Call me the Undecider

Juvenile cormorant unconcerned about e-mail

The time has come to make a decision about whether to upgrade my home internet service. Unless it hasn't. I don't know. Maybe I should be happy that I have any connection at all, unreliable or not. Maybe I'm too demanding. Or maybe it's time for a change. The fact that I don't know whether it's time to make a decision suggests that I'm not ready to make a decision, but that doesn't make the decision any easier to make. If you know what I mean.


I don't know whether my service is getting worse or I'm just getting less patient with it, but yesterday I tried to post some interesting stuff and all I got was disconnected--repeatedly. Couldn't even check my e-mail. This morning I had no problem checking my e-mail, but only one message (out of 24) was not junk. Is it worth the expense of upgrading my service just so I can receive one non-junk e-mail message? On the other hand, if my service were faster, I could find out much more quickly that my e-mail isn't worth checking. Less time waiting for a strong connection would mean more time to devote to more important tasks.

Like what, exactly? It's summer, a time when I cherish inaccessibility. Yesterday my husband and I spent the morning paddling around on a remote lake where the only sounds were birdcalls and the wind in the trees and an occasional trolling motor--until we were startled by a tinny jangling over near shore. A woman in a fishing boat pulled out her cell phone and her chattering carried well over the still water. Who takes a cell phone out fishing? (Um, we do. Keep it in the drybox to use in case of emergency.) 

The whole point of getting out on the water is inaccessibility, but when I get home, I want to be able to check my e-mail (for more junk) and post photos (even if no one out there is looking at them). And I get frustrated when it doesn't work.

For several years now we've been hearing promises about a big state grant that will make low-cost broadband service available throughout the county "except in certain remote pockets." Guess who lives in a remote pocket of the county? That would be me. We can't even get cable television without paying to run the lines a mile or so, while monthly costs for satellite service are outrageous. So we make do with a wireless modem that sort of works some of the time but when it doesn't work I get annoyed.

But am I annoyed enough to make a change? Sometimes, but the feeling tends to pass. So maybe I'm not yet ready to make a decision--which itself is a sort of decision. I really ought to do something about this, but right now I think I'd rather look at birds.