Like a good neighbor

As of Wednesday night, we are no longer stealing bandwidth from some kind and probably unknowing neighbor. It turns out that there were two phone lines coming in to the house, a primary and a secondary, and the phone company made the wrong assumption about which was which when they hooked us up. So the reason we didn’t have DSL (or, in fact, any kind of phone signal) was not because the phone company was sluggish and dragging their feet and so forth but because they were less than competent. However, they walked Kurt through going to the junction box and switching which line was live over the (cell) phone and then voila – like magic – we had phone service and DSL. Now you might wonder why we didn’t notice that the telephone wasn’t working. Well, the only conventional phone in the entire house was a completely basic model left in the house by the previous owners which we promptly unplugged (without testing) as soon as we opened the box with the DSL modem. We just don’t normally use a landline anymore. It did not occur to us to even try it. Still, the story ends happily, with all of us now online without much trouble and Kurt easily finding and hooking up our wireless router. I remembered which box it was in and said box was easily accessible to us, which cannot be said for all the boxes currently in this house. So now we’re the one providing the friendly hot spot to our neighbors, should they need it. At least for the time being. So, if you live on my block, feel free to use my internet connection.

Sophia requested The Bojaby (or Bojabi) Tree again tonight. She kept asking Kurt to tell it and he kept telling her he didn’t know it. She was skeptical of this claim at first, but then realized that she didn’t know it either, so he could be telling the truth there. We have very different storytelling styles. He rushes through about 5 stories in 10 minutes, covering everything from Jack and the Beanstalk to the Three Little Pigs to Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I find my memory for most of these stories failing me. I realize in the middle of telling them that I’m leaving a part out, or forgetting the hook, or the main character’s motivations, and don’t tell them efficiently. However, I can tell one or two stories very well. I go into all aspects of my limited repertoire elaborately, with lots of detail, and probably more embellishment than is needed. It takes me about 10 minutes to tell one story. If it isn’t the Bojaby tree story I tell a Princess Monkey Toes story, which I make up, usually starting where I left off last time. I’m so pleased that Sophia gets exposed to different storytelling styles and different stories between the two of us. Tonight she was very involved as I recounted my tale, telling the animals the name of the tree when they’d forgotten it. It was really sweet.