This post was brought to you by the letter "a"

Four days and 2 wireless routers later, I am finally connected to the internet without a cable. Now, since I have just made this work (with no controlled strategy other than "keep unplugging, resetting, rebooting, etc), I'm not going to declare anything more than temporary victory. For now, there is wireless in the apartment.

For later, let's just say I've stocked up on my favorite chocolate. Which needs no electricity, no cables, no firmware updates (unless, of course, it gets too warm, then I just "reboot" it in the freezer), and is always available. It doesn't even ask me to choose between German, French or Italian before eating it.

I'm a bit suspicious, actually, of the electrical outlet over on the other (let's call it "fishy") side of the room. The desktop, with its frankenstein adaptor, won't power on over there. The first router which came with the cable modem gets all manner of bad reviews on forums, so I'm just going to eat that cost (because the customer service for that router gets even worse reviews, and at $0.08/min for crap help), and for now pretend that the new router I bought over the weekend was never having problems. But I'll also maybe stay away from the "fishy" side of the room and its outlet, until we have an electrician come over. We'll need one for a number of odd jobs anyway - adding outlets, installing ceiling lights, and now I'm thinking, for checking the existing outlets. Who knows, maybe the last tennant here was 95 and used only the occasional lamp.

While I've been working and reworking the various computer-related components here at 3am, the freakiest sounds started coming from the street downstairs. Like a dying animal. At first I thought (and M thought) that it was a cat having gotten hold of a hedgehog. The pupper didn't thought anything other than "bark, bark loudly, because that sounds disturbing!" We saw a hedgehog the other night at the dog's pee spot, in the dark, standing perfectly still hoping the dog would eat it. We made sure that no one was eaten. Anyway, I thought now one of the cats got one. But when I looked out, there were only 3 small cat-like things running down the road after each other. I don't think the first one had a hedgehog in mouth. I hope it didn't, anyway. And if it did, I hope it got a mouthful of spines to teach it a lesson. Hmmm, maybe it tried to get one and got hurt? Who knows. I'm hopeful to not find any dead hedgehogs tomorrow morning.

Oh, hey, we did find one kind of whimsical thing for the living room over the weekend. So, let's just say that this post was brought to you by.....

Yes, it is backwards. I know. I just got wireless internet working after about 6 hours of trying random stupid things and not knowing what I was doing. I'm going to let you just deal with a backwards "a" for now.