Breaking Through The Ice

It’s been over a month since I wrote my last words. What’s happened?

I had a flurry of inspiration while in India. I wrote some of my worst stuff: A Homecoming Long Overdue, Return to India and some of my best stuff: The Buzz of Food, The Feel of the Beach, The Desire to Overcome. There was even some mediocre pieces: Friendship from Strangers. But since I’ve come back, nada.

What Happened

There are contributing factors to my dry spell. After taking six weeks off of work and coming home to a cheering office, work took me by storm. A project consumed me with long hours consuming my thoughts and took priority over everything. When I came home, my computer tried a new experience staying mostly in my bag. I couldn’t look at it, I gave at the office. All the inspiration, spiritual experiences, travel and swimming – all went into a box not to be opened until spring. To sum up: I felt wrung out.

There was also a bit of culture shock.

I’ve been spending time reading. There’s a stack of half-started unfinished posts that just go no where. I’ve been outside in the 70-80 degree March weather. I’ve ridden my horse, walked along the Mississippi and did things I wouldn’t dream of doing at this time of year.

Why would I be indoors writing?

Times Are A Changing

It looks like I may finally have a solution to my rural Internet problem. Where we live, there is no cable, DSL or ISDN. Internet has come in two choices: satellite or cellular. Satellite has a daily cap of around 420 MB/day and cellular has a cap of 5 GB/month – less than satellite. Cellular is faster but has less capacity, which we need. My wife does distance learning over the Internet and has had to watch lecture between 1 AM and 6 AM, the free-range period of satellite where the cap doesn’t apply. The latency completely sucks. The bandwidth: shared by more than a neighborhood in a cable system.

We have been on the other side of the digital divide for almost 8 years and I’ve tried almost everything. Most of my writing has taken place in city coffee shops, where the Internet works without hair-pulling latency delays. This changed this week with the discovery of a point-to-point radio ISP that seems to have a decent signal in my area. Hopefully the painful sub-standard Internet will finally be given the boot. I used a combination of ISP networking. Not computer networking but social, “I know you don’t cover my area, but do you know anyone who does?” One helpful provider referenced a great resource for finding a provider: Connect Minnesota (connectmn.org). Installation is set for tomorrow.

The other change that you’ll be noticing shortly is the purchase of domain names for both of my blogs. Look for this URL to change to chasingtheasson.com sometime soon. I need to make sure everything transitions smoothly and I wanted to warn people before making the switch. The old URL you’ve been using should automatically redirect. Don’t be shocked when it does.

Hopefully some decent writing will be out soon. Until then, enjoy some of my older works.