Living on the Moon

I live, obviously, in the country. When I first moved here as a child, the road was a barely paved, unnamed stretch of ignored gravel. Now we have a name and even one of those new-fangled yellow lines down the middle. What we don't have? Cell phone reception or high speed internet. My house is probably the last cell dead zone in Delaware. It's true. I can get reception in my yard, but inside we get just enough signal to make the phone ring, but not enough to take the call.

Internet is even more fun. Here I am, 5 miles from a town that, though small, has DSL, cable, Fios, every technology you would care to choose from, and my only choices are dial-up or satellite. Comcast likes to tease me by sending me offers of cable internet service for about half what I pay for satellite. And, like Charlie Brown running to kick Lucy's football, I'll call them up, ever hopeful that this will be the time they mean it. At first they'll tell me they can provide service at my address, but it always ends up the same. My address isn't in the service area, I'm too far off the road, they can do it but installation will cost $5000, etc. So I continue to limp along with my over-priced satellite internet because it is, after all, faster than dial-up (as long as it doesn't rain hard).

The whole thing makes me rather grumpy. What's a girl need to do to get a little technology? I'm really not out in the middle of nowhere--more like the edge of somewhere. I am smack in the middle of the great urban centers of the east coast, but I might as well live on a 500-acre ranch in Montana or the moon, for all the notice these companies take of me and my neighbors (yes, there are other people out here). Come to think of it, I think the astronauts on the space station have better connection speeds than I do.

A Fresh Start

In honor of the first day of spring, I am starting fresh with this blogging thing. I really love blogging. The problem is, I spend so much time loving other people's blogging that I forget to leave time for my own. So, in keeping with the optimism that spring always lures me into, I decided to recommit.

I first became a country mouse when I was 9 and my family (my parents, me, and our yellow lab) moved into a log house in the woods. Coming from suburbia, the rural life was something of a culture shock. Years of raising chickens and goats--complete with heading out to the barn for milking chores before school each morning--farmerized me just enough to be a country girl to the urbanites I was around at college, but was never enough to completely chase the city girl core out of me. For a long time, I tried hard to purge the country mouse out of my system, but it was no use. I'd like to say I claim dual citizenship, but now, over 16 years after moving my own family into my childhood home, I realize it's time to embrace my inner country mousiness.

I was going to include a list of the top five things I love about the rural life, but they all were pretty much variations on the same theme--epitomized by the fact that my children can relieve themselves outdoors (a practice I STRONGLY discourage, and one of the reasons I wanted girls, but that's another story) without being photographed by the neighbors. But most of the time we put all that privacy to much more respectable uses.