Ah...but I have all the critters walking and flying past my window PLUS internet. Once we went through the hell of a couple of months of getting it to work, it has worked really well...no interruptions. Surprising, because when we lived in the city, we had frequent 'net and phone interruptions with Century Link. We had one time this past winter when we had no power (no 'net, no phone, and, worst of all, no water), but it was a really short outage. A couple of weeks ago, they replaced several poles along our road, so we had no power most of the day...but we knew a couple weeks in advance that would be the case. Because it was a Wed. when I ordinarily drive two hours each way to load bread donated by Dave's in the metro area, I switched my pickup day to Tues. in order to be home so that my spouse, who has elected not to do anything to be mobile, wouldn't be alone, isolated, without any way to get help...or force flush the john. I still have a couple of big containers of water on the front deck, which I'm gradually using to water newly-planted flowers in front. Much easier to use the stored water than drag 100' of hose around! However, the large flower beds out near the road require buckets of water dipped out of the creek as even 200' of hose doesn't reach all the way to the end of the largest bed.

There are disadvantages to living on acreage, like lots of "stuff" (not planted grass) to mow, lots of walking to do things, but there are advantages. One of the greatest is that, once I've mowed the acre or so around the house, from the road our place looks lovely. Of course, upon closer inspection, it's not an even green carpet, but from a distance it looks great. People who walk along our road often comment on what a beautiful place it is...but they don't spend two days every week trudging along behind the mower, or hours bent over weeding. Right now, I'm working on cutting the downed limbs that fell on the mowed area during the past winter, which was unusually windy. I piled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of limbs and limb tips near the woodpile. Shoot, one fair-sized tree fell right on the woodpile! Once I finish cutting the limbs that fell on areas we mow and the paths I've created, I'll start pulling limbs out of the wooded areas. The hundreds of acres next to our place has second growth alder on the lower slopes near the creek, so there are lots of chunks of firewood just waiting to be harvested.

The back of the place is all old-growth spruce, uphill and then back down to a little tributary creek that bubbles out of the ground in a miniature waterfall, then disappears under the roots of a huge tree only to reappear several feet away. It's a private little glen that I love to visit. We need to talk to the Parks Dir. in the nearby small town to ensure that this place will become a small nature park after we're gone...much better than allowing it to be sold, all the trees cut and replaced with dozens of houses and roads.