I've been really tired and had a stomach ache for the last few days.
I had to get up extra early today to take dad to his osteoporosis screening. He would normally drive himself, but the van is in the shop.
(The main focus is getting the windshield wipers to work again, since it rains a lot this time of year here. They could replace the windshield for $250-300, but I'm not sure that is really necessary. The mechanic said that the cracks in the windshield should not have interfered with the wipers and that it may just be a coincidence that those broke the same day. I wonder if maybe I broke them when I manually moved a wiper down a couple inches to get a better view of the cracks just after I bumped the lumber into the glass. While there it is also going to get an oil change and at least one tired replaced, as it has almost no tread left and someone warned we last month that the side had bad dryrot and will likely case a blowout soon. Thankfully I got 4 free tires from Habitat, as the home we are working on next had a bunch in its garage which were going to be thrown in a dumpster otherwise, four of which were in decent condition and the right size.)
Dad drove my car when we dropped off the van, but complained that sitting down that low made his arthritic hip hurt much more than usual. He also got really confused as to how to control the wipers, lights, and defrost on my car, as they aren't in the same place he is used to using. When I sat in the passenger seat to talk him through it I noticed he kept accidental flooring the gas pedal, which would have been a problem were we not in park. Dad decided that the odds of him crashing my car on the longer trip to the hospital and back was close to 50-50. (He is 81 years old, almost 82. He took away his father's car keys at age 83 after my granddad crashed into an ambulance.) We had to take mom with us too as there is no one else to watch her.
When we got home from dad's appointment, I saw a red light on our router/fiber optic gateway saying that our phone line was not working. The phones did not have dial-tones. At first it seemed like we still had internet, but when I actually tried to access a webpage it would not load and then the formerly green broadband light turned red. I restarted our gateway 3 times, to no avail. (It just changed solid red lights to blinking red.) My phone's data is limited and very slow. Our mobile data reception in this house has always been poor. I eventually managed to navigate the ATT website, not well enough to find a number to call to talk to a person but enough to go through the instructions for restarting the router a fourth time before setting up an appointment with a technician when that did not work. The soonest appointment was on Saturday.
After setting that up I went to the end of our street and saw that there was an ATT truck parked by a phone pole about 100 ft from the intersection. I spoke briefly to the man who lived at the nearest house and then eventually got the attention of an ATT employee inside a trailer behind the truck. He said that it is possible that he accidentally cut off our access while splicing cables together, but did not think it would have caused an outage that would last as long as ours had. A couple minutes lost of connectivity would be normal, but not a couple hours. He said there were also few other ATT technicians doing the same thing a few blocks away who could have messed something up. (The city is adding a sidewalk to that street and have to move a lot of water pipes, gas pipes, power lines, phone lines, etc., first.) He said he should be done in a few minutes and our service will hopefully be restored by the time I could walk home, but not to cancel the Saturday appointment until we know it is working.
About an hour and a half later, about 45 minutes ago, our phone and internet finally started working again.
I could not figure out a way to cancel the technician appointment on my phone, but the desktop website is better designed and allowed that.
