All Signs Point to Crazy.

I don't often remember my dreams long enough to recount, but when I do, wow!  Do I sound like a crazy person!  If dreaming is genetic, I can safely blame my mother for my occasional night of the crazies - she has had some whoppers herself.

In recounting my dreams from last night, I had this epiphany (which seems so blatantly obvious that I don't know why I've never considered it before) that nightmares are so much more scary than your typical horror movie because the characters are real.  Whereas the people in the movies are just fictional characters with no connection to you or your life, the people in your dreams are actually real people that you know and care about and the threats on them seem real enough to cause a genuine fear for their safety.  A horror movie can only go so far to draw you in, but when people from your real life are involved - ACK!

But I'm jumping ahead of myself...
I don't put much stock into dream interpretation.  For the most part dreams are just those random miss-firings in your brain late at night which can cause some *ahem* interesting stories.

So, I'm driving down a street on my way back to work after a lunch break.  I didn't actually recognize any of the streets though and I accidentally missed the street that I should have turned at.  Rather than turning around, I simply turned at the next street in an attempt to reconnect to my original route.  That street (of course...) snaked around into a part of town where I felt completely lost and I ended up at a road that had the asphalt all ripped up and was under construction.  There was no obvious sign of any construction workers present though, and no cars driving on the road at that moment either, so I took my chances and carefully pulled out onto the road.  Within minutes I had cars barreling towards me and had to do some fancy maneuvering to avoid being hit.  Turns out that the road had been narrowed to a single lane with construction workers on either end directing traffic.  They had neglected, however, to block off the intersecting side streets and unbeknownst to me, I had pulled into oncoming traffic.  *sigh* So, I pulled a U-turn right there in the middle of the road and headed in the opposite direction with the flow of traffic ....all in plain sight of a cop.

The cop follows me but doesn't put on his lights.  Thinking that he chose to ignore my little traffic incident, I relax a bit and and pull up to a stop at a red traffic light with the rest of the vehicles.  At this point, the cop is right behind me, and what does he do?  Right there at the intersection he puts his car in park, hops out, and comes to my window for a chat.  By now, the light has turned green and the rest of the traffic is long gone.

"Ma'am" he says, "Do you know that on August 8 you were clocked on radar going 170km/hr in a 40km/hr zone?"

My heart was beating between my ears so loudly that that I don't have a clue what he said after that - fines, charges, speeding, racing, way more than 50km/hr over the limit, court, license suspension, vehicle impoundment, jail?....  Holy crap!  How? I don't remember doing that.  Why would I ever do that?? How am I going to pay for it?  I don't think my car will even go that fast.  How am I going to get to work? And why did it take 2 1/2 months for them to tell me that I had a speeding charge?

Seems mostly believable, right?  And then the scene changed.

I was at church.  There were a lot of people there - many more than normal.  Lots of kids too.  I was sitting near the front, and it seemed to be at night.  Our church pastor was standing in front of a projection screen telling a story.  I was still thinking far too much about this speeding charge to pay any attention to what he was saying, but I was starting to wonder why the picture on the screen had a cartoon version of a meadow with a bunch of bunnies on it.  And then one of the bunnies started changing shape because it was holographic or something.  Seemed perfectly normal.

He may have been telling a story about some trip he had been on somewhere.  He caught my attention when he mentioned that moose droppings, when placed on an incline will roll downhill at an ever increasing speed without stopping.  Seriously.  That's what he said.

Suddenly, I realized THAT'S what must have happened the day I was clocked driving so fast!  I was driving along at a perfectly acceptable speed and just as I passed the radar gun, a speeding ball of moose poop flew by and threw the radar gun out of whack!  I'm not guilty!  Praise God! 

And then my alarm clock went off.  It was 7:30am and dark, so naturally I hit the snooze button.  I hate waking up in the dark in the morning.  More often than not, I transport myself back to dreamland almost instantly.

Unfortunately for me, my 9 minute snooze turned into 9 minutes from hell with myself, my mother, and my bf frantically running from a big black tornado of doom bearing down on the local Sears store.  This particular dream was cut short by that pesky alarm clock and simply ended in a total state of panic and terror.  What a great way to wake up on a dreary Monday morning!  The ensuing dream related brain haze left me so bewildered that I didn't remember where I was and had trouble finding my own bathroom.  Suffice to say, it was scary.

It's too bad that I don't have a very active imagination while awake, otherwise I could write the next big Halloween horror flick and make millions!

Highspeed hangup

The trouble of moving from a city to a very, very small village is that you can no longer take high speed internet for granted.  Where there is a plethora of highspeed (DSL, Cable, Fibre Optic) choices in the highly-populated places, there is but a small handful of options in the boondocks. 

Now don't get me wrong, I love living in the boondocks. One could even say that I feel no shame, I'm proud of where I came from; I was born and raised in the boondocks. 


However, I've also come to love highspeed internet.

So, here are my choices:

1. Dial-up.  My parents cruise dial-up at a whopping 14.4kbps.  It is like watching paint dry, except more boring.  It takes half an hour to check their email, and they've literally never run a computer update.

2. There is actually free access to Satellite internet at my new place of residence; one of the perks of living above a coffee shop.  Satellite is incredibly expensive and not something I would ever recommend to anyone.  We get average download speeds of something like 500kbps.  Faster than dial-up; it's tolerable if all you want to do is check facebook over and over and over again.  (honestly, that's about all I do anyway...)  However, if you want to, say, stream video, watch youtube, download computer updates, sign up for NetFlix, or shop for a new game on a Wii, well... there's this thing called 'throttling' that kicks in after about 5 minutes and grinds your internet connection to a halt.  It's the provider's way of making sure that everyone gets equal and fair access to the satellite signal.  It sucks.  Mostly, this form of internet is tolerable because it's free to me.  If I had to pay for it, I would not be a happy customer.

3. Broadband internet is something the county has been funding in order to bring highspeed to the rural people of Southwestern Ontario.   If you're willing to pay $85/month, you can get really great speeds of up to 5mbps.  It's a good choice if you don't mind putting up a $700 tower/lightening rod on your roof.  Unfortunately, one company hired by the county to provide this service oversold the bandwidth, didn't invest enough into equipment to keep up with demand, and actually went bankrupt.  Is that something I actually want to invest $700 in?  Not really...

Which leads me to my last choice for highspeed in the boondocks:

4. The Sony Ericsson W35.  AKA the 'Rogers Rocket Hub', or the 'Bell Turbo Hub'.  The idea being that you take this little unit, plug it into an outlet, and it uses the local 3G cellular network to create a wifi hotspot in your home.  It's a great idea.  They promise speeds of up to 7.2mbps.  It costs as little as $35/month.  You can connect up to 15 things to the internet all at once.  [Internet sticks are currently boasting speeds of up to 21mbps but can only be attached to one thing at a time, and are significantly more expensive.]  The hub even has an option to add a phone (VoIP) for a reasonable $20/month - which would be great because we're currently working with just cellphones.

The BF and I decided that the Hub would be a viable option.  So, today on my lunch hour, I went to the local Rogers desk in the mall with the intentions of purchasing one of these units.  To my benefit, the sales guy was in his early 20's - so you know that he knows a thing or two about the system and how it works. 

Upon my request of a Rocket Hub, he immediately told me, (without even showing me a unit), that they are currently experiencing huge network problems and, during peak demand times, it is very unlikely I'd even be able to connect to the internet.  He said that he himself can rarely access the internet over his own personal Rogers cellphone between the hours of 8am and midnight.  He also said that that it is not just a Roger's problem, but an industry-wide problem.  Essentially, the popularity of accessing the internet through cellphones, smartphones, internet sticks, and hubs has created such a strain on the network that nothing is getting through.  Obviously it's a problem they're working on, but I bet it's not one they'll readily admit.

Would it be a surprise to know that I walked away today without a Hub?  Strange that I didn't want to shell out $150 and sign up for a 2 year contract at a minimum of $35/month for something that can't guarantee me internet access, eh?

So my question is, where is the CRTC in all of this?  Shouldn't they, (or someone, anyone), be governing the sale of these devices to ensure that demand doesn't outpace supply?  If I'm going to purchase a service, shouldn't the provider actually have to provide the service?  Shouldn't that be, like, law or something?  Or at the very least, good business practise.

For now, we'll just keep limping along with satellite internet.

That thing they do to keep adults entertained

Muppets are still awesome.