And She Stuck the Landing

After the ice storm in February, we thought my hp laptop had bit the dust. It suddenly refused to dial-up and connect to the Internet and threw such a fit about it, I thought she was a goner forever and ever and that Wall-E might find the old girl centuries from now, harvest her for her parts and then use the rest of her to add to the skyscraper mountains of trash in the land of Large & Plenty. However, through that whole debacle, I learned a little something about myself. Learning something about oneself is always risky, sometimes painful, almost always okay once you're on the other side of it and occasionally, it's kind of great. I learned that I had gotten stuck.

You see, this old girl, having a tendency to be gritty, frugal and thrifty, had accepted that dialing-up was just the way it was for me. Since we moved three years ago and have no cable access out here, we didn't have the chance to use high-speed, even if we wanted to. We could have paid for satellite, like many of our neighbors, but I just felt it wasn't necessary.

Thankfully, the husband stepped in and saw a bigger picture. Not only did he see that a lot of my connectedness to the outside world was through my computer, he upgraded me. I'm a mom, I stay at home, we live out of the way and when you put all those things together with no computer access, you have a slightly isolated Mama-doops. Stubbornly, just like I was trying to stay here for so many days without power after the ice storm, I felt as if I could handle my new situation and make the best of it. Or, at least I was telling myself that. It was like an unintentional fast.

Christian came home one February afternoon with an AT&T wireless connect card, thus bypassing dialing up. It rocked this girl's world. Flippin' flip, it was wonderful. It was slow at first and had some issues, but I was okay with the dependability issue because I was connected to the "out there." I was back!

For over two years, we had terrible cell phone service as well. If someone wanted to get a hold of me, they had to call my home phone like people did before cellular devices. And once again, I really was fine with it. However, not long ago, when we saw power trucks coming down our county road headed up the hill to erect a cell phone tower one lovely day, I held loosely. They had been telling us it was coming for three years. I am happy to announce that they did turn the cell tower on several months ago allowing cell service like it ought to be AND just in the last couple weeks, our cell tower has 3G. For the love!

Since having all this at my fingertips like the rest of you have probably had for years, I was transformed. I could pull up mp3's and listen to them. A band's mySpace page loaded like lightening and began singing at me from the computer screen. Hoorah! Even going to someones Facebook page was a rarity before because I usually didn't have the time to wait for it to load. And now, it's all right here in my lap, err, laptop, I should say. I see picture upon picture, read article upon article, YouTube will load ... Holy cow.

So, my first love is really and truly music. This is another one of those areas of myself I put on the back burner mostly because I had a kiddo, and now two, and live music became a delicacy. (There's more behind this, but, ah...another time another day? Who am I kidding?) I wouldn't trade my kiddos or my current circumstances for the world and just like the other rants up there, I just had become almost fine with not being the first to hear the new sounds. I say almost because it always nagged at me ... always.

Anyway, getting sort of "unstuck" has been like a breath of fresh air. I have an appetite for what I love again and it sits so well with my soul. I even dusted off (literally) my old guitar and got my pick out and tried to tune by ear the other day. I'm rusty and I've got to buy a new tuner. But, you know what? I'm okay with buying it now. The reason why is because it is something I love and it's so good for me to hold that plastic Fender pick and re-develop those callouses I used to have with pride. Christian even threw looking for an old piano to refurbish out on the table this last week. If only you could see my tap dance.