Monday, December 30, 2019

2 weeks without WiFi

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Internet Connectivity


Flower from the Sea of Cortez 

The Sea of Cortez is known for having large blank spots for internet signals. We were aware of that heading north, but there were still things that we missed. We learned that 1) yes, we can live without the internet  and 2) no, we don't really want to. For me the greatest hole was felt in connecting to friends and family, not just direct contact, but in reading your stories posted on Facebook. We do have a satellite connection (more on that later), but it is very basic.


Some of the other things that I missed had both good and bad aspects.
• The lack of news being at the tops the list. I assume that if a world war broke out I would somehow hear about it, but day to day news is not there.
• No bill paying, and no buying things online ( which is good because I couldn't pay the bill when it came!)
• No looking up information, no recipes to try to make the best of whatever food we happen to have left on board
• No sports news, certainly felt by Bob more than me.
• No daily poems
• No Word of the Day

We do have a satellite phone connection, and for those of you who missed talking to me I can definitely teach you the *secret handshake* if you want! We receive messages as if they are a text and when we reply back to you it goes to your email. The problem with this is that it has a weird "Iridium" address and can go straight to your spam, so unless someone knows the message is coming, it may not actually get to them! The messages sent to me are limited to 140 characters, whereas I can send out 1000 characters. Doesn't seem fair does it? It can get confusing sometimes, leading to cut off messages. I can also do regular email, but without pictures, please! I recently got some pictures sent to me, and it took 28 hours of downloading just to get 4 pictures!

Returning to the world of internet is nice. Good to make contact with people, and catch up on things that I missed. Happy Holidays to all of you, it's good to be back!

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