Grounded...

I don't even know where to go with this one, so I'll just put the facts out there and let it be.

There's a hum coming from the stereo speakers, and Didgeridoo Boy set about trying to ground the receiver Saturday night. In my infinite wisdom (ha), I decided I would record the happenings for blog fodder. I have about thirty minutes of video of the back of our couch set to the soundtrack of one devil of a fuss, which begins with Digeridoo Boy shouting for me to call the GD'd dog. Totsi is a helpful dog, and was trying her level best to give Didge all the assistance she thought he needed.

(Yes, there *was* a video link here at one point. Didge's language was far worse than I realized, so I've taken it out and deleted it from Yfrog.)

It went downhill from that point. Moments later, I found myself crawling through a shelf section of our entertainment center to try to catch a wire Didge was dangling and access an awkwardly-placed outlet, as I am the member of the household small enough to fit through the thing. My mission was to unscrew the plate on the outlet, attach a wire to the screw that was connected to the receiver, and screw it all back in place. There was no "good" language - from the moment I left the couch, I was swearing like a sailor. At the end, I glared and said (between expletives) that Didge is never, ever to ask me to do anything for him again. Ever.

Here's a still of that precious moment:

Didge was even more ticked off than I was. Finally, it seemed to work - but then the buzz came back. And that's when Didge said, "I think I know what it is. Damn. It's the wireless router. The router and receiver are interfering with each other." I replied, "I'm not moving."

Sunday morning, I woke to discover that we had no wireless internet access, and spent the day tethered to the router that said it was working, but was clearly fibbing, by a mile-long stretch of ethernet cable while I waited for Didge to fix it. We have no idea what happened; our network simply went away, requiring us to establish a brand new one. All we can figure is that something somehow reset our router back to the factory defaults. Satisfied with that knowledge, we've dropped the subject altogether.

And the speakers? Still buzzing fit to bust.