Saturday, May 1, 2010

Weeds, Snakes and Satellite.. Oh My!!

Today Harry and I were working on miscellaneous things around the house. First up was Hughes Net.

Some of you guys might remember that we got our ‘High Speed Internet’ through satellite via Hughes Net. Well to make a long story short it works sorta. It might be high speed internet, but the connection quality leaves something to be desired. On top of that you can’t use it for Skype calls at all and you were limited on what you could upload and download a day. Paying about 120 bucks a month for that just didn’t seem to be worth it. And our local ‘Canyon Wave’ which is free to us, since the tower sits on our land, has a way better connection quality. True it’s not high speed internet, the speed is just a little below DSL… Well you can’t watch streaming video… you have to wait until it has loaded about 1/2 of the content… but we’ve gotten used to that.

In the last few month the expense for Hughes Net didn’t seem to be justified anymore. So we decided to cancel our 2-year contract with Hughes Net prematurely. In order to do that we had to pay them a penalty of 400 bucks. You can recover about 200 bucks if you send modem, power supply and radio transmitter of the dish back. So today we removed the radio transmitter. So I climbed up onto the roof and started removing the radio transmitter according to the instructions that Harry read out loud from below. Actually the instructions sound way more difficult than they are. It turned out to be pretty much a piece of cake.

Next up was weed removal. Considering the amount of weeds and the amount of land we own… pulling it by hand is just not feasible. Of course you could just use a weed whacker to keep the weeds somewhat in check. So we looked into different solutions. The thing with chemical weed removers is that they are not only harmful to your pets, but the are also getting introduced into the ground water table. And especially if you get your drinking water from your own well, that’s just not a smart idea. So we finally found some complete organic remedies to remove weeds. Most of them are based on vinegar. So we mixed it up and sprayed a ‘test lot’ with that remedy. Now we’re waiting and see what’s going to happen. I will keep you guys posted on that progress.

Later that day Harry came running in and say I had to go outside and see something, he took me over to the side of our house pointed out a 4 foot snake. We knew we had snakes on our property but never seen one. The only reason we saw this one was because Daisy got way to overexcited when she came across it on her walk. We're not quite sure what kind of snake it was, but we're absolutely positive that it wasn’t a rattlesnake. Guess that just goes along with living in a rural area.

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