Yesterday I was supposed to publish a post for you all to read, as part of our super-cool expat blogger group, C.O.S.I. (Crazy Observations by Stranieri in Italy. My fellow bloggers have dutifully presented theirs to you, but not me. Nope, I’m sorry to say that you will not be getting my thoughts on our group subject, which this week was: crazy things said to us by readers, friend, and family about living in Italy.

Nope, from me, instead, you get this.

This poorly formatted, link-less, photo-less, late excuse for an apology. This has been submitted by the WordPress Email-to-Post function from my aging iPhone, which means that for every character you see typed here, I needed to wait about 15 seconds to see if it appeared correctly. I suspect this whole thing to take me close to an hour.

Two weeks ago there was a violent summer hail storm here in Emilia. Naturally, our phone lines and internet went out. And, naturally, we are still waiting for our connection to be fixed.

It took four days for Telecom to come out and check the line. It took a week to get Tiscali to understand that the problem was on their end. It took ten days for us to communicate to them successfully that the router needed replacing. And it took 12 days for us to decide 12 days is an unacceptable response time for an internet provider.

On day 13 we switched to Vodafone, and they sent us a new router, pending activation of our line. On day 14 (of course) Tiscali sent us a new router. Now we have two functioning routers and a line that has been disconnected pending transfer from Tiscali to Vodafone.

Every post that I had scheduled to publish prior to the storm has gone out, thanks to WordPress and Buffer. This may have given you, the reader, the impression that everything is hunky dory here.

But no. No. No.

The only internet access I have is from my iPhone, which has this cool feature where push notifications arrive, telling me for example, that I have an email, and then it claiming that I do not have a good enough connection to download the email and read it.

I have tried moving around to get a better connection. I’ve tried the town piazza. I’ve tried an open field, I’ve tried the balcony.

Nope. The only place I get crystal clear reception is … Where do you think? Yep. My in-laws’ house. Crystal f-ing clear.

So I write to you today to encourage you to visit the other C.O.S.I. blogs. I cannot give you their links here in this post, but I will ask them to pop them in the comments of this so you can find them. Otherwise just head to the blogs listed on my COSÌ page, listed at the top in my menu. I know it’s a lot of clicking, and you’re accustomed to me feeding you the hyperlink, but I’m about to throw this phone on the ground and stomp on it, so please forgive the omission.

I would like to tell you that I will be up and running early next week. But. Who knows.

Remember, it really is COSÌ.