their router and modem for the one I own in the guesthouse and there is no signal. Today I told them if they don't fix it asap I am switching to the new company that started providing service in this area. Suddenly they are not the only company providing service to this remote area.

In the meantime I am still dealing with infected eyeballs. No amount of prescription drugs seem to be working, no compresses, de nada. My vision is extremely limited, to the point where I mistook Shakira for Beyonce at first glance on Superbowl night. The only way I can see a thing is by wearing my computer glasses around instead of my trifocals.

Which made Sunday most awkward. I ended up having to sing on worship team because there was no one else, and I had to tell the leader than it had better be all old songs I know because I could not see well enough to read the lyric sheets. Thankfully it was.

The sermon was another minister, who ran extremely long, so extremely long we ran out of coffee quickly. I snuck into the kitchen to brew up more but that turned out to be a huge mistake. I was cornered by a lady named Sharon who started complaining in triplicate about the mission trip she'd taken with other church members the week before. The gist of the problem is that she was lumped in with the Clonies.

Apparently on mission trips to desperately poor areas in Central America the Clonies hog the mirror and the bathroom for hair, makeup and fashion plating before going out to stand around the mission field and then go shopping. Yes, I can see that happening, and I understand just exactly how maddening that would be. I stopped Sharon very quickly and told her she needs to tell the pastor, not me. She did call them 'The Clones' meaning I had to bite my tongue not to howl with laughter. We both came up with very similar nicknames for those ladies.

God bless the Clonies~ they make me laugh with their assumptions that Barack Obama was president when 9/11 happened and other idiotic doings and sayings. This very morning I went online at a local restaurant to see if I could throw together an NLQ post and encountered one of them complaining about how Americans were too greedy, unsatisfied and chasing possessions. I so badly wanted to ask her if she considered botox, plastic surgery and colored contact lenses greedy but knew I'd better not. I want them to keep talking to me so I can hear about Machine Pikachu and other funny stuff.

They all love Trump too.

So I heard on Wednesday that one of our kids bought a plane ticket for next week to come visit us. I've been in a whirlwind of cleaning, making sure all the bedding is freshly washed and dried outside in the glorious sunshine only to end up doing something just so super stupid on my end. When hanging out the sheets I ended up stepping on a rusty nail. Not deeply, more of a glancing scraping gouge than an actual hole.

Since it's been something like 2007 since I had a tetanus shot it was away to the doctors office. Something Ticos do way better than the U.S. I was seen and given the shot in under ten minutes. No appointment just walk right in. When's the last time you were able to do that at a doctors office?

Which is why I have a fever today and am sweating like a Mormon in a coffee shop. As per usual I'm reacting to the vaccination. I don't care, I will continue to get vaccinations and ride out the side effects. I ain't no fainting flower, not even when having to deal with the highly annoying nature of trying to get Kolbi out here to fix my internet.

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Friday Noon:

Still no Kolbi or ICE, still no internet but at least I am able to access online for a tiny while going to the edge ofour property, pulling enough cell phone towers and running my Iphone like a mobile hotspot.

And it's been drama here. I bought the tiles to tile our outdoor dining room table. Been scraping away the veneer and plotting it out. Ended up buying white with swirls of blue Italian tile and a triptych tile set of exotic birds in all colors for the table. Just finished laying out all the tiles where they go

But Jim is acting like an old lady about it all, not wanting to buy the tile until the tile guy comes out. Not trusting my measurements or color choices. He's always like this when spending major amounts of moolah. I've tiled before, heck I put in an antique tile surround around our fireplace and tiled both baths. They look great, he never had a hand or a decision in it. This will be great when I finish too. 

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And it was great. See?

Jim was having something of a fit over the fact that the chair slip covers are green leaves, and that this main table panel was green leaves, but that I'd surrounded the panel with white and blue Italian tiles. He kept asking me to return these nicer expensive tiles for cheaper bigger greener ones, or to paint the white and blue tiles. I refused, and did what I always do, just soldiered on through and did my art thing and left hm griping in the dirt.

He finally got it after I had everything masticed, grouted and sealed down and finished, but not before. Just like I cannot figure out how to balance my checkbook he cannot mentally envision how something like this will end up in the finished state.

He's busy with another set of schemes I don't have time to explain right now involving his German friends here. I hope they work.

This afternoon Kolbi/ICE finally showed up and we suddenly have internet and cable again. But I haven't done more than take a gander at Facebook because right after he left I had a bout of feeling very crappy. Very low blood pressure again and I took a long nap. Low oxygen on Monday, low blood pressure today. The only good I can say about it is that my blood sugar was also extremely low and I got to have a few pineapple tarts until it came into normal ranges.