A Fresh Start

I don't think I've everbeen so grateful for my internet connection. I am back online at home in time for my last two months here in Japan. I will be home at the beginning of April. I think. I should probably get the dates figured out and all, huh. In any case, I'm just very happy to be connected again. I may not be posting much, but I keep up to date with my friends pages, and it helps me to feel a little closer to home.

In other news, I am going back to Tea ceremony, and it's really fun, but OMG my legs go numb after 20-30 minutes on my knees. I hope I can get some more stamina before I get back home. And I found a tea ceremony teacher of the same style (omotesenke 表千家　for those who care) Crud, switching to Japanese messed my english font up. Well, that's all I had to say anyway.

My internet got shut off last Thursday. I got that fixed over the weekend, but now my computer refuses to connect to anything outside of it. The connection thing thinks it's connected, but it only seems to be sending packets and can't receive anything. I've tried connecting at different places, so I'm sure it's the computer. One other thing happened, and that was me installing Norton Internet security while the net was down. I've tried turning off Norton, and booting in safe mode, but it doesn't seem to help. I have looked at my proxy settings in the browsers (IE and mozilla), defragged, and attempted a system restore. Unfortunately I don't have any restore points that are before this happened. I've run disk cleanup too. I'm running WinXP on an IBM thinkpad with a 500 mhz celeron processor and 10gig hard drive. I have about 1.5 gb free disk space. I am at a loss for what to do next. I can access the internet at school, so I'll be looking at my mail. If anyone has any ideas, please comment!

Oh, one really annoying complicating factor is that Norton is a Japanese program, and the computer can't read 3/4 of the little windows it puts up. Yeah, I think I'll have to uninstall it and work from there.