Always Have at Least a "Plan B"

Editor's Note: For reasons that will quickly become apparent, today's post is late and I will not be getting to my comment queue today. 

[Update: As of 2 p.m., we still are without phone or Internet. From what I can glean on Twitter, there is a cut fiber optic somewhere that needs repair. Should the outage continue through tomorrow morning, there will be no post.]

I have been having a frustrating week playing "Super Dad" while my wife is away for a prep course for her boards. I can thank her mother's being here for preventing the above description from being somewhere between "hellish" and "impossible". I am not sure how I could negotiate bedtime with an infant and a two-and-a-half year-old who keep each other awake if they're in the same room. Oh, and the older child fights sleep as it is. At least, I am not sure I could put both down and still get any sleep myself.

Interestingly enough, all the problems have been from Pumpkin; the baby has only bothered me once or twice a night. (No: Until tonight, I have not had to wake my mother-in-law for help.) I suspect -- and this is as close to an atheist gets to praying -- that the problems are due to her missing Momma and some circadian-rhythm-disrupting combination of me getting her to sleep earlier and daylight savings time. (Parents of very young children lose no matter which way the clock shifts, because children can't be expected to understand, let alone make such a change.)

I get lots done on top of blogging by getting up at three each day. This week, though, Pumpkin, who normally sleeps through the night, has woken at least once a night. Today, I hadn't even turned on the coffee maker when I had to check in on her -- for the first of five times in less than an hour. Ultimately, I had to take her downstairs and put my mother-in-law on baby duty. I couldn't just wake her when the baby woke (or take the baby myself) because our nanny cam apparently requires a full-blown Internet connection (and not just a working home network) to function. (How hard would it be for Dropcam to make some sort of time/feature-limited provision for such an event?) I was ready to devote a post to how easy Dropcam was making my life until this cute (and technologically unnecessary) hiccup. I still love it, but I am kicking myself right now for not having a backup monitor.

And the Internet connection? Apparently, there is some sort of outage affecting Charter customers in my area. All it took to find out after checking things on my end was a few calls to a badly-executed voicemail that tried to route me to billing when I said, "I want to report a service outage." As far as that goes, I think the below tweets say it all:

Rev. Nick: Do you not have a System Status web page for people to check? Why do I have to search Twitter looking for network status?

Charter: [S]orry for the downtime of services.Pls call 888-438-2427 to check for outages in your area.We want to help.

Rev. Nick: I already called. They confirmed there was an outage, but said they did not have ANY details or specifics.

Okay. That's enough venting for one day. In fact, it's quite a bit of a luxury to be able to complain about things like this, and that's the big lesson for me today: I think I owe more than "a moment's silent thanks" to quite a few people as a character in an Ayn Rand novel once put it. That, and maybe get a few emergency posts together ahead of time for the next time I have "one of those days". And buy a second old-fashioned baby monitor.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: As of 2 p.m., we still are without phone or Internet. From what I can glean on Twitter, there is a cut fiber optic somewhere that needs repair. Should the outage continue through tomorrow morning, there will be no post.