'Netless Time
Created | Updated Dec 9, 2011
Not ready yet--please don't read!
As many of you know1, I've been without internet access since midJuly. It's been a busy summer and autumn, and full of changes. Enough of 'em that I decided that an entry would be better than a journal entry2.
The first major change, and the one that precipitated the loss of home internet, was a change in housing. Some of you may remember that we were this close to buying a house early this summer, but the well and septic tests changed our minds. We went forward with moving out of our rent-controlled apartment anyway, because we had been given the use of a nice 5th wheel trailer3, as well as an offer of a place to park it and hook it up to electricity for free, indefinitely. Free rent and no utility costs5 means we can save up to maybe make another try at home buying, if that's what we choose later6. Now, it's not huge--there's one bedroom and a built-in hide-a-bed in the living room--and it's fully furnished with the only set of matching furniture we've ever had in our 14 years of marriage, so we had quite a bit of stuff to get rid of, before putting books and photos and other small things into the smallest storage unit we could find--as Tom pointed out, by the time we pay storage fees for a year or so for a big storage unit, we could replace the furniture we got rid of quite easily! We started out with Tom and I in the bedroom and the girls in the living room (on the sofa and the floor--at that point, we weren't using the hide-a-bed) but Notepad was going through the "Oo, a button/switch/something-I-get-a-lot-of-attention-for-touching, I think I'll push it!" stage, and little things like the stove knobs, the circuit breakers, and the switch that controls the pop-outs were all within reach. Also, she could quite easily open the hall door and come in with us while we were staying out of the livingroom (where the entry is) so she'd go to sleep. Around the start of school, we switched--the girls now share a queen bed, and Tom and I have the double, which is the same size we had in the apartment. With the layout of the trailer the way it is, Notepad can't open the hall door from the side from which a pull is necessary, so the only switches she has access to are light switches. And it's a lot easier to spread out in the living room while waiting for a 2-year-old to fall asleep than stay huddled in a bedroom that offers little room around the bed.
We also had a change in pets. When we moved out of the apartment, I knew there would be no room in the trailer for the guinea pig cage8, so I found a good home for her with someone I used to work with. I figured we'd be petless for awhile--while we'd discussed getting a dog once we lived somewhere uncaged pets were allowed, I figured it'd be a few months--and a dog around beagle-sized at the most9. Well, about a month after we moved into the trailer, some folks we know had to move back to the Midwest with family--and that family is allergic to dogs. So we acquired a 14-month-old, spayed female boxer that we renamed Penny.