No Internet connection? Make a meatloaf.

A question. Why are little girls’ toys always about unicorns, nail art, Easy Bake ovens, glitter and princesses? Growing up in the 1950s my kid sister and I had nothing like that. We played with a huge Rig-a-Jig construction set, Tinker Toys, SpiroGraph, modeling clay, hand puppets, tempera paints and gigantic boxes of Venus Paradise colored pencils and Crayola crayons.

We also loved jacks. And cards. And at my cousin Bobby’s house we’d hang out in the basement, building elaborate mansion floor plans on the pingpong table with Uncle Harold’s golf tees.

The most fun I ever had, though, was with my very own Smith Corona manual typewriter — starting at eight years old — so I could launch my career a famous author. Although the famous author thing never materialized, exactly, I’ve been writing continuously, one damn thing or another, since I was old enough to spell. Today, in 2013, you get the Howdygram. (Sorry, people.)

What made me think about this? A cute video I watched last night on Jezebel.com ... a gang of “fierce little girls” lobbying for better, more challenging toys. It’s actually a commercial for GoldieBlox, a construction set to encourage girls into engineering.

GoldieBlox was developed by a Stanford engineering student named Debbie Sterling who raised more than $285,000 through Kickstarter. Hmm. Maybe Bobby and I should start marketing golf tees to future architects.

Here’s an AT&T update, in case you give a crap. They sent a technician this morning to check the fiber optic equipment that’s in a big green utility box thing outside near the curb. He figured out almost immediately that the problem is inside the house, so they’re sending somebody else over here tomorrow between 4 and  8 p.m. because apparently AT&T has different job descriptions for outdoor repair dudes and indoor repair dudes. (And I think they also wear different outfits.) Regardless, I’m still betting it has to be the router sitting here on my desk, because every few minutes the power light turns red and we lose our connections to U-Verse TV, the Internet and our home telephone.

To redirect my frustration I think I’ll make a meatloaf. Thank you for reading this.