There’s a certain beauty in moving out to the country. Open space, no houses bunched so closely together that you can read your neighbor’s paper while they’re sitting on the can, the peace and quiet, the option to either jump in the pool or work in the garden, or walk the trails in the preserve behind the house, or just loll around with a book while sitting under a tree.

But then, there is one downside that we’ve just discovered.

A downside, you say? How can that be? The idyllic life has nothing to mar it!

Except for those of us who fairly live on the Internet currently: there is no high speed access in the area. No DSL, and the cable company doesn’t even have basic cable service out there, which means we’re suddenly finding ourselves getting the satellite folks out. And resigning ourselves to life with dialup, at least until the gigantic development about six miles away grows up into houses with people in them, at which point the cable people will realize that service should indeed exist out our way.

Naturally, those of us of a certain age remember the days of dialup. Some of us of a certain age remember the first waves of dialup, plugging along at 300 baud. Since living without access is not an option, and since living without this property is not an option, dialup it will be. Fortunately, I am not streaming videos or music from my laptop to the Internet at large (heck, if I wanted to do that, I have a 1 Gps connection available to me at the NOC within our network there).

Since support issues are so very quiet these days – aggressive server management will do that for you – really all I do is check in and answer tickets, and do command line server maintenance things for work. For play – well, I suppose trying to bring up cuteoverload on dialup would be an adventure in pain, and I’ll have to reserve all my iTunes purchases for trips to the NOC so they can download there to my laptop while I’m setting up servers.

I expect to be spending more time away from my laptop then I have been lately, and instead of sitting around on my ass all day long doing this or that for work, I expect to be carving out time for enjoying life. Gardening. Cooking things from my garden. Canning. Swimming, for the first time in a couple of years (especially now that I no longer have a hole in my abdomen). Walking the trails in the forest. Landscaping. Experimenting with recipes for hot sauces and salsas and other things that maybe one day will be for sale.

That sort of thing.