Dear Comcast:
I miss you, but I am adjusting to life without you. And by the way, I fully expect you will 'adjust' my bill for the outage this week.
The same cannot be said for my wife, the Turner Classic Movie network queen.
The Heron household is now on Day 3 without cable.
That means no TV, no Internet.
I think I could get to like this.
Now I have to admit that I spend most of my day here at the office, where I am surrounded by laptop (with docking station and large-screen monitor), iPad to monitor Twitter, radio tuned to KYW-1060, and TV blasting the local news.
Yeah, you could say I'm plugged in.
My wife, on the other hand, has been sitting at home, without her safety net, the glorious old black and white flicks she loves so much on TCM.
We're not complaining. After going out for about five hours Wednesday morning, out power came back on, and except for one small blip has stayed on. Since we heat the house with an electric heat pump, we're just fine and dandy. We've got lights, we can cook, we're warm.
What we can't do is watch TV. Or go online. No email. No Twitter. No Facebook.
The last two nights, I have actually found it somewhat soothing to walk into an eerily quiet house, without the usual clatter emanating from the TV.
Of course, my wife, who has been alone most of the day, thinks that would be a good time for us to have a conversation. I look at her with the blank stare I'm usually left with at the end of another day, and she realizes it's pretty much a lost cause.
The loss of the TV doesn't faze me. I really don't watch TV. By the time I get home at night, I usually swallow something, then collapse into bed, perhaps perusing the papers before to slide into a coma.
I can't remember the last TV show I actually followed religiously. I hear people talk all the time about their favorite shows, and I always feel left out.
Not this week.
One of the great lessons of this storm is just how dependent we've become on our gadgets and all the technology we depend on every day.
We've had problems actually printing the paper the last two days, but we've been pushing information out on our website non-stop.
I think it says something about us, who we are and what we have become. Slaves to technology.
Well, I'm not a slave to the TV. I'll live without it.
Now, if this had happened during the Eagles season, and the power and TV gone out during a Sunday game, that would have been a crisis.
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