I spent the last two weeks of December at my farm in Eastern Washington. I love the farm, despite the farmhouse, which I swear my grandfather jerry-rigged to start falling apart the minute I bought the place more than a decade ago and despite the deer that tempt my dogs to adventure on a daily basis. However, there is one big drawback: there is no internet connection there.

It sucks.

I could get an account with one of the local wireless companies, or with a satellite company, but I’m not there for long enough periods of time to have talked myself into the added expense. Winter holidays tend to make me rethink that. Actually, I think I let my brother talk me out of it. Time to rethink.

For the last couple of years until the middle of last summer, I had a wireless access point out at the farm, from a company my brother lets use his tower to bounce signal off of.  Or something like that. But last winter’s huge snowfall kept the receiver buried in snow and ice for several weeks, and it didn’t take kindly to the abuse. The receiver started malfunctioning last December, and was less and less reliable until it finally heaved its last gasp in July or August.

At the moment I also don’t have a working landline. The contractor who is building my new house did some preliminary work last year and – oops – clipped the cable. And since it was probably the original baling wire installed years ago by my grandfather (don’t doubt – when I had the electrical service replaced a few years ago, part of it really was baling wire). So even dial up is out. Cable service doesn’t extend this far out into the country. I thought about getting a wireless card for my cell phone account, but I might as well pay for the satellite or wireless service every month.

So, I have no internet at the farm.  Did I mention it sucks?

I could drive into downtown Spokane and park my butt anywhere in the city center and get free wireless. That’s about 16 miles away. I can sit in my brother’s driveway while he and his wife are at work and sit under his tower and hit his access point or have them leave me a key. When I remember to ask and they remember to leave it. I can find a restaurant or coffee shop. No, scratch that, I hate the smell of coffee. Or I can wait till my brother or sister are home and go to one of their houses.

None of these options is nearly as comfy as parking myself on the couch with a dog on either side of me, the wall heater roaring, the flat panel spitting inanities into the room, and the Christmas tree lit up across the room. Actually, in the car in the driveway at my brother’s house isn’t far behind, but it’s tough to balance the laptop on the steering wheel without accidentally honking the horn or cutting off the circulation to my hands.

Could I go out and buy a new receiver? Maybe, but apparently it’s not that easy. My brother spent two days trying to get two different receivers he rebuilt to work with the system. After about three hours with each, he gave up.  Either they weren’t working or the wireless ISP wasn’t. Given past behavior, both are likely. He did finally find one to order – not the one that was more than $400, but one that was a more reasonable $40 or so. In Greece. Shipping is free though. It will get here someday.

And hey, it’s not like I didn’t have a few things to do around the farm. Part of the house is about 100 years old and trying really hard to fall apart. I might let it if it weren’t the part that contains the kitchen and the only bathroom. In the first three days I was at the farm for Christmas vacation this year, I placed the toilet innards, had a plumber out to fix the leak under the kitchen (hot water line – much as I like not spending the money to heat the water, I kind of miss the radiant heat flooring situation the leak had created), replaced the heater in the well house and thawed out the brand new pressure tank that had been replaced just  two weeks earlier, fixed a leak coming from the water heater, discovered the back of the house had settled a bit more and that there was a crack in the bathroom floor through which daylight was visible, had my nephew out to patch a leaking hole in the roof of the house, discovered the big sliding doors to the Quonset are apparently stuck shut for the winter, hypothesized that the frozen puddle next to the Quonset was probably because the contractor hadn’t really buried the new water pipe to the new house, cleaned all the filters in all the faucet aerators, and … cripes, I don’t even remember what else.

And then on Christmas Eve, Dandy, one of my wee dogs, decided to take off after some deer and was missing for more than 20 hours. Out here on the prairie we have deer, elk, and coyotes, among other critters. Little dogs don’t usually stand a chance out overnight, especially on nights when the temperature is below 20F. I didn’t really notice the missing internet for those hours because I was out hiking across fields and driving around farms calling and calling and calling. By the time he allowed some nice folks a couple of miles away to read his collar tags and call me, I was a little too tired to be surfing the ‘net anyway. Probably shouldn’t have been driving either, but adrenaline and joy are great motivators.

Still, the second week of vacation, it really sucked. I couldn’t tweet (well, I could tweet on my non-work account, but not receive tweets or post to the work account), blog, post updates to Facebook, look up the weather (kind of important since I was planning to travel back to Redmond at some point, across the Cascade passes), or look up phone numbers. I was so desperate for a phone number at one point I had to … gasp … pull out the phonebook. You remember phonebooks?  I think the one at the farm is at least two years out of date, but it worked just like I remembered.  I’d already read everything I brought with me and made a trip to the bookstore … and was fast running through those books too. And I never thought I’d say it, but there are only so many hours a day you can nap.

By Tuesday after Christmas I was so bored I stooped to taking my equally bored 14-year-old niece shopping. To a mall. And then spent a couple hours playing games and making fudge. Much as I love my niece, I have to be pretty damned desperate for a distraction to spend almost an entire day with an incessantly fast talking, airhead teenager (Ashley is a straight-A student, but she’s the one they write the blonde jokes about).

By Wednesday I decided to invite the whole family out to the farm for New Years Day, spent an hour at my brother’s catching up on email, Facebook and Twitter, and started writing future blog posts for my work and personal blogs, and played Spider Solitaire and Mahjong Titans over and over and over, doing unnecessary laundry, plotting how to replace the kitchen floor without spending money (now that it’s warped from several months of that leak), and making the dogs play with me. Poor things.

I’ve also been watching television. Actually watching it.

Wow, does it ever suck not to have an internet connection.

I ended up spending a third week at the farm and discovered just how much I didn’t need an internet connection. And how absolutely vital it is. I had a stupid moment the night before we were supposed to head back to Redmond – I let Dandy out off leash after dark again. He ran off again. And no one has seen him since. I didn’t need the internet to drive the roads around the farm, talking to neighbors and checking between the hooves of deer and elk for a small white dog. I didn’t need the internet to do donuts in the car in the half melted mud of a field planted with winter wheat. I didn’t need it to put up signs, hand out flyers, or visit the local shelters and vets looking for Dandy. I didn’t need it to walk out into the fields and call his name.

I did need the internet to post a lost ad on craigslist, to check the shelters daily, to find the location of all those vets, to monitor email in case someone had seen the craiglist ad and had Dandy. I needed it for the good wishes and support from friends and distant family. I needed it to get a bit of work done during the hours that it was too dark or too rainy or too icy to be out looking. I needed something the keep me sane after hours and hours of searching.

Dandy still hasn’t been seen. Sam, my other Bichon, and I came back to Redmond and internet connectivity everywhere a week late. Frankly, I’d give up the ‘net permanently  to have Dandy back. Sam and I will go back to the farm this coming weekend to look some more. This time though, I'm going armed - I caved this afternoon and bought a Smartphone. If I can figure out how to work it, I won't have to worry about the withdrawal ...