When you live five miles down a country road, your internet doesn’t come through a cable. Maybe it comes through the telephone line accompanied by an anachronistic serenade every time you dial-up, or maybe it comes from… OUTER SPACE. We have satellite internet. If we had smart phones, bless our hearts, we wouldn’t have smart phone internet, cuz that doesn’t work here either. We have satellite internet. Usually it is just like normal internet. You snuggle up with your honey, watch 5 hours of That 70’s Show on Netflix, and then, just as you need to use the internet for the next three weeks for school work, you notice that your videos don’t stream, at all. It feels like 56k again. Sometimes you have time to sing yourself the little modem song as your .gif loads. We have a 10 gb data allowance for the month. We get a grace period between midnight and five in the morning, during which our usage doesn’t count against us. It is about as likely for us to be up before five than after twelve, but on some Saturday nights we binge on Netflix until our heavy lids slump down over our red-from-staring-at-a-screen-for-too-long eyelids.

When we do run out of internet, we can pay for more like the junkies we are. Ten bucks a gigabyte for additional internet. If there is a new season of Downton out, this is a must.

The other issue is weather. Sometimes when it rains really hard and we are worried that a tornado might come crashing through our cardboard walls, there is no internet to be found. It also goes out in the increasingly common Arkansas blizzards. Last time we were out of internet for two whole weeks while we waited for the satellite folks to come out from Memphis and fix the dish. They were even nice enough not to charge us the standard service charge after I spent some time on hold and then with customer service, explaining how we don’t need the short end of the stick.

It is another cost of living in the country. And it’s worth it. Plus we don’t spend all of our time watching Red make Eric’s ass into a hat. We have to save some for Fresh Prince, delivered fresh on DVD.