Dance as Life

I have been patiently hoping that some of my friends from the past will seek me out. I think of them often and am sorry to have lost track of them over the years. I have what I believe is a unique name unchanged by marriage, so I’m easy to find. I hope some day that my best buddies from 8th grade, Diana Erickson and Becky Nissen from Catherine Blaine Middle School in Seattle will see their names in a search and leave me a message.

I broke down and got Blue Sky satellite. Besides having an unattractive dish sticking up in the middle of the chicken yard, it’s not cheap and it’s not fast.

But since I can demonstrate that I got significantly lower grades due to not having Internet access, it’s better than dial-up. However, it’s slow and I even nearly maxed out my monthly quota just updating Windows with all the updates since the last downloadable Service Pack.

How can the United States hope to compete with Europe and Asia if we can’t get decent high-speed access to rural folk. (I’m not even that rural. Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond is less than 20 miles away.)

It is true. I don’t have high speed Internet. I’m canceling the dial-up as it’s faster to drive to Starbucks, drink a green tea latte, and update my farm on Farmville, and get home again before connecting a loading an average web page.

I live on a 5 acre farm just 4 miles between two larger towns which both offer high speed. No Clearwire (no line of sight.) No microwave (no line of sight.) No satellite (no line of sight.) I can use my smart phone as a modem IF I sit outside in the middle of the pasture, but not inside the log house. Most people aren’t sympathetic. Move they say. If every one who lived on a rural farm had to move to participate in the modern world, what would we eat?

I am a graduate student at the University of Washington. It is really, really hard to coordinate school when you don’t have Internet access at home. I’m at Starbucks tonight so I can download my homework, which I had no idea was out there. I’ve had classes where the professor posted homework into an online tool on Friday night that was due first thing Monday. I defintely lost at least one full gradepoint for that discourtesy.

We need universal access so that there is a somewhat even playing field for everyone. You know who benefits most from my lack of access? Starbucks, of course.

I haven’t been able to attend for several years, but I’d really like to go this year. There aren’t a lot of places to learn Welsh in North America, but I can recommend these highly. This year, the Cwrs Cymraeg (Welsh Course) will be held in Cardiff, Wales. The previous course in Wales was in 2000 and it was a lot of fun.