Coming to you live from one of San Rafael's six known Internet cafes...

My ISP and I are still getting used to each other. They think it would be nice if I paid my bill on time. I think it would be nice if I were notified sometime during the billing cycle that the time is coming up.

We'll get it right eventually.

I'm not actually positive that my Internet is out because of billing, but I know the cable part of the bill expires tomorrow, and the Internet part--or part of the Internet part anyway--is paid separately, to a whole different institution, which may have a different cutoff date.

The cable TV works fine, and all the lights are shining their designated colors on the cable modem, which is usually not the case when it's an external connection problem. So I went down and paid the bills (three separate ones for one simple Internet connection) this morning, in hopes that that's the issue.

In other utilities, the water company sent a guy around yesterday because there's a big bad leak from my hot water tank, and they had noticed the elevated consumption.

I thought that was pretty cool.

Would have been even cooler if he'd been able to talk to my landlady, who knows about the leak and will be fixing it soon, just to motivate her a little more. I do understand that "soon" can mean a lot of things--and she's been out of the country and just got back--but I hope it's not too long. I realized after entirely too much time had gone by that I could just shut off the water before it got to the tank, but that means I have to go down and turn it back on any time I actually want to use the hot water. And I am a fan of the hot water, at least on a semi-regular basis.

Update:
As I was writing this post, the cable company was texting my cell phone to remind me that my bill expires tomorrow. I actually received the text as I walked away from the Internet cafe, an hour and a half later. And I got home to find my service back on. So, happy ending all around. And, while I reserve the right to complain about them from time to time, I'm still pretty impressed with the public services here.