Poor Neglected Blog

It is amazing how unmotivating it is to be stuck on a slow dial-up connection. It will take me several days to get caught up with everything that I have ignored over the last couple weeks. The good news is that with most of our internet time freed up, we got a fair amount of work done at Debbie's mom's place. It would have been nice to get even more done, but I'm happy with where things are at. As far as our current status, we are back "home" in Arizona, but not for long. Today and tomorrow are recovery days, then Monday morning we start the process of getting a truck and doing all the final packing. I'd love to be out of here in a week, but that may not be realistic. Ten days is probably more likely. In any case, we will be out of here sooner rather than later, and heading for Michigan with all our junk in a really big truck. Love that drive. At least this time, having to repeat the previous drive through an ice storm is less likely given that we will be moving in the middle of August.

I don't know if I will have the time to get to them, but we have over 1,800 photos on the camera that need to be sorted. Nearly all of them are from Courtney's wedding, but we also have some pictures of the work we are doing at Debbie's mom's house. We were too focused on getting started on the job, so the "before" pictures are actually what the basement looked like after a week of work. Even then, the difference that a little paint and drywall can make is pretty amazing. I think everyone will be rather pleased when it is completely done. It will certainly make the space more usable as living space rather than just a hole to pile stuff in. We hope. It will really suck if we go through all the work and money only to have a slightly nicer-looking hole to pile stuff in. I don't think that will be the result, but the possibility is there. When we get back to Michigan, we need to work pretty fast on a couple big things that will really make a visible difference, then we will have a list of smaller things that will make small improvements to the space. With just what I know needs to be done right now, we shouldn't have any problem keeping busy for a couple months if we keep working full-time on it.

Not much else at this point. I need to spend some serious time getting caught up in the next 36 hours so I can get way behind again. We still have no idea what we will be doing for high-speed internet. Cell phone coverage is weak on a good day, the house is too far from the phone switch for DSL, and the cable company won't run a wire for the last 1,000 feet unless about ten more people move in and build houses. We can go with satellite, but the price is a killer ($190/month for 3Mpbs vs. $51/month we pay now). Plus there are pretty serious bandwidth restrictions (only 500MB/day) with a 24-hour "recovery period" if you exceed them. That may or may not be a problem, but at that price, any restriction is unacceptable. Add in the latency of the 100,000 kilometer round trip and interruptions due to precipitation, and it is a very expensive solution that is inferior to what we have now. Far better than dial-up, to be sure, but much less than what we are used to. The problem is that I would like to try out a cellular solution, but the up-front cost and commitment is prohibitive given that it most likely won't work given current cell coverage. Ah well; we have about a week to figure something out.

Well, I'm not getting caught up sitting here typing on the blog, so I guess this is it for now.