If you read my blog daily, you have noticed that for the last few days there has been nothing to read. That is because we have been without internet. (We have also been without CBC radio which I depend on heavily.) These kind of things happen a lot in our small isolated rural community. Living without, seems to be part of life around here.
The power goes off a lot and depending on the cause, can be off for a just a flash or 7 hours, you never know. Once power to McBride was off for a couple of weeks when a forest fire destroyed a transmission line. Luckily, that only happened once.
If you look closely at the photo above, you will see a series of antennae. It is located on a shoulder of Mt. Lucille. Those towers provide our community with radio, TV, and internet. As I understand it, last week a crew was doing maintenance on the dirt road that leads up to the towers, and they inadvertently severed the power cable, thus disabling all those services that we depend on so much.
Joan and I have made ourselves so dependent on the internet, that when we don’t have it we start pacing the floors. Secondary to my internet dependency is my CBC radio habit, that I listen to throughout the day, and at night. When I am not listening to an actual radio, (like when I paint) I listen to CBC streaming through the internet, so you can see how stressful it was to me to suddenly be without. Fortunately since we have satellite TV which is independent from the towers on the mountain, we still had that to give us our media fix.
Our internet and radio went out Tuesday morning. We struggled through Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday evening as was working on a cartoon, our power when off momentarily, I cursed figuring I had lost all the work I had done, but then realized that the outage probably meant that power had been restored to the towers, and sure enough the radio came back on, but not the internet.
Friday morning came and went, and we still didn’t have internet. By Friday night I was a bit pissed off. We had company and I expressed my disappointment in not have internet back, and was told that the internet was back on. It wasn’t for me, and after a bit of investigation, I discovered that our WiFi router had turned off and hadn’t come back during the brief electricity outage. Once I got that going again our internet was restored.
Last night as I was going to bed I set up my iPad to stream CBC radio as I went to bed. I was so happy that things were getting back to normal. Unfortunately, the radio streaming kept cutting off and on. It got so bad, I finally just gave up turned it off and did without--its all part of rural living.
My paintings are on view at: www.davidmarchant.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment