I've Been Away Now For So Long...
  My, it's been a while. Sometimes, when you live on a fixed income as I do now with only Social Security benefits to pay the bills and buy the groceries, it can be difilcult to get two ends to meet. I've been drawing Social Security now since I was 62 years old (I'll be 66 next month). I didn't really want to retire at 62 but my job played out a couple months before I turned 62 and I couldn't find another one at the time, so I figured I might as well. At least I would have social security money coming in. However, to this day I still haven't figured out a way to budget my monthly income so that it will last the whole month. Getting only one meager check a month really sucks.
   Anyway, recently my now aged car (2003 Ford Escape) has decided to go all rust bucket on me and keeps trying to give up the ghost. I had to spend $800 last month just to keep it running sufficiently enough to get me from point A to point B (as long as point A is not too far from point B) with only a minimum of anxiety about being stranded on the side of the road. That hit, on an already strained budget, left me scrambling to figure out whether it would be Paul or Peter who got paid that month. The cable bill was one of the Paul's that didn't get paid. I discovered very quickly that Time Warner doesn't have much of a sense of humor about such things. They cut me off only a few days after the bill was overdue. So no TV and no Internet.
  Now let me tell you it was a close call. I almost decided I could live without food as long as I had the internet. I had to pay the electric bill of course because it is pretty cold out there and hard to read books in the dark. Tough choices had to be made. Of course my addiction to food won out in the end and keeping the lights on just barely. So it's been a couple of long months with no TV and no Intenet. I say again...no TV and no Internet! For me that shock was like the shock to most of you if someone came and took away your cell phone. Heaven forbid! How would you live? Well, I'm here to report on just how I managed to live out these past few months without curling up in the corner of my room and turning into a  little shrivelling, brown ball of withdrawal twitches accompanied by pitiful moans and groans that would have been horrible to witness.
  I actually survived quite well. I didn't starve, and I read a few books I've been meaning to read. I played a lot of games on my computer...yes it still works without the internet - but just barely. It even kept popping up a little message in the bottom right corner saying there were new updates available for me to download. Poor computer was delusional thinking it still had access to the outside world. And I hate to admit it, but I did click on the message a couple of times just to see what would happen. Nothing...well it told me to please check my internet connection because it could not connect to the internet. Just goes to show you how smart these things really are.
  Now for some of you, I'm sure, losing the TV would be a major blow. I mean how would you know who they kicked off the island on Survivor, or who got voted off of American Idol? Or others would just die if they didn't know for sure if Victor was really going to be that mean to his own son, Nick. For me, I wouldn't know those things even if I had TV. Now I really thought I might die for sure when I thought about not seeing any of the final season football games and none of the College Bowl games. But low and behold I put them out of my mind and life went on. To tell the truth, I'm not a big TV fan. I do watch a lot of movies, but that is about it. The past couple of months, I did watch several of the dvd's in my collection for the umpteenth time. I couldn't even afford Red Box and that's just sad. So old favorites had to suffice when times got tough.
  But it was the internet that was as hard for me to do without as it was for me to give up drinking Coca Colas a few years back. I craved me some internet. I was recently told by someone that they had never met a man that didn't watch the News on TV on a daily basis. I never watch the news on TV. But I read a lot of news on the internet...real news and not just what some talking head wants to convince me is the real "no spin" version of the news. I subscribe to and read a lot of newsletters that come in my email on a daily basis. I had well over 1,000 unread emails, by the way when I did finally get on the internet. I also watch a lot of videos on youtube, and actually scroll down and see what all you guys posted on my facebook page. I also depend on the internet guite a bit as a research tool. I use it to look up details I include in my book I'm writing. I also use it for reasearch and commentaries when preparing for my weekly Bible Study class. So for me the internet is the to-die-for utility around here. I could do without my TV, cell phone, coffee maker, microwave, or blender way better than doing without my internet access. That being said...I still survived without it just like we deed in the old days. In fact I really started getting used to the peace and quiet around here. But I'm from the now older generation and still remember how it was in the old days when we didn't have such things as TV's, Computers, and cell phones busying up our time and drowning out our own thoughts. For the last couple of months I got a little taste of what that used to be like. And it wasn't at all as bad as I thought it might be. Still don't look for me to throw my computer out the window any time soon, ok?
Not gonna happen. And Yea!!!! I have internet again!