It wasn’t my intention to leave the Prairie Muffin post up at the top for as long as I did, but y’all will just have to forgive me, because I have not had internet access for the past four days. Four days! No internet! Aaaahhhh, withdrawal!

The story: Since we live in the boonies, we have to use a satellite dish for both TV and internet access. That means two different satellite dishes are stuck on the side of our house (as if one isn’t ugly enough). Oh, how I long for DSL… Anyway, the siding guys were out on Thursday tearing the old crappy siding off our house. (The new siding – which we ordered to replace the ugly stuff with big gaping, bubbly seams – will arrive sometime later this week.) When I got home from work on Thursday afternoon, Dave told me that the guys must’ve bumped one of the dishes, because our TV was fine, but we had no internet access. Fantastic.

Since I don’t work on Fridays, I had Dave call the satellite folks to send out a repair guy to fix the dish. I’d be home all day, so no problem, right? Well, they couldn’t get a technician out until Saturday afternoon. Dave stopped on his way home from work on Friday and bought me a couple of new video games to keep me occupied, because I was going crazy without internet access. And for some reason, we couldn’t even get a dial-up connection to work on my laptop. Argh!

Saturday, the technician came out, and the poor guy spent about three hours outside trying to get our dish working again. (Did I mention that we’re having some freakish heat wave right now and it’s been 95 degrees every day? I felt really bad for the guy. But you have no idea how thrilled I am that we got central air-conditioning this year.) Problem is, the dish is about five years old, which in satellite technology means that it’s three or four generations old, and… no luck. The guy couldn’t get it working again.

The thing is, Dave and I have been unhappy with our ISP for a while – our access speed is crazy slow, they have a limit of how much we can download per day, and forget trying to upload anything because dial-up is faster. We had heard that there were other satellite Internet companies in our area that are much better, but to change ISP’s means that you have to shell out the cash for a whole new dish. Since our current one is busted, this gives us a good excuse to go ahead and make the switch to a new ISP. So it’s really not all bad, except for the cost aspect.

Well, that, plus the fact that it will be Wednesday before they can come out to set up the new satellite dish. Cry! So if you don’t hear much from me this week, you’ll know why.