Temporarily Indisposed...

Yes, it has been forever and a day since I've got around to posting anything on the ol' blog, but for once I have an excuse other than it's summer and I don't feel like doing anything that resembles work. We've been having internet issues since the end of May, due mainly to the fact that we're too cheap to pay for our own internet connection so we mooch off my parents via high-powered router. This has worked well for the past six plus years. Then we made a fatal error in judgement.

We put siding on our house.

First off, it's necessary to understand that we live in the bunkhouse. When we moved in, it was 400 square feet, half of which was originally my granddad's chicken coop with a kitchen and bathroom built on. Then we dragged an old wooden granary over and tacked it on one end for a living room. Then we built a lean to off the south side for a porch and a bedroom, so the child didn't have to sleep on a mattress on the living room floor. The porch alone was a three year process. With all the expanding and tacking on there wasn't much sense putting on siding, plus it costs money that could be spent doing something fun, but eventually the particle board started sloughing off wood chips like dandruff and my mom got tired of looking at it out of her bedroom window, so she offered to pay for the installation if we would just please do something about our little wooden shack. So we went from this (which makes it look a lot better than it was in real life):

To this:

Ain't it purty? Dale and Richard Bird did a beautiful job. Just one problem. That high quality Masonite siding does a bang up job of not only blocking the cold wind, but also our WiFi signal. We've tried antennas. We've tried moving around to different parts of the house. The signal will pop up for a few minutes then disappear for no apparent reason, except that it's most likely to work when the temperature is below fifty degrees, which actually happens quite frequently in the summer up here on the border but only before 8 a.m.

In the meantime, in order to blog or Facebook or anything that requires a decent signal for more than five minutes I have to haul my computer over to my mother's. Or out to the tipi, which does not have Masonite siding. Under normal circumstances we would bite the bullet and get our own hookup, but as it happens our local co-op is in the process of installing fiber optic cable to replace our glorified dial-up, after which we will be able to do crazy things like stream video. Excuse me while I put my head between my knees to avoid hyperventilating. Unfortunately, there is no estimated date of completion, so for now, I'm sort of in internet detention. 

This is not all bad news. Thanks to lack of Twitter, Facebook and staring at dresses on ModCloth and eShakti, I finally finished the preliminary draft of Book Two of next year's Texas Rodeo series. Now all I have to do is figure out what Book Three is going to be about and I'm golden.