I Also Have To Make My Own Photocopies

What a day. My Internet connection has died somehow. Especially maddening since both computers keep blissfully announcing that my wireless network connection is in particularly fine fettle ("Status: Connected. Signal strength: Excellent"). A little like having your auto mechanic assuring you that your car is an absolute dream, a creampuff, except that you have to push it to go anywhere.

So I am blogging from the beautiful Chappaqua public librarary, which our realtor told us seventeen years ago when we were house-hunting had been built by the town's education-minded citizens in lieu of a swimming pool . . . one of the smaller factors that led us to settle here.

Anyway I have spent about two hours on the line with my ISP trying to get the problem straightened out. The last conversation ended with the service person advising me to phone Intel, a scary suggestion that bodes many more fruitless hours on the phone.

Meanwhile in the car on my latest trip to the library I caught five minutes of The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, New York's NPR station--just enough time to hear Eric Burns, author of Infamous Scribblers, a book about journalists during the American Revolution, explain that the world's first newspaper was founded by an Italian named Aretino, "a Renaissance pornographer and blackmailer." That I guess is the high journalistic tradition we bloggers can't be trusted to uphold.

But now I'm just being bitter. If I worked for the New York Times or even The Village Voice I bet I would have an Internet connection that worked. Being freelance is absolutely wonderful except for those times when it's sheer hell.