SteveAndersen.com

I’m back ya’ll. Technically I have been back for about a week now, but I have been so completely swamped with moving junk, and still am, that this is the first time I have stopped long enough to post anything.

Man, the country is strange.

The lady across the street from me (the only other human in a bout a mile) has a flock of sheep. She had them shorn earlier this week, and now they look all naked. I feel weird about looking at them.

I went to a real, old fashioned country “True Value” yesterday. I felt like I opened the door on 1948. Wow. Who knew those places even existed?

I feel sort of like I am living in a movie. But with better scripts, and the sets are real. If you think about somewhere between “Field of Dreams” and “Footloose” and you have the right idea. Except, would that make me the uptight preacher, or the streetwise city slicker? I am not going to consider that one too much, because a) it might cause some sort of character / anti-character reaction that could be bad for all of mankind, and b) I think it is relatively obvious that while I am a country pastor, I am far from uptight about it, much to the chagrin of some of my colleagues. That, and the more I think about it, the more I have decided I am much more like James Earl Jones. Speaking of which – I am after all only an hour and fifteen minutes drive from the actual “Field of Dreams” movie site. I told you.

Wow. Rural.

Amazingly I have “high speed” internet access. It is nowhere near the high speed I would like, or have become accustomed to, but it IS better than dialup. Die dialup, die. If I can get a real connection out here (where Moses wandered with the Israelites for 40 years) then there is no excuse for using, or having to use dialup anywhere anymore. It is about bloody time.

The connection is wireless – it runs from an antenna / transceiver (using POE - nifty) mounted on the front of my house to a tower 5 miles away. It is supposedly 300K a second – not screaming, not DSL or Cable speeds by any stretch of the imagination – but it gets the job done. There is a bit of latency I am not used to, but I think that is server lag at the ISP office more than any transmission issue. They are using one of the 802.11 standards, but it is not b, or g, and no one I have asked seems to know which one it is. The advertising says it is proprietary – which I am sure is BS. I COULD look up the wikipedia article on 802.11x and figure out which one is dedicated to WAN build out – but I don’t really care. Supposedly they will be giving me a speed upgrade in a few months. I dare to dream. Either way – for my needs, most of the time, this is getting the job done very well. If there wasn’t the server lag I would be completely delighted.

So anyway – I am back, and now you will be forced to endure more of my mindless babbling. It should actually get more interesting from here. I totally need to write a book titled “City Boy Moves to the Country.” Chapter one would be titled “I’m glad dryer sheets don’t smell like THAT!” Chapter two would probably be “A through exegesis of a John Cougar Mellencamp song.”