When things break, break, and sometimes fix themselves

The book manuscript has ground to a screeching halt, as my obsessive graph shows. I'm hoping to get caught up somewhat after the middle of next week, when the summer class I'm teaching will be over.

I've been having weird computer problems. On Saturday night, my computer screen at home blanked out and died. So Sunday was spent shopping for a new one. The new one is very nice, considerably larger and with a sharper picture than the old.

But things got stranger on Monday night, when I lost my internet connection after a pretty severe electrical storm. Do the usual troubleshooting stuff. Wait for a day in case the connection went down temporarily. No luck. Ah, I think, the DSL modem is toast, so I shell out for overnight delivery of a new one. No, that's not it. Phone the ISP and get a walk-through, and they diagnose that my network card drivers are somehow shot. Network cards are dirt cheap, so I buy a new one later that night.^* Plug in the new one, check the drivers... and see the old one back on the system. Plug the cable back into the old network connection and the old modem...

And everything is fine.

What?

Things are not supposed to fix themselves like that.

Now I have to try returning a DSL modem and a network card.

* Tangent: The network card came with all its drivers on a 3.5" floppy disk. A floppy? A floppy?!? When was the last time a computer got sold with a floppy drive? You have to order them special now! What are retailers doing putting software on floppies?!?