Cav's Place

Time for another quick personal update, though I was considering waiting until tomorrow and making it a Sunday update after all, hoping I’ll actually manage to finish the original Tropico 4 campaign. Finished mission 19 last evening, so only the last one is left now and I tend to finish one every other day, after even finishing one per day at first, when they were easier, but I’d rather not rush myself with that and then either end up failing or leaving the post for Sunday evening and wondering whether I’ll even be able to post it after all.

I’m saying that because it was a good thing I managed to post the review for The Cavalier Club Saturday evening, as I had no Internet access starting just after I went to bed that night and until Monday afternoon. There was something of a blizzard starting that evening and continuing through Sunday, which I’d hardly consider a bad one and which in fact just finally brought enough snow and freezing temperatures to remind us that we actually are in the middle of winter, as opposed to the spring weather we had been having until then, but it seemed to be enough to snap a wire inside the cable, which was likely already damaged.
There had been some issues even Saturday evening, and I was actually worried I’d be unable to post even then, but it worked normally again by the time I did and, despite some power fluctuations and even a brief blackout, Internet access continued to work fine, bar one very brief outage around 4 AM, until I went to bed, at 5:10 AM. However, according to the logs I saw in the morning, at 5:20 AM it wasn’t working anymore, and I seemed to have no signal whatsoever, though if I moved the cable to another port on the switch, or plugged it into the broken old one, the LED would briefly flash every so often. That port on the switch wasn’t actually burned out though, since plugging the cable going to the computer into it made the LED light up normally, so it was weird.
Dad called after he woke up and was told no others from the area complained, but they’ll come and check. Then I called myself in the afternoon, heart racing and struggling to get a few words out until I completely froze, and was told they did check, works fine for the few others connected to the same switch, but they just couldn’t get on top of the building, since everything’s locked and apparently they didn’t get the key the guy who quit the network I used to be in, prompting this “partnership” with this other one, said he had. So the person I talked to said he was deeply sorry, but I’ll have to wait until Monday, as he’ll come with another guy then and see what they can do about it.
Monday morning, I woke up at 10 AM, since he said he’ll come around 10 or 10:30 and call first, but there was no sign from them until 11, when actually my mother called and was told he had just walked into the office and will be on his way. Didn’t call again before getting here though, so she was surprised to get called back a while later and asked to go out the window, so they’ll be able to see what cable to work on. That message was relayed to me, the cable was eventually identified even though another one apparently had the name on it and he kept saying it couldn’t be the one I was talking about, and even moving, and after digging it up from under the snow and ice, asking me to plug it in and out several times and finding the issue, it was eventually fixed… Which actually seemed to also fix the upload issue I had noticed before and which had prompted me to plug it directly into the switch, as running it through the UPS caused the upload speed to be only a few percent of what it should have been. Now let’s see how long it’ll hold.

But I was saying this will be quick and I’m at 700 words already, so let me move on to the fact that I actually went out for a little while that day, after I made sure the Internet worked just fine, supposedly to drop off some recyclables but really just taking a walk around the area to enjoy the cold and the snow, including the piles I had to push through to reach the bins. Didn’t enjoy the puddles though, and had to navigate a few as I crossed streets, one particularly large one being impossible to go around, so my socks and feet got rather wet and the fact that one boot wasn’t tied properly didn’t help. Or, in fact, it was tied as well as it could be, but the shoelaces had snapped as I was tying them and I had temporarily replaced them with others that were too short, since they were the same color as the old ones, only taking those out and putting some brown ones, which were of the correct length, in after coming back.

But then things didn’t go so well. Dad had apparently been asking for a certain dish for a while and, since I had been out of my room and even interacting that day, my mother asked me repeatedly to have some as well right after she’ll cook it, while it’ll be warm, and then called me again once she had some made even though I had said to just leave it for me to get to at night, even if it’ll be cold by then. And I did mean what I said, but we’re talking about the dish I saw as a sign when I suddenly saw it there several years ago, with all the mental links formed by it, and which I’m not sure has been cooked since, or if it has been then definitely no more than once or twice, so I couldn’t resist when it was there in front of me and took some to eat in my room.
Well, I shouldn’t have done that, as I somehow “managed” to bite hard on the fork instead of the food and chipped two front teeth. Or at least I see and feel that I chipped those two, and one of them actually bothers me a little since then, but it’s possible that at least one other was slightly affected as well. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but I wasn’t exactly paying attention, so I may have noticed out of the corner of my eye that the food was slipping and tried to bite hard and fast to catch it, but either wasn’t fast enough or simply missed, and this was the result.
Been wondering what to do about it since then, and whether I should use this as an opportunity to visit another dentist, as I had been unhappy with my regular one for some time, but I didn’t go anywhere yet. What’s odd is that my regular dentist’s site no longer exists, which may mean bad things even though the one time I sent them a message through it I was told I was lucky they saw it because they don’t usually check and I should just call, which I’m not going to do. But, either way, I had a look at other places in the area and picked one while dad kept suggesting another, so I eventually sent a message Thursday afternoon to the one I picked and then earlier today another one to the one he picked, since I got no reply from the first place.
Now let’s see what happens, and what, if anything, can be done about these teeth and how much it’ll end up costing. The prospect of going to some new place is definitely scary and this second place would make things even worse, as they seem to be focusing mainly on children and families, even having information posted specifically for pregnant women, which likely means they’re careful but also obviously creates an environment I’d never want to be in under any circumstances. But if they’ll reply and the other ones didn’t, I guess they may be a solution for now, if probably not the place I’ll want to return to whenever other problems will appear.

And this was far from a quick post… Once again, if I could add even a quarter as much to my story per day, it’d be something. Then again, I know I should stop struggling to just add yet another pointless paragraph every night, move everything after the battle with the three wizards that takes place after my characters sail away into another file and leave it there to get back to at some later point, and get to the edits and changes needed to make the part up to that point into an actual book on its own.
But that’s not going to happen, so at the moment I guess I’ll be going back to Tropico 4, since even playing a game and actually advancing is rare enough for me and may count as a little more than moping around and feeling like shit… Not that I feel any differently, nor that I could, as long as one particular miracle won’t happen.