Snow, Cold, Routers and Internet

I have a cold.  It started coming on yesterday afternoon.  Last night my nose was stuffed up so I could not sleep well.  I was up at 0400.  I tried to access the Internet but could not so I went up to look at the modem – the 2 solid 1 blinking was present.  In vain, I tried resetting the modem but I knew it would not help so I called Mediacom.  They said the Angola area was under service and would be back on by 6 or 7.  In fact it came back on at 0500.

I look out on at least three inches of snow.  There is supposed to be freezing drizzle until 1000 hrs and after that just plain overcast and depressing.  I gave up on the Wireless addition to the household.  I thought I could do almost everything with networks but this one has me stumped.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not.  When it works it works great  but when it doesn’t I can see the whole LAN perfect but not the Internet.  I tried opening ports, using static IP’s, using different WLAN cards.  It works until I shut it down and on reboot the WLAN does not see the Internet.