Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

Well, it's 10:00PM, the evening news is on; Channel 2, NBC news out of Anchorage. I'd like to be in the living room watching it, resting in my easy chair, but instead here I am, sitting at this stupid computer cranking out a blog post. It's something that I've tried to do for the past week or so, but for reasons unknown, the Internet has been unbelievably unreliable. Thanks Hughes Net. You know, when you pay for something, you should actually receive it. Every month I get a bill from Hughes Net for Internet service, but about half the time I try to get on, there is some kind of problem. What if that happened when you went into the store? You walk through the door, looking to buy a few bananas, a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk, for some reason they're out of what you're looking for. However, you still end up having to pay before you leave, even though you don't have anything in your grocery bag. It's the same principal. Somethi...

Well, here I am again- up at the library, trying to do a blog post and read my email. I got a call from Gene, the guy who is supposed to be setting us up with Hughes Net so we can get internet service at home. I was expecting to be all squared away by now, but he called and said someone made off with his direction finder. He needs that to make sure the antenna is pointed at the satellite, so I guess I have to wait until he gets another one. Go figure. To make matters more interesting, I can't tell which picture I'm choosing for the blog right now- it just gives me a number, which I randomly chose, so obviously I got the picture from my book. Oh well. To add to the situation, I only have thirty minutes allotted for this computer before it automatically shuts off and I lose everything. Can you believe it? Actually I can- nothing really surprizes me. " What doctor? I have the only recorded case of malaria in Alaska? No, I'm not shocked at all" "What's tha...

If I can get some pictures to finish uploading to the web page you'll be able to see what I have been working on for the last few weeks. The page says that it's uploading pictures, but I don't believe it. The internet around here has been incredibly slow lately. For a couple days we didn't have any internet service at all. Apparently the internet provider has an antenna on top of the cold storage roof, and the cold storage is getting some electrical work done, so that knocked out our internet. Sometimes living here is like being in Bizzarro world- from the Superman comic books. In that world everything worked backwards. I don't know very much about how the internet works- and frankly, I don't really care. I do care about having a reliable internet service here though- something that has been exceedingly difficult to obtain. I can't understand why. I know that we're kind of in the bush, but we're not that isolated. It kind of boggles the mind. I c...