I hardly know where to start. Maybe it’s best not to think or talk about today at all. I wouldn’t want to live through it again, although it had its high points. Things didn’t start well, though.

In fact, the horror that was today began last night. Some time last night my phone stopped working again. When the phone guy was here last weekend, he hinted that maybe there was more work to be done, and he was right. This time there was a loud drone in the line, but it wasn’t a dial tone. I know that because I couldn’t dial out, and it turns out that nobody could call in, either, without getting a busy signal.

I don’t know when it happened, but I discovered it after midnight. First thing this morning I visited the phone company’s repair web site. They confirmed the problem and let me schedule the work for this afternoon, between 1 pm and 5 pm. That allowed me to get most of my morning errands done. And I already knew that I could use the fax line to make calls. Today I also figured out how to configure it so that I could receive both calls and faxes.

Somehow, in the middle of the afternoon, I discovered that my dial tone was back. I checked the answering machine and found four new messages, the earliest at 1 pm. I assumed that the repair work had been completed, but at 3:50 pm, the company truck pulled into my driveway.

The guy checked out my wiring and then went up on the pole. He called me from the top of the telephone pole and told me that he hoped my phone would keep working, but he was sending his cable guy out to do some outside work over the weekend. I said I hoped it kept working, too. But it didn’t.

Around 4:30, the drone was back and the line was useless again. That’s probably how it will stay until they come out and do the actual work that needs to be done. Their excuse has been that it looked bad, but not bad enough to need immediate repair. I beg to differ. This is not the time of year (or month or week) to be without the phone line.

But I did have good news today, and I’m trying to dwell on that. It seems that I will have help on the kennel end-of-month paperwork (and there is a mountain range of it) after all. The Boss told me Monday that Julie had left him and gone home. Today she resurfaced. She has indeed found a home away from the Boss, but she’s still going to help me with what I need to do to get (and keep) the new business running.

I expected no less of her. She’s an honorable person and a caring one, and I couldn’t believe she would leave us (me) hanging like that. I’m glad I didn’t believe it, because that would have made me too much like the Boss himself. There’s a place I just don’t want to go.