Tragedy Averted.

Woke up this morning, and things were going pretty good until the internet stopped working.  One minute, things were going fine...the next, I got up to unload the dishwasher, and when I came back, the magic was gone.

I gave it about an hour to come back on it's own, but nope...so, instead of carefully turning the wireless router off, and then turning the modem off, I lost my patience and used the switch on the surge protector to give EVERYTHING(TV, WII, Modem, router, cable box) a power-on-reset.

It didn't fix the internet.  I gave it about another hour, and finally called the fine folks at Charter.  'Ken' stepped me through unplugging this, resetting that, 'please wait, I send signal!'  Eventually, the right chicken bones landed in the right postions, and the internet came back!

With the internet problem solved, I went to fire the Wii back up, so that my wife could have Netflix waiting for her, but, there was a problem.  After my little 'power-on-reset', the Wii no worky-worky.  In fact, the little light that said it has power going to it wasn't working at all.  I tried more than one plug, and pouted.  It was quiet obvious...venting my frustration at the internet had caused something with the Wii to stop working...the question was, was it something with the adapter/cord, or something internal to the Wii?  And it was a $120 question...Fred Meyers(luckily) had replacement adapters/cables for $30, whereas Wal-Mart wanted $150 for a new Wii.

I almost bought both the new cable, AND a new Wii, with the plan that at least I could fix the problem right away, and once the wife was occupied watching dramatic British Series, I could safely return what I didn't need.  Kind of like bringing two dresses home, since you couldn't decide which one looked better in the store.  In the end though, my anticipated displeasure at having to deal with the customer service desk outweighed my lack of a back-rub from my wife if she had to wait two more hours to watch North & South.   

In the end the new power cord fixed the problem, and I learned a $30 lesson about letting my temper get the better of me when dealing with electronics.