DSL, Day One

I'm having fun with my DSL today -- I jumped out of bed this morning and checked my e-mail in 30 seconds.

Okay, leaping out of bed is an overstatement, as I didn't get much sleep last night. Firstly, I have been persuaded to join a church choir, and the first rehearsal was last night. We finally hit a critical mass of things that persuaded me to do this. My voice is a bit rusty, and I really need to do more singing before the Big Choir Safari of 2007 (which hopefully will not be yet another repeat of the Bataan Choir Death Tours 1998, 2001, 2004, and 2006). This will be good practice. My friend who persuaded me to sing said "hey, we now have NO sopranos", so I figured that in this case no one would frown upon my rusty soprano voice and make me do really fancy auditions, so that was a plus. Also the church is close to my house, so it's not a huge schlep somewhere in upper DC or Maryland, and even I can make it there by 10 am on Sundays. And, as this was the reason that my friend gave as to why he joined this church and not a different one (the Catholic in me is still amused that people decide which churches to join -- God is God and church is church and you don't get much say about either), they have parking. Which where I live is a very big deal indeed. I have a church across the street from me with about 20 spaces, which makes the neighborhood unfun on a regular Sunday morning. So now I'm singing again, and virtuous. Hahahahahaha! Oh yes, and Episcopalian too. (Shh! Don't tell the Pope.)

Of course, by the time I got home it was 10 pm, and my DSL modem had finally arrived. I was tired, had early morning duty this morning, so I should have left it in the box and just waited until today to set it up. Riiiiiiiight. There was a new toy and there was no way I wasn't going to play with it. Actually, the most time it took to set up was to unwrap all the components in the packaging and connect the wires (click, click, click, plug, click. Flip the button). Whammo -- high speed! After years of dialup, just jumping around the pages was a new experience. I kept thinking I was just hitting cached pages. Nifty. I only played with it for about an hour, and then tried to go to bed, but I guess I was so excited I had trouble sleeping. So I staggered out of bed and checked the e-mail in the morning. Nothing exciting, unfortunately.

Additional upsides to DSL: I was able to download the Huckle-Bug in two minutes, rather than the usual one hour. Woooooooo! Also, I shall now be able to do more than play solitaire on my weekly lengthy chats with Mom. I love you Mom, but you do tend to go over the same stories week after week. And now I can answer most of her questions while on the phone, rather than having to e-mail them later.

Downsides: Now charity telemarketers can reach me while I'm browsing the net. Honestly. The one I got tonight had tried about 20 times in the last week, according to caller ID.