I haven’t said much on the subject of work these past few months, afraid to jinx myself again like I did last time something wonderful happened in that sphere. So I’m going to tread lightly with the details and say that I finally got my dream job. It’s not transcription, it pays a professional wage, and I have reason to believe that it would be long-term (there is no job security in the freelancing world). I work set eight-hour shifts three days a week and I need reliable internet because I have to respond to emails very quickly.

This is why my internet situation has become so critical this summer. I can no longer go up the hill in the morning to download work for the day and then go back up in the evening to send it. I really need to be online and available every second of those shifts. Every shift since I got this job has been incredibly stressful because I never know from one second to the next if I’ll be able to do a Google search or send an email. Now that someone is working alongside me during my shift, I know that my unacceptable internet situation is going to be coming obvious because he can respond to emails while I’m still waiting for them to come in because the attachment is so ‘heavy’ (less than 1MB).

Let me reiterate that I did my due diligence when I bought my property. I had every reason to believe that I would have internet here after the building of the new tower in 2013. But SaskTel screwed up and I have no recourse against them.

My booster is waiting for me in Plentywood and I’ll head out there first thing Friday to pick it up, then will have a four-day weekend to get it working. I don’t think I’ll want to do any permanent mounting until I’ve lived with it for a bit. I’m not expecting it to provide me with a miracle. All it will give me is, hopefully, a more reliable connection. I’ll still have the slow speeds when I’m throttled.

So the booster or a mobile office are going to be band-aids, nothing more. The fact is that this is it for internet at Haven forever because SaskTel will not bring us any sort of service except satellite, which is not much better than dial up, incredibly expensive to set up and use, and which has punitive bandwidth restrictions. They boast that I can get 40GB per month (which would be enough), but I read the fine print and there are daily restrictions that would slow me down to dial up speeds. I get better speeds than that on cellular when the connection is working okay, even when throttled.

Do you know how far hard wired broadband internet is from me? I bet you don’t and you will be surprised. I had a reader comment that I live ‘in the middle of nowhere.’ It does feel that way when you come from Assiniboia. But Willow Bunch has hard wired broadband and it is just 18KM away. When the gravel is well graded, like it was last night, I am ten minutes driving distance from the nearest house that has hard wired broadband. Ten minutes. It might as well be a hundred years because SaskTel won’t consider bringing that to my community either.

I have at least twenty working years left, possibly thirty. So if I were to spend my summers here, that would be ten to fifteen years of my life struggling with the internet.

I’ve always made plans for my current income because I’m not one to make plans for ‘the day I win the lottery.’ But now, it looks like I might have options I hadn’t anticipated. I’m mobile. Why would I come here and struggle to work when I could go anywhere in the world? All that would happen would be that I would come to resent this place I love so much. Haven will always be that, a safe port, a place to drop off stuff and to sit and breathe for a few days or weeks. I cannot anchor myself to this place at this time, but it will always be a security blanket of sorts.