I swear that I am a woman on the edge. I swear it. Other than a trip to Knit Night at Lettuce Knit….Oh, wait. I have got to show you pictures. We have the best knit night in North America. I’m sure of it.

That’s Denny. What’s she doing? I don’t know. Something with a half knit sleeve. (It’s totally cracking Ken up.)

That’s Julia, the Julia from Vesper Sock Yarn. She brought her mum and her sister (good cookies) and a box of her yarn and she was freakin’ mobbed. I was only about 10 minutes late and the colourway I was most hoping for was gone. It was really good fun watching it walk out the door at a million miles an hour. (See the arm reaching for yarn in front of her? Wild crowd.)

Julia is holding a green sock, because all I have done for the last nine days is knit socks and for the last three days it’s knit green socks and now Joe has upgraded the router and I think I might really be losing my cool.

Aren’t they starting to get to you?

As many of you will know, Joe and I share our house/home offices now…and for as long as Joe is “between opportunities”. We’ve been learning how to (with rather limited success) share space, coffee, air and phone time. Joe gets about 22 phone calls a day. There is no point in me answering it. I have three teenaged girls and a work from home husband. I assure you that that phone call is really not for me. Likewise, if your phone is ringing, I can assure you that it is not me calling you, since I would have to either have to have drugged every member of my family into passive, drooling unconsciousness to obtain said implement of communication, or be alone in my house…which is likely going to happen again sometime in 2011 when everyone has gone to University and I take a small, secret apartment across town where I sit, alone and talk on the phone uninterrupted and take baths uninterrupted and I make meals for one person and then I eat them uninterrupted… but now I’m losing track of the router story. Ahem.

So everybody is on the phone all the time and the router (which provides me with the internet, the only form of communication I have left to me) isn’t working. The thing is ass. It only routes when it wants to and it doesn’t want to much. I keep trying to get on the internet with my laptop and the router keeps laughing in the face of my attempts. Everything was tried and eventually, yesterday, the router was summarily replaced with a new box of wonder which promises to route the daylights out of the internet and direct glorious uninterrupted bandwidth right to my lap and lo – it is good.

Joe hooked the thing up and damn, it routes. Routes good. Routes so well that I am forced to admit that Joe was right, that upgrades can be good and that I am very happy with the routers routeing. The Router continues to fulfill my every wish and routes real good until 9am this morning when it stopped.

Then it started. Then it stopped. I don’t know if you could say that it quit really, since Joe’s computer still had internet, and the family computer still had internet. Just me. Just my laptop. The bulk of today has been spent with me trying to convince Joe that the router isn’t routing (which is not his experience, since the plugged in people keep having internet while only I – who has the only wireless connection in the house, has none.) Joe doesn’t want to hear this because (at least it seems to me) that he is on the phone every time I’m trying to tell him that the wireless is out. By the time he’s off the phone and comes back upstairs, the wireless is back.

It’s like when your kid’s really, really sick so you get an emergency appointment and take them to the doctor and their fever goes away in the cab and by the time you get there they’ve pinked right up and are playing tag with their sister while demanding a nine course meal while you try to explain to the doctor that you really aren’t a psychotic parent and you swear that the kid was half dead 16 minutes ago? The router is like that. Joe goes downstairs to make a phone call….router stops working. Joe gets off the phone and comes back upstairs to see what’s wrong with the router, router starts working. Infuriating….and I’m an idiot. It took way more phone calls than it should have for me to catch on that it isn’t a cruel coincidence that Joe is on the phone while the router isn’t routing….

The router isn’t routing because Joe is on the phone! The phone and the new router are incompatible. Completely incompatible. Something about the phone’s signal messes with the routers signal and the phone wins. If the phone is on, the router wireless part of the router is off.

Clearly, since I have a work from home husband and three teenaged daughters, The phone screwing up the router is a really big problem. Investigations are being made. Channels and antennae are being changed, nothing is working so far.

I suspect, as I reel from the apex of situational irony in which we discover that the router was purchased because I need it to communicate because I can’t get on the phone, only to discover that the very thing which was purchased to fix the phone problem is now a victim of the phone problem itself… and I know you suspect as well that if enduring this were not enough, that to add insult to injury, I am about to discover that the first principle of interior decorating now applies to home electronics.

You know the first law, where you buy a new chesterfield and your curtains are suddenly crap, so you buy new curtains and now the carpet doesn’t match and…….

I have a new router and my phone doesn’t match. Any bets on where this ends?