Dear Amy,

Repeat the following to yourself and your privileged ass:

I REALLY AM HAPPY TO BE HOME.

I REALLY AM HAPPY TO BE HOME.

HAPPY. TO BE HOME. I AM IT.

***

That said.

It hasn’t exactly been a smooth transition.

Our power went out over the weekend due to Saturday’s surprise snow and ice storm. (Well, a surprise to me, because I left my weather app set to West Palm Beach weather which as you can imagine, is considerably nicer and I preferred to pretend it was still relevant to my life.) Thankfully the power came back on after a few hours…but our Internet did not. Our Internet is dead. Kaput. Dunzo.

We have Verizon Fios and I don’t want to bore anyone with the technical blah-blah-cakes of it all, but there’s a thingamabox in our living room and a bigger, fiber-optical-er one in our basement, hardwired into the house. That’s the one that is dead, and that is the one that will not get repaired until THURSDAY, because I guess a lot of people’s thingamaboxes are also dead from the weather, so GET IN LINE, SWEETCHEEKS.

So we have no TV, which is a big old fucking drag (and anyone who talks about Walking Dead or Better Call Saul will be dead to me), and we have no Internet, which is…problematic. As you can probably imagine. Especially today, when all three kids have off from school so I can’t go off in search of Free Wifi With Purchase Of An Alarming Amount of Coffee.

I’m trying to work offline and then bundle all my tasks into five minute windows when I use my phone as a hotspot to burn through as little of my data usage as possible. It’s like something out of Apollo 13, when the astronauts would power up the engines for 10 seconds of course-correction, only not nearly so exciting and also nobody is probably at risk of dying here if I don’t get that spreadsheet attachment over to that guy or publish this ridiculous blog post at some point.

Houston, we have a mild inconvenience.

I have to give my children props here – they are all currently in Noah’s room, building Lego Hero Factory Battle Machines creatively, because they don’t own any Lego Hero Factory Battle Machine sets because I don’t even know what that is or how they all became so obsessed with it. But they are NOT FIGHTING. There is NO SCREAMING. There is COLLABORATION and SOMETHING AKIN TO THEM ENJOYING EACH OTHER’S COMPANY.

There is, however, a fairly epic level of mess, because I suppose at some point all these Battle Machines will actually…battle? And they’ve already built enough warriors and enemies to rival something out of Lord of the Rings.

(There’s another storm advisory for tonight and tomorrow, which means I need to brace myself for a snow day and another day of this deeply half-assed working schedule. Back-up childcare! Who needs it!)

(Mournful Amy-as-Apu-From-The-Simpsons, Up On The Rooftop: I DOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.)