Cut Off!

My cable television and high-speed Internet connection are both out. Must be a fairly wide and serious outage because it's been 4-1/2 hours since my cable tv got stuck on one sound, which I thought at the time was just an irritatingly bad musical group on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson." It was late anyway so I slammed off the tv, rolled over and went to sleep. But shortly before 6:00 a.m. I turned on the tv again to see what had happened in the world in the last few hours and got a black screen.

That woke me up!

I tried my kitchen tv. Got the "Early Today" full-screen logo on that tv.

Comcast's local customer service phone line is by turns saying "All circuits are busy" and "Due to a high volume of calls, we are unable to connect your call at this time; please call back later." So they definitely know there's a problem.

So how am I connecting to the Web? Good old Verizon broadband card. I believe in back-ups.

God, it's quiet. I'm used to tv aiding my insomnia. I usually have early-morning tv's going in my bedroom and the kitchen before the sun comes up. I pad back and forth between the maybe-something-in-the-refrigerator-will-help-me-get-back-to-sleep and the let's-try-the-bed-one-more-time. The chatter of the too-bright-and-feaux-witty tv personalities usually distract and calm my racing mind and allow me to get a few more winks before my day has to begin. Insomnia is such fun -- I can tell you what's on every major tv channel between midnight and 6:00 a.m.

Ah, better. I just went to the Web site of my favorite local country music station, WPOC 93.1 in Baltimore, and am listening live. Ugh -- Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" greeted me first. I prefer the new country in the morning, not the stuff from three decades ago. So at least I know that the world is pretty much as it was last night.

Well, eventually they'll get the cable fixed. Until then, I feel kind of disrupted. I hate being cut off. Even if it's bad news, if something's happening, I want to know.