Back in the world (or should I say online world?)

Well, that was weird. Two days without any non-work-related internet. I think two days without internet at all would be easier. In fact, will presumably be coping with a whole week without it, when we dash off to France next Saturday (or the Saturday after next, if you are my husband or sister).

Unfortunately, when you are sat at the computer all day working and answering emails and even having to check one of your google mail accounts because that’s where all mail about the domain transfer thingummy jig is going, it’s so, so, so, hard not to open the notification emails telling you about new comments on your blog, or new twitter followers or new facebook friends. So difficult.

Even more difficult though, than swearing off social networking of all kinds, is the realisation of just how much non-work-related use of the internet you make. At 2.05pm on Monday, I called Chris on the internal phone (we live in a four-storey house – I’m not going to walk all the way downstairs!) to ask whether Spotify counts as work-related or not. I would be listening to it while working after all. He came down against. So I had to look through the stuff I’ve managed to transfer from the old computer and find something. But I wanted to listen to Abba. I have Abba on the old computer. I probably have Abba on a CD somewhere. But not in my Windows Media Player playlist.

Emails I subscribe to about pregnancy and pre-school children came flooding into my inbox. But I couldn’t open them. I wanted to check the weather, but I couldn’t. I wanted to google (or actually Bing, which I’m using much more than Google these days – try it out, it’s great) somebody I saw in some TV show or film and now can’t remember what or who it was, and couldn’t. I was thinking about our holiday and was going to re-read the information on the house we’re staying in and the area around it. After winning half of a £50 lottery prize with my sister at the pub quiz on Monday night (woo! No need to get lots of questions right!), I wanted to find out how much the last couple of series of ER that I haven’t got yet are costing at the moment, or browse to see if there’s something else I could get with the windfall. But, no. Couldn’t do that either.

Yesterday evening I was ill (dizzy, heavy, flu-like symptoms) and slept lots, apart from watching Dollhouse (thank goodness we don’t get our TV through the internet). It’s most likely that it was too much heat – even though I didn’t leave the house all day, our office is in the (very very hot) office and my chair is directly under a sunlight, which I often forget (today I wore a hat all day). But part of me wonders if it wasn’t maybe a little bit of withdrawal symptoms and little bit of an inability to do anything other than sit tapping away at the netbook, writing blogs, commenting on blogs, tweeting…

It’s nice to be back.