And I'm back

 So, Thursday afternoon, I got my covid booster.

I was okay Thursday night and Friday morning. I videoed this (I forgot it until I looked at my cloud-photos today):

 Yeah, there's gotta be a fault in the line to that lamppost.

Made it through my classes, but then when I got home at lunch I started to get VERY tired. I managed to grade the exam I had given, but that was about it. I also wound up with a big, red welt on my arm that itched (it's still there but is some better)

Saturday I felt better enough to clean house a little.

Sunday morning I woke up and tried to do Duolingo (which I do on my phone) and it kept telling me it wasn't connected to wifi. "Weird," I thought, and went to look at the modem.

Totally dark. No lights at all on. Uh-oh. 
So first I called the service number (they are staffed 24 hours) too see if there was an outage. No, no outage. And I knew the cable itself wasn't bad because the cable tv worked, and I have the cable on a splitter - one branch goes to the tv, one branch to the modem. 
 

The woman I talked to had me try it in a different socket, no go. (And I was reminded it was probably time to replace the surge-control strip; those tend to only be good for 10 or so years). Which I did after church, so I have a new one now.

The woman on the phone said she could set up a service call but I asked if I could just exchange the modem for a new one (I rent it from them). She said "well, as long as you know where the office is...."(I had to do this in 2020 when the previous modem died).

So after my office hours ended, I drove out there. (It's not easy to, you have to cross the busiest street in town). At first the woman at the desk seemed dubious and I thought "oh no do NOT make me have to set up a service call" because I don't have time, but then she said "well, if the tech is here, he can tell me what's a replacement for this one"

And fortunately, the tech was. So I signed some paperwork and surrendered the old modem. 

The new one was basically the same set up - more lights and a little larger, but it wasn't difficult to hook up.

I got it home, hooked it up. Success:

 Well, except then it shut itself back down after a moment and I wondered if they'd given me a bad one. I was also operating under stress - I had a meeting over Zoom like fifteen minutes from then, and if the modem didn't come back I'd have to drive back up to campus for it. (I was also stressed because something went wrong with OneDrive on campus and I almost lost a whole exam I had typed - but was able to recover it - earlier in the day)

But it came back. A friend suggested maybe it was a firmware update it had to do, and I suppose that could be it; it's still fine and I did my Zoom meeting from home. 

Went back to campus for about an hour to do some catchup grading and to finish the exam. 

While I was over there, this arrived in the mail:

This was another journey. I ordered it (pre-ordered) back in August. Supposedly bound printed matter is untouched by tariffs, but between then and now, Trump got angry at Canada and increased tariffs, and Canada Post went on strike, and this had to sit at customs at the border, but I FINALLY have it. (It will be republished next year and apparently then booksellers here will have it).

So yeah, I'm ready for a few things to be easy.