Spring has sprung!

Because I live in New England, I'm hesitant to say it BUT....I think spring may finally have arrived. The weather's finally sunny and yesterday it got above 60 degrees. Let me repeat that: 60 DEGREES! In March. (For all you Californians/Southerners out there, let me put this in context: we once got 2 feet of snow in April. I've even seen it snow in May. Our weather has a sense of humor.) I was even outside wearing a t-shirt without a sweater or jacket - AMAZING!

In other news, I can't believe it's been over a month since I last posted. I've been so busy - I'm still unemployed but for the last month or so I've been able to get temporary work. The upside is that I'm finally earning some money, but the downside is that I haven't had a day off all month - I'm seriously working 7 days/week. I just don't feel like I can turn down any paying jobs right now, particularly if they're only temporary.

Finally, if I haven't been commenting on anyone's blogs in the past couple of weeks it's because we had an internet blackout. Someone hacked our modem. We received several scam messages on our voicemail and my dad somehow thought it would be a good idea to call them back to see if they were legit (ummm....if they weren't, they sure wouldn't tell us so I'm not quite sure what he was thinking). A little while later, our internet went down.

After 6 wasted hours spent on the phone with Comcast, it stayed down. We suspect that there was a Comcast security breach (which is how the scammers got our number and account info) and Comcast was trying to disguise the fact that it had happened (they seemed to have a lot of information on the scam, plus a few customer service reps admitted that this type of situation had been happening all day to other customers). They kept on passing the buck for hours and hours until they closed for the day...at which point we were so frustrated we just canceled the service outright. It's taken a few days to switch over to another provider.

The upside to this whole situation is that we don't have to share our internet with 6 other families anymore. We live in a co-op and had been sharing it with everyone else in the building. It had become a point of conflict (at least for us) because we were paying for it. Everyone else was supposed to contribute to the monthly bill, but no one ever did. One of the co-op members streamed movies constantly from 5pm-3am nightly which meant that the internet was s-l-o-w and we may as well have had dial-up. Nobody else could do much with the internet beyond checking emails when that co-op member was online. Now, our internet is technically slower than before but it's much, much faster in actual practice. I can watch videos on Netflix again! Skype has more than one pixel!

One other thing I noticed is just how much time I spend on the internet. Without the internet, I got a ton of stuff done. I baked cookies, I read multiple books, and I reorganized my room. Now that we have the internet back, I'm going to try to use it less often. We'll see how that works!