Internet is fully restored!

After 3 weeks and 2 days, our internet is finally fully restored.  (The original lightening strike was on July 5th and they had another tower hit this past Sunday.) They came this morning and had to reset/adjust our box.   After the lightening strike, they replaced the box on the main tower.  Apparently the new box did not like having to go through the little bit of trees and shrubs that we had in our internet path (our internet is a wireless DSL that runs from tower to tower through a direct signal).  Jason sawed off a bunch of tree limbs (today), took out a cedar tree from across the road (this past week), and the internet guys built an extension arm for the radio transistor (today)!  Now, we are back in business.  Just in time for the school year to begin.

I was beginning to hit a desperation stage.  For the last 2 days, I actually broke down and starting using dial-up.  It was either dial-up or drive to town and go to the library.  When you live as far out of town as we do, you do not have many affordable options for internet.  We pay $29.95 per month for 1 megabyte per second download speed with unlimited access.  (We also had a $199 set up fee for the equipment and have used this service about 1 1/2 years.)  This speed allows us to download just about anything we need to fairly quickly. Our other options are/were $45-80 per month with monthly limits on usage and slower speeds.

Anyway, things are hopefully fully back to normal for a while.  Now begins the yearly school planning!

Just for fun! Blast from the Past...

This weekend the whole family went to garage sales around Stillwater. We had so much fun. At one of the sales, the lady said to fill up a box for $5. We began looking through the tables and tables of items that she had to offer and filled up a pretty nice box including an IPOD, kids books, craft items, bread tin, kitchen trinkets, a heavy duty roasting pan with lid, some tools, and the most fun of all....an early 90's laptop computer. It came with Windows 3.1 disks and Microsoft Works.

We took the "computer" home and turned it on. It powered up, but that was about it. The Windows was not loaded on the computer yet, and we just could not figure out how to get it going.  Today, I decided to get it back out and try again. I fiddled around until I was able to figure out how to use the DOS prompts. I was actually able to reload the Windows 3.1.  It took forever! The one program (Windows 3.1) consisted of 6 different 3.5 floppy disks. (note: I complain about some of the programs that I have to load on my computer taking 5 minutes). Let's just say, I waited a little longer than that.

I was able to get the computer fully loaded and give it a test run. Talk about blast from the past - "antique."  This is a complete non-color screen laptop computer that has what we would consider now...not even the basics. It only has 4 MB of memory, but it is upgradeable! (My laptop that I have now has 2 GB Memory and is considered outdated!)  It is supposedly internet capable with dail-up because it comes with an old Juno dail-up disk.  It did have Mine Sweeper and Solitaire though.

Although today's computers do so much  more, it was really fun to dive into this computer to figure out something "new."  Boy, computers have really come a long way!