Assiniboia

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An Unsustainable Situation

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.

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Scorcher

It’s been hot here the last few days! I haven’t really noticed because I’ve been working and my home has a little thing called AC. With heat has come massive swarms of bird-sized mosquitoes, so it really hasn’t been outdoor weather!

Today is the start of a four-day weekend for me. I’m burning out from a really long and unending transcription marathon, so it’s nice to have some time to just breathe. Of course, I utterly failed at sleeping in this morning, but I did take it slow. I waited for the post to come, then went to town to run some errands.

By the time I’d hit the post office, the bank, and the thrift store, it was only 11:10 and much too early for lunch, so I decided to go walk around the Shurniak Gallery. This gallery is a real gem for Assiniboia, featuring lots of beautiful art in different mediums. There’s mostly paintings, but also some sculptures and other things. I’ve been to the gallery once, in October of 2013 for a music concert, and I didn’t have time to view everything.

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The artwork on display would belong in any world-class museum. My favourite medium is oil, so I spent a lot of time admiring the colours and brushwork on a variety of paintings. You really have to go through the entire building because there’s artwork tucked into every corner.

The gallery now has a cafe serving soups, sandwiches, and coffee beverages at a reasonable price and is really a lovely place to wile away an hour. Admission is free and donations are welcome.

After visiting the gallery, I decided to check out the lunchtime buffet at the New Moon Cafe. I usually do the buffet at Andy’s, but a neighbour told me that New Moon has ‘more stuff.’ It did and it was tasty and the same price as Andy’s, but the ‘more stuff’ isn’t things that I enjoy, like breaded and fried mystery meat in a very sweet sauce (typical Canadian-Chinese offerings passed off as ginger beef or lemon chicken or sweet and sour pork). So I’ll probably to stick to Andy’s, which has really good pizza! But I’m glad I tried it out and I did enjoy my lunch very much, especially the chicken wings and broccoli!

After lunch, it was time to get groceries. The grocery store parking lot is absolutely chaos as the store renovations progress and I had to drive around the block to find a parking spot! It’s no wonder they are so adamant that baggers take out orders as I don’t think everyone would be bothered to walk their carts back several blocks!

They had some good deals today on everything on my list, so it was a fruitful expedition. Shopping in that store is such a chore because there’s no room and people for some reason don’t get that and just leave their carts in the middle of narrow aisles. I really hope that the expanded store will give us a little more room to move around. I really do appreciate the increased amount of selection in the store, though, especially when it comes to ‘ethnic’ foods and am optimistic that when I come home next May, I won’t feel a strong urge to go do a big Moose Jaw shop like I did this year.

Next thing on my list for today, make sure that I’m ready to move to my new computer, which should be here Monday but I suspect could surprise me tonight… I don’t think I’ve ever moved to a new machine running a newer OS before, so I’m not convinced that a ‘restore from last Time Machine backup’ will work.

It’ll be cooler over the next few days, so I’ll be able to start running some tests to determine where I’ll be installing the new booster antennas. There was a very justifiable delay in getting the booster out (which the Facebook followers know all about), so probably won’t get it till about this time next week. I can’t wait to write a report on that and give the awesome store and tech I dealt with some much deserved praise!

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New Booster Order

Thanks to the wonderful generosity of many of you and others who are not blog readers, I was able to order my new booster a couple of minutes ago. If I had had to cover the purchase entirely on my own, I would have had to wait till another cheque landed at the end of the month. I really need that new booster now because my internet connection is getting worse as the days pass and I finally have confirmation on why.

Because of the local topography, I can only connect to a tower that is located quite a distance aways in a popular vacationing spot where people camp and have cottages. We are in the heart of holiday season and SaskTel has confirmed that my especial difficulties this past week have been due to the tower being overloaded and my weak signal not being able to get push through the interference. Of course, the congestion on that tower would be diminished if folks in my area could connect to our local tower, something I will bring up with the president’s office when it finally gets back to me.

Shipping for the booster was 95USD/125CAD to my hamlet or Assiniboia or free within the United States, so I’m glad that I’m so close to the US border and have several places in Montana I can ship to. I was nervous about shipping to my usual destination, the bar in Opheim, because they just leave packages out in the open and unsecured. A bit of Googling found a package service in Plentywood, which makes sense since it is directly due south of Regina.

I just called them to make sure that they are still operating because they website hasn’t been updated in a while and they are! I am so glad to know of this service! Plentywood is 163KM from me, versus 100KM to either Opheim or Scobey, so it won’t be my first choice of location to pick up things, but it’s good to have the option for valuable packages. I’ve been trying to plan a touristy trip just northwest of Plentywood on this side of the border, so I’m going to combine the two trips and spend less on fuel than if I did the tourist thing one day and a border run another day, and definitely much less than I would have paid for shipping!

It’s been a financially exhausting month, another case of taking a leap forward financially and another giant one back. Thanks to your help, I’m back on track. It’s been so stressful the last few weeks dealing with a failing computer and increasingly poor internet. I’ll have my new computer and booster by next week and should hopefully be much less stressed in my last couple of months here this year. Thank you again so very much!

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Reflections From the End of the World

As long-time blog readers will know, I was based in Yukon for two years and traveled all over the territory and parts of the Northwest Territories. What some of you may not know is that I spent time shopping for a home base up there, but any decent land meeting my criteria wasn’t affordable. I was looking for a frontier experience but not a deep bush one, something I could easily drive to and that would have basic services.

I eventually decided I didn’t want to be that far north as it would limit my mobility. To my surprise, I discovered that I wanted to live where the vast majority of other Canadians live, within about 100KM of the US border.

And then I found an anomaly along that densely populate strip, southern Saskatchewan, which promised the wide open space and frontier experience I wanted right in the heart of the continent. I had my pick of affordable lots and I settled on the perfect compromise between deep rural living and suburbia, a charming little hamlet with most services. It didn’t have internet at the time of purchase, but was slated for improvements that would be cellular connectivity in the next year. No one cared if I used it as an RV home base and never developed it (an issue I faced when I was looking at properties 10 times the cost in southern Alberta). And incredibly, I could pay cash. It was perfect.

Sure enough, when I arrived the following year to spend my first summer on my very own land, we were on the coverage map! But surprise, the telecom company had made a huge mistake in locating the new tower and we still didn’t have service. As those of you who have been following the saga know, I’m now able to prove that SaskTel made a mistake. They are a Crown corporation and accountable for how they spend their money, so with a little help from the NDP in pushing the ‘this is a waste of public resources’ angle, I just might get this resolved within my lifetime…

Something else has come up that makes life here difficult and which will be next summer’s fight, our lack of civic addresses. Even though we have a post office, I frequently can’t get things delivered to it because ordering systems now have a database of valid civic addresses and I can’t just make one up and put my PO box number in the next row. I’m figuring out how to work around that. I have a neighbour who works in town who says that as long as it’s not 10 parcels a day, I can have things sent care of him and he’ll drop them off when he passes by my place in the evening.

Today, I saw how absurd the civic address thing is when I couldn’t confirm on the Elections Canada website that I am registered to vote. I called and the front line person I spoke to couldn’t find where I lived. I’m waiting for someone higher up to get back to me.

A reader who probably isn’t reading anymore actually came through the hamlet recently, although she didn’t look me up. She has the same attitude as others that I live ‘in the middle of nowhere’ or ‘at the end of the world’ and therefore I don’t deserve basic services. Having lived and traveled through the far north, where I never had major connectivity issues (a shortage of bandwidth, yes) or difficulty getting parcels or proving where I lived, I still don’t think that I was that naive in believing that I could get such services here in southern Saskatchewan even in a rural community.

I’m figuring out how to make my life here work and I’ve been asked by more than one person why I don’t cut my losses and just go.

It’s easy to lose sight of the positives when I’m so consumed by an issue like the lack of connectivity. But believe me, there is more positive here than anywhere else I’ve ever tried to make a life.

Most especially, once upon a time in Quebec, I faced many of the same challenges (especially lack of connectivity) even though I lived just 50KM from the capital of the country. It was impossible to get anything done there because of the entrenched corruption and apathy at every level of government. I saw that in most of the rest of Canada, how traditions and procedures are deeply rooted and unchangeable.

There’s something delightfully rustic about this part of Saskatchewan in that it never quite figured out how it fit into the 20th century and so is still struggling to fit into the 21st. The population basin here is older, coming from a generation that doesn’t understand the need for internet or cellular phones. We still write cheques here and call each other rather than email.

It’s the frontier I was looking for and I am part of the first wave of young pioneers flocking to the area in search of some of the last affordable real estate in this country. Since moving to my hamlet, two couples of my generation and another gal my age have moved here. More are going to come as they get squeezed out of Assiniboia, whose prices are steadily rising to Moose Jaw levels.

So the services we want are going to come because the market will eventually force it, but we can shape how those services will look. None of my neighbours today appear to really care about my fight for connectivity, but I am keeping records so that I will be remembered as the one who brought broadband internet to the St. Victor valley, much like people are lauded for bringing the railroad. The metaphor sounds silly, I know, but that’s what the government is actually using when it talks about increasing broadband internet across Canada!

Another thing is that big oil is coming in the near future. There is going to be money to be made here and our cheap property values are going to skyrocket. This is something that the economists on Bay Street are talking about, not just our belief. They say that Saskatchewan is the only Canadian real estate market that hasn’t exploded yet and when it does, people are going to make a killing on their investments, like some Manitobans did.

I know I have to be patient because this is an unshaped world I’m living in. It is so bright with promise and I want to be involved in shaping the future of the area I have decided to make my home. I refuse to sit and wait for other people to make the changes I need to be able to thrive here. Wanting to make things better and actually doing something about them is very different from bellyaching.

I love it here. This is Home.

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Epiphanies

Ooh, today was bad, apocalypse level bad in terms of winds, rain, and property damage in the southern Prairies. I was right in the middle of it and unlike the eye of a hurricane, where it is calm, I was in a real maelstrom. There are trees down all over my hamlet and I had to use a lot of muscle to get a particularly large branch off my driveway so I could park my truck.

My internet service is flaky on a bad day and non-existent on a day like today. I ended up spending most of my day parked in a field about halfway to Assiniboia. That’s how far I had to go to get a usable cellular signal so I could do my work and about as far as I dared to go in lashing rain, gusting winds, and huge amounts of water on the road. It was a very long and unpleasant day.

Working out of my truck for a few hours is fine. I sit in the passenger seat and have a lap desk, so I’m comfortable. But I have no bathroom or means of making a hot beverage (which would have been appreciated on such a cold and damp day). I really don’t have an alternative place to work except taking a motel room in Assiniboia. The library in Assiniboia has weird hours and I obviously couldn’t do an eight-hour shift there or at the bakery that sort of doubles as an internet cafe. So I am rather resentful that I’m being put in this situation because we don’t have cellular service down in the valley, where I have a lovely office.

I am actively pursuing the connectivity issue this summer. I am at the point of seeking a political resolution, having reached an impasse with SaskTel, the telecom company that holds a monopoly in this province. As soon as I am ready to go to the media, I will lay it all out here on the blog. But the short of it is that at this point in time, there are no plans within the next 10 years to bring cellular service, and therefore good internet, to my valley and so I really need to reconsider using Haven as a home base. My flaky internet wasn’t such a big deal when I could schedule going up the hill to where there’s service on especially bad days while being able to work at home, but the new job requires me to respond very quickly to emails and is not compatible with a flaky internet service.

Which led to an epiphany regarding another decision I’ve been contemplating: buying a new (to me) vehicle.

I figured out this winter that I really want a camper van to use as a daily driver and to serve as a mobile motel room and office when I’m traveling. The epiphany I had today is that if I had a vehicle like that, it would mean being able to ride out poor connectivity issues in style. At the first whiff of bad internet, I could relocate to the mobile office, park where there’s a good connection, and work comfortably with access to a bathroom and means to make a simple meal. Yes, my home has wheels, but can you imagine having to pack up and move a 32′ motorhome a couple of times a week, never mind find a large enough place to pull off a highway to work?! There is a reason people like having toads!

Having contemplated the camper van situation for some time now, I’ve figured exactly what I want and why. Mexico has featured heavily into my consideration. I want something that I would be able to import when I move there semi-permanently in three to four years, so that means I need something older since you can only import vehicles manufactured eight or more years from the year of import. So that puts me at a 2009 to 2011 model year, a huge improvement over my current 2000 truck. I also want something that can easily be serviced in Mexico.

Next consideration is fuel economy; I want an improvement over my Ranger’s gas guzzling tendencies. I want something small that I can park anywhere. And I want something that is proven to be convertible into a camper van.

Tall order? Nope. I have found one vehicle that meets every single one of these requirements and it is hugely popular in Europe for camper van conversions: the Ford Transit Connect. It is not to be confused with its larger sibling, the Transit.

Unfortunately, the North American Transit Connects don’t have all the options of their European counterparts, most especially a manual transmission. Going to an automatic would be a huge concession. But we can get the longer body and high roof here, so there’s that. The Transit Connect makes for a very compact mini motorhome. The Transit is much more spacious, sort of like a poor man’s Sprinter in fact, but it doesn’t have the fuel economy of the Transit Connect.

I’ve looked at conversions of the Transit Connect and it would be just the right size for a small bed and work station with room for a potty, a cooler, and a cooktop. Pretty much every conversion I’ve seen has the same basic layout, and with good reason, as it lays out all these elements efficiently.

The conversion is a project I feel I could undertake myself. I would not add propane or plumbing. The most complex part of the job would be electrical, but that’s something I’m competent to do and I would actually pull a lot of materials from Miranda (solar panel, whole house inverter, battery monitor), which would really cut down on costs.

So now it’s a matter of finding my Transit Connect. I did a soft inquiry to see if I could get a vehicle loan and the amount and the answers are yes and enough to buy a recent model (I found a 2013 that fits in the price range). I really doubt that I would buy this summer/fall. I just don’t feel financially secure enough right now to jump into this project, although I am scanning the market. But it looks like my plan for next spring will be to find and purchase the vehicle and then spend the summer working on the conversion.

I need to decide how far afield I want to look. Importing from the US, which has a much larger market, would be a huge pain, but manageable with a broker. I just need to figure out how I could buy a vehicle there in the spring and drive it home while still having my Ranger and would appreciate suggestions for that. I love my Ranger and want to keep it as a cargo carrier until it rusts out from under me, so abandoning it in some junk yard like I did my beloved Accent isn’t my preferred option.

My fear of the Ranger rusting out is what is what got me thinking about buying a new vehicle in the nearish future. I’ve had three body repair guys tell me that the Ranger is too far gone to save and to stop putting money into it except for the most basic mechanical repairs. Independently of that, my financial planner told me that we needed to adjust my plan to fit in the replacement of my truck within a few years. So this is something I really need to be thinking about.

So to recap, I need a new vehicle, I need a backup place to work when internet at Haven is especially bad, and I need to cut down on costs when traveling between Canada and Mexico. Funny that the solution to all of those things is the same thing. I really do think that things are coming together for me!