The Long Weekend

     A major storm blew through Louisville on Friday. Our Governor here in Kentucky declared a Statewide Emergency even before the storm hit town. It knocked out the electricity at our apartment complex for hours. It also killed the Internet and Cable for the area. 

    We were lucky in that we didn't lose power for days like some people did. All we did was suffer from Internet withdrawal, Netflix Cold Turkey, and the loss of the Cable news channels. It was truly eye opening for me to realize just how much a part of our lives television and the Internet have become. 

    No Internet means that you cannot surf the web, look up recipes, find game walk-thrus, check the weather, check for status updates, or update people on what is going on. No Wi-Fi either. If you have a VOIP home phone, you can't use it, because it needs the Internet to work. Unless you have the Internet on your smartphone, you are completely cut off. 

    Not having cable television means that you can't watch broadcast TV at all. The days are gone when we could bring out the trusty Rabbit Ears Antenna to *try* and get a local broadcast station to come in on the tube. I don't believe that many people these days even have those old antennas. Heck, I'd be surprised if most of you have aluminum foil in your kitchen since that can't be used in a Microwave. 😏

Those services are *finally* back on after being down since Friday afternoon. 

    For us, it was a long weekend of watching DVDs and playing Klondike Solitaire on my computer. Most of the games I like to play are online. A lot of things I assumed that I could do on my computer while the Internet was down, well, it turned out I could not do those things without an Internet connection; Programs, apps, documents, spreadsheets, most are on the web and stored on the cloud. I had no idea that some of my programs would not run without an Internet connection. I thought that they would load and run because they are installed on my computer. It turns out that isn't always the way it works.

    It is just me and my 89-year-old here at our apartment. We don't have any family around, and no social friends anymore. The pandemic, and age, distance, change of lifestyle, and most of our lifelong friends have left the world, these are all part of why we are much more isolated than we ever were in our younger lives. Things change, people change, and lifestyle changes. It happens to everyone. When you have people around, you can talk, do things, play boardgames, go outside and throw a frisbee. When you are older, you are not going outside to throw a frisbee. 

    Dad and I, we are not the type of people to sit and play a game of Monopoly with just the two of us. Not that we'd ever play it even if 20 people were here, but you understand my meaning; Not everyone who lives together can play together. 

    I sat down and read books until my eyes were too tired to read. I played Solitaire on my computer, cleaned the house, cooked, ate, and stared at my Internet Router trying to make the light turn from red to blue. It finally did 48 hours after I began staring at it.

    The Internet and cable television are now a part of who we are and what we do. I realized that fully over this long weekend. We are addicts of a type. We allowed those things to integrated into our psyche and lifestyle so completely that we didn't expect the outage to cause us that much angst and boredom. It did, surprising so. I am not sure how to get ourselves back to the mindset of the past when we didn't have all that. We could easily live and dream and breath without the Internet or Cable TV. It is not so simple anymore for us to do that.

    Strange how we let that happen to ourselves. But it did, and here we are. Thankfully it is all back on again. Now we can sit down and stare at the television and computer monitor happily, without a care in the world. 

Life is funny, isn't it.

Best to you all,

M.W. Van Dyke