Monday, October 22, 2012

Major quickie post

Sorry nothing in so darned long. We are STILL trying to get internet sorted out at the house. Long story short:

Satellite people say suuure we bundle with a local phone company for your address, we'll put in a work order!
Local phone company two weeks later hasn't come out. We call satellite people back.
Sometimes it takes a while, they say, we'll check on the work order and get back to you.
Two more weeks of impatiently waiting.
We call tv people AGAIN.
Oh wait, says they, we don't bundle with that local phone company for your address, you're too far out in the sticks!
Who do we call then?
Heck, say tv people, we have no clue!
Two  more weeks, we finally find out who to contact, now we are waiting for hubby to have a day off when we have the $50 deposit so he can go to the neighboring mini-city of Harrison to get the darned stuff set up!

This is highly frustrating, as it is now fresh season at work (7 days down, 25 days of H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks to go) and I am working such long days that getting things done at home is problematic, let alone getting here to the library when they are open. As rough as the mountain road is, I don't DARE bring my lappy with me to work, lock  it in the car while I'm at work, and try to dump mail and etc. afterwards on the way home. I'm afraid the poor thing would be too jounced around to actually boot up after the ride down the road to the main drag!

On the upside, I got a package from my Mom the other day which included some yarn I'd left behind when I moved to the Ozarks, a couple movies I'd forgotten about and my recipe book of clipped recipes! What a treat! We've also decided to backburner the woodstove for a bit though we'll keep working on the woodpile, because we have a whole list of small things we need to get for the farm as well and quickly. So Quentin instead found this great little electric space furnace that was recommended to him by one of the guys at Race Brothers in Harrison for $160 that he'll get this weekend while I'm working and get it in the house. Otherwise, it's getting a bit chilly at nights and we'd rather like to be warm!

Getting the woodstove corner finished up and the stove in the house takes more than one pair of hands, which he doesn't have, and as cold as some of the nights are getting, we really can't wait until fresh is over to get it all done. So it's a stopgap solution that should work to hold us till next spring or summer when we'll have time to work on that project. Upside to that is, we get a bunch of the small stuff we need that we were putting off to work on the woodstove project done instead, like the 8" battery-operated chainsaw for me, another new tire for the truck (one is getting a bit worn for our safety), a weedeater, and some other things like my spinning wheel and a new computer for me. I'm getting a nice desktop, rather than another laptop, because of several reasons.

If it breaks down, barring the motherboard, I can fix it or cheaply replace things like the mouse or keyboard.
If it needs upgrading, I can do that easily myself
It won't require a new battery every couple of years when the one in it goes blooey and won't charge anymore.
It will have a bigger screen for the comfort of my poor, 44-year-old eyes.
It will have more RAM and hard drive space and processing power/speed than my laptop, so I can do more of what I need and want to do without having to worry about it freezing up or taking forever to do something.
And it will last me a good decade or more before needing replacing. (Mom is still using a 15-year-old one that I kept fixing and upgrading for her. The tower and motherboard are fifteen!!! years old and still going strong.)

Downside is that if the power goes out, and I'm working on something, I lose the something rather than having the time on battery that a laptop does to save stuff. Plus it's about $200 more than the best laptop Wal-Mart has that I can get my hands on. However, it does have double the RAM and hard drive space (8 gig RAM and a TERRABYTE hard drive - If I run out of space on the hard drive, there's something seriously wrong!), which will be a blessing. For that extra $200, I get a lot more bells and whistles.

So hopefully soon I'll be back blogging, and trust me, I have a BIG one to post with some photos, that's just going to get bigger as we get things done before the winter sets in here in the Ozarks solid and the telephone people finally get here to set up internet for me!

Love to you all - it's been a bumpy ride so far with the move but sometimes ... you just gotta bounce over the bumps!!!!