There's A Giant Mushroom In Our Yard...

It was always clear that dial-up Internet access was going to be inadequate. Cable TV is not available at Honeyhill; fiber is a pipe dream; even DSL is out of range. Our only hope was to look up. Satellite Internet service is available most places, but it's the 2nd worst of all possible options. We did some research to try to find service providers, and finally settled on Wildblue. We had the advantage of knowing that they had serviced our property before--we have a Wildblue satellite dish on a post at the bottom of our hill, and cable running into the house. So we called them, only to find that they were NOT available where we were anymore--their satellite was out of slots. They transferred us to our 2nd choice, HughesNet. (By the way, if you let us refer you, we BOTH get $50 gift cards...talk to me!) HughesNet is one of the piecemeal remnants of the old financial and manufacturing empire of Howard Hughes, aviation pioneer, eccentric, and zillionaire. They signed us up and arranged for an installer to arrive on 3 March. 3 March was raining. Not hard, but everything was slippery. The installer arrived, as promised, but he won't do roof installs in rainy weather--it's dangerous, and the sealing goop for the holes he drills doesn't set properly, leading to leaks later. We offered the Wildblue post, but the post was too small for the HughesNet mount, and the angle was wrong for the HughesNet satellite. If we wanted Internet service, we needed a new pole. And that is why we have a giant mushroom growing in our yard.