I haven't been posting, you'll note. You might have worried about my well-being, or you just chalked it up to laziness, but the situation was dire and entirely out of my control: I lost the internet (those of you who guessed lazy were also not wrong).

You see, I am an internet thief. Worse than that, an unabashed internet thief. My next door neighbor has an unprotected router and I have no scruples about exploiting it. In fact, one of the emphases for buying a laptop was the promise of a built-in wireless card and free, untethered internet. And it's been heaven ever since.

Of course, that's when this story takes an ugly turn. A few weeks ago, I was surfing the net late on a Friday night (oh, like your weekend's so busy?) when my internet disappeared. Were they on to me? Had my clueless neighbor gotten wise? My Airport had no answers as it pinwheeled sadly.

Maybe they just went on vacation, I thought, and turned off everything in their apartment on their way out. Maybe it'll be just for a long weekend, or a week. But the next Monday came and went without anything happening. All week I waited, trying to remember what people did with laptops before they could surf the web while watching TV ("I think I'll organize my iTunes!"). The next Monday rolled around. Nothing.

I finally admitted that I'd lost the internet for good and called Comcast to get cable, scheduling an appointment for the following Monday. But late Sunday night, while I poked away at a video project I was supposed to have gotten done a month before ("Well, I guess there's nothing else to do!"), my Airport sprung back to life. My neighbors had returned from vacation and plugged in their wireless! I called Comcast at one in the morning and canceled my appointment, cheerfully chatting away at the technician on the other end who clearly found my vitality awfully trying ("I got into this job to be unpleasant to people in the wee hours of the morning, and I'll be damned if you're going to slow me down."). And I've been exuberantly pirating internet again ever since.

The moral of the story: If you wait around long enough, sometimes someone solves your problems for you.

The other moral of the story: there'll be more posts coming soon.