Nesuko is Tested

I drove all the way to Tim's last night to upload to-day's chapter of Boschen and Nesuko. So happy birthday Nathaniel Hawthorne--and lest you think I'm ignoring Independence Day, I'll refer to the Wikipedia entry for "Young Goodman Brown" which quotes Stephen King as saying it's "one of the ten best stories written by an American." An excerpt from the story:

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.

"Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you."

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.

You can find the full text of the story here.

So my Internet's back to-day. I assumed it wouldn't be, which is why I drove into deepest Santee to upload it from Tim's. I even asked his advice on buying laptops--he recommended research and carefully weighing options and ordering from New Egg. "But I want one to-morrow!" I said. So we looked through Best Buy's web site and I planned on going in first thing this morning.

Then last night, I decided to try restarting my computer and when it came back on, Internet worked fine. This was at 1:30am. I did feel silly. Why didn't I try this before? Well, I'd unhooked modem and router several times and I thought this was the same thing that restarting the computer accomplished. Guess not . . .