Wow! I notice that I hadn't posted anything here since Sept 23! I thought it had been a while, but that long?
The main villain was the very tight squeeze that Wildblue put on us for exceeding our download allowance. Wild slowed down things so much that at times having dial-up again instead of wireless started looking like a good option. But we hung in there and did as little as we possibly could online, not knowing explicitly everything that they included in being a "download." But I did download a graph that's called "Bandwidth Usage," and it has quickly become the second thing that I'm always going to bring up first every morning after going online. It showed our numbers lowering at varying rates of speed, until yesterday it happened. We were supposed to be in violation until we finally dropped from 122% of our allowance down to 70% -- Which I still don't understand. I would think that anything below !00% it would be okay. But no, and even when we did reach 70%, we were still considered to be at fault, and it wasn't until yesterday, when we hit 69% that we were finally "forgiven," and now everything online is just zipping along.
At the same time, though, other things happened to keep me out of the online bag. One was the need to get some firewood piled up for the imminent winter, with the memory of last year's heavy snowfalls still hammering on us. And it doesn't help when some Russians started saying that a winter is in store that will be the worst in
1,000 years. But being Russians, and with the terrible summer they've just had, they would say that.
Every year in Russia is the worst in someone's 1,000 years, right? But if it's really to be the worst in theirs, it's really time to look out!
Because old age has started precluding cutting too much wood, this year I finally relented, and we bought three very large pickup=truck loads, but that didn't turn out to be enough, and so in the last two weeks I've gone back into our woods and started cutting down a few dead or "rogue" trees to fill out the pile to the needed size. I did this also because I regard it as being a part of my landscaping, and because this time of year it's such a pleasure being out of doors in our woods, with the leaves presenting all these riots of color, and with the tiny flying and crawling things being completely out of that picture, and with the temperature and the weather being just right..
Also I've gotten back strongly into trying to finish my huge, collective Iris stained glass window, which still has only three of the nine projected panes finished, and that absolutely
must be done..
So I'm trying to integrate one activity with the other, which is uncomfortable, because I like it best to work on only one thing at a time, and right now it would be best if that was the window..
