Friends in the area (a bit north of Seattle) note that storms, rougher than usual, have been a weekly happening for the past several weeks. Our Shaman buddy bought an aux generator a little over three weeks ago and says he's had to use it for a couple of days about once a week every week since. Port Angeles vicinity, out in the country.
I'm suspecting that the storms in the Seattle area - or somewhere else with similar events - are responsible for my past 8.9 hour ordeal. Our dialup connection started giving us an error message in lieu of a connection. Connect and start to negotiate, and then the site wouldn't come back to finish turning on.
Approximagely 9 attempts to contact the MSN support line each resulted in an 00:02:37 dance with the automated-sythetic-pretty-lady-voice to get to "I'll transfer you to someone who can help you" - followed by a click and a disconnect. (At least it was synthetic English.) Never did get through. Wading through my list of 11 alternate local dial-up numbers I finally found ONE that got me (I think) hooked up. Three others would hook up, but drop the connection immediately.
(If you don't see this post you'll know I was wrong.)