No Electricity, Phone or Internet Service?

You may not have noticed, but I didn’t send out a weekly tip on December 19th. Here in Wisconsin, we had a thick layer of heavy snowfall a few days before. The landscape was beautiful with the trees covered in white frosting! But it wasn’t so nice to lose our electricity, phone, and internet services. Granted, I shouldn’t complain. We stayed warm with our wood-burning stove, and we had a generator we ran a few times so we could get water and cook. And it was only about 10 hours later that our electricity and phone were restored. But not the internet. And we live out in the Baraboo bluffs where we don’t get a cell signal.

To make a long story short, it took 9 days before we had internet again. They had to ship us a new modem, and with the holidays, it took a long time to get here. Those were a very loooong 9 days!! Suddenly I realized how much our lives revolve around using the internet. I can’t begin to count the number of times I thought, “I’ll just look that up quick.” only to realize I couldn’t Google anything. No YouTube videos for my husband to watch. No TikTok to entertain my 17-year-old daughter. No communication with friends and family via texting or Facebook.

Instead of streaming Netflix, we had to dig out some old DVDs and hook up a player to the TV. Instead of Pandora for my Christmas tunes, I discovered some CDs I hadn’t played in years. That was an unexpected gift. My husband and I even played a couple of games together. That was another gift.

We did make a couple of runs into town to use the internet at the library and grocery store. What a great reminder of how convenient it is to have internet access at our fingertips at home!! And how interesting that so much of what we do now relies on it.

We were all incredibly happy to get our internet back, but there were several gifts in not having it for those 9 days.

Has life given you any unexpected gifts lately? Have you had any reminders of things you take for granted?