Okra pickled in brine is mighty fine. I made a batch of these babies, and they taste great.

Pickles are good, m'kay? I'm not talking about the vinegar- and sugar-soaked abortions hawked these days in grocery stores. Now that I've got the calabashes (read: bottle gourds) drilled and set up as evilsuckers rubber banded to the patio deck grating, I can hardly bring heinous crap like vinegar/sugar pickles into the house without alarms going off, and animules barking, meowing, and causing a major uproar ("Major Uproar, reporting for duty, suh!")

I'm talking the sort of pickles produced by actual age old lacto-fermentation in salt water and spices. Takes about a week to make. Vegetables, salt, water, dill, pepper, chili for the adventurous. Mmm, mmm, good.

As a gnaw on a pickled Abelmoschus esculentus delicacy, there doesn't seem to be anything else left to do. My day has been stopped by an Internet outage.

First call to Time Warner ended up being yer typical runaround. The tech wouldn't listen to me. There had been a storm the night before. I know what I'm doing when it comes to computers and network connectivity. All I bloody wanted to know was if there was an outage on Time Warner's end.

"If you would just give me your email address-"

"Wy do you need my email address?"

"Well, sir, you don't need to give us your email address."

"I just want to know if there's an outage now in Austin."

"Are any lights blinking on your modem?"

"All the lights that should be blinking on the modem are blinking. I know all about modems and networks and computers. ALL I need to know from you is if there is now an outage in Austin."

But it was useless. Corporation-speak was all the tech was capable of. I don't know if she was sitting in Banglor or Memphis or Botswana. It didn't matter. It was obvious that nothing would get through that wasn't already in her limited and useless to me script.

I hung up, and after 45 useless, frustrating minutes of unplugging routers, modems, bridges from power, plugging them back in in the correct sequence after 60 seconds, restarting computers, releasing and renewing LAN connections, playing with router settings, plugging a laptop directly into the cable modem to eliminate other possible router or cabling problem vectors, I knew that it was highly probable that it was nothing on my end.

In the next Time Warner call, the tech immediately tells me that yes there is an outage on their end. Well, duh. You probably know about it now because of my earlier call to your idiot sister in Banglor. But, no. I did not say this to her. I curse at reality regularly, converse with Tilley (a Tibetan terrier) about life and evil, but I know better now than to waste time venting at a corporate customer service tech. Instead, I thank her, hang up, eat another okra, and breathe, stopping to smell the damp, pink roses growing on a bush off the deck.

Have you seen your mother, baby? Standing in the shadows...

The situation has at least one silver lining: it's forcing me just to write. No internet diddling around. No looking up word definitions, rhymes, or synonyms. No checking email, no visiting favorite sites. No knowing whether the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. No proceeding along with my planned day of working on my online classwork or cyberbilling my clients.

I simply just write, as i look out at the roiling grey clouds over the lake and feel the chill of the drizzly winds blowing over the water and through the trees. And the roses.

Uh oh.

The internet came back on just now. So the temptation now begins: do I start doing my classwork? Check my email? Diddle around the net? Blog?