A couple weeks ago our internet started taking small vacations. I was annoyed, our oldest was panicked because “NO TWITTER!” (ah, the humanity).

I contacted our service provider and they were like “not our problem, dude, call NTT”. I called NTT and they sent a guy out to check out our internet. The NTT guy blamed everything in our house that runs on electricity and an old phone cord for the problem.

I was skeptical, but I bought a new cord when I was out the other day and then spent today undoing what I’d done and doing something else.

Most older Japanese apartments have two fatal flaws: 1) they have only one electrical outlet in each room and 2) there’s only one phone jack in the entire apartment. In order to hide my desk in the variety room and connect my computer to the internet, I had to stretch a 10 meter long phone cord from behind the hutch in the kitchen to the far corner of the variety room. This involved running the cord along the baseboards, around corners, through the entry way and around more baseboard. I attached the original cord with U shaped nails that had plastic insulation along the curves (at least most of them did before I started hammering away on them).

The NTT guy gave a long list of why that set up was a bad idea but couldn’t explain why it worked until it didn’t. Just in case I tore it all out and replaced it with plastic hooks that stuck on the wall. To do this I had to wear a silly hat with a flashlight attached and had to clean up a shocking amount of dust.

The plan for the next part of the day was to set up a Kobo Touch eReader I bought recently. (It was used and $20 so I couldn’t resist.) Setting up such things usually involves copious amounts of swearing, but after an initial failure, the only swearing happened when I tried to read the f@#king manual which consisted of 1) a “congratulations you bought this device” pamphlet and 2) vague online instructions.

Luckily, the internet and Calibre saved the precious ears of my precious girls and gave me a portable device with several books and a dictionary on it but no blinding back light and no quickly dying batteries.

I would have started reading right away, except that now that the internet is working better I have more distractions.