Catching Up

We have had some of the most pleasant weather this week even with the rain we've gotten. I'm glad for the mild temps for the sake of the fellows who are painting our roof.

HOME FROM HAITI. Jenna is back home now. She came home late Friday night, and the first thing she said to me after getting out of the car was, “I’m going back.”

The main purpose for this trip was to provide medical support. They took vaccines for the kids in the orphanage we work with. They also hosted a couple of medical clinics for the general public in the area. Bro. Bill also went to lead a marriage counseling seminar for local pastors. Jenna has promised that she would write up a piece about her experiences to share so I don’t want to steal her thunder, but I will say it sounds like the trip was a success.

A QUIET HOUSE. Jenna is home and the boys are gone. I took them to Boxwell Reservation today to begin their week of summer camp with the Scout troop. Nate got a bit of the camp experience last summer. He and I stayed with the troop while he did Webelos Resident Camp, but this is his first time as a Boy Scout. Their camp site is right on the shore of Old Hickory Lake and the boys chose a tent that’s about 30 feet from the water. It’s a perfect setup!

WELCOME US TO THE 21ST CENTURY! There are three things I've always wished I could change about our house. I've wished we lived on a seldom traveled country road rather than a highway. It would be nice to have more than one bathroom and a separate laundry room, though we do pretty well with what we have. And I've always wished we could get good Internet service.

I am happy to report that we now have good Internet service and can join the ranks of millions of people who take the Internet for granted. When we first moved out here our only option was dial-up. About six years ago we switched over to satellite service. This was better than dial-up but it was expensive and came with severe data limits. We regularly exceeded the data limit and suffered from near dial-up speeds leaving our service pretty much useless except for checking email. It was a regular experience for me to spend five minutes emailing this newsletter and posting it to Blogger--that's after typing it up and giving Vicki a chance to proofread it.

We now have a new service provider expanding in our area and we signed on with them about three weeks ago. The Internet is actually a useful service for us now! We've been able to video chat in real time where this was a terrible experience before. I came in the other day to find Nate was playing a card game with his cousin Zachary in Georgia. Just the other morning I needed to get up super early to run some software updates on one of our servers at work when it would not affect others in doing their jobs. I normally drive in to the office for this. This time I took my laptop to the living room, logged in to the network at work (VPN), remotely logged in to the server like I would if I were sitting at my desk, and did all the work that I needed to do--and I did all this while sitting on the couch watching a program on the Smithsonian channel streamed over the Internet though our Apple TV (which I won in a drawing back in March). When I got done I went back to bed. I could not have done any of this a month ago.

With our Apple TV we could actually "cut the cord" if we had one to cut. Seeing how we have an old-fashioned TV antenna we'll keep that for additional TV options, but we sure have enjoyed watching the on demand programming now available to us.

Who knows, with our new Internet service I might even send a few pictures your way. Of course, that will mean getting into the habit of downloading, organizing, and posting them somewhere before they are terribly out of date. We have a lot of catching up to do.

Joe