Relative Something

There are many days when the Wintervale connection to the world via the internet is annoyingly flakey. The problem is mysterious and invisible, frequently interrupting progress in the middle…

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Hi, I’m back. That’s the way this works. After a seemingly interminable pause, activity resumes as if nothing is amiss. You wouldn’t notice a thing, unless you were attempting to visit with others via Zoom.

“Your internet connection is unstable.”

As soon as that message appears, even as I rush to write a chat message to everyone to explain that I could hear them all even though my image may have frozen to them, my fate is doomed to closing and then immediately reconnecting, minus all the text I had just entered in the chat window.

It’s life in the country. For all the advantages we enjoy living out among farm fields and forests, it comes at the expense of having a reliable internet connection. The industry can’t balance the economics of running fiberoptic cable to handfuls of houses scattered across many wide miles.

We don’t stream. We rent DVDs through the mail.

If we want to accomplish something without interruption, it takes a lucky combination of atmospheric conditions and an absence of too much competition for the limited bandwidth. Oh, and we can’t have already exceeded our cap of monthly allotted usage.

In all of the Zoom meetings I have participated in over the last month, I was the weakest link.

It’s too bad because I love the possibility of connecting with my multiple remote communities, but I love living where we do even more.

Cyndie pointed out that our new openings around the two big oak trees beside the driveway allow for excellent viewing of the rising moon.

Since our internet browsers weren’t having much success loading pages, we were more available to get out and enjoy the lunar view.

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