Haven

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Addressing Comments

For some reason, I haven’t been receiving comments to my email, so I’ve been missing the fury behind the scenes.

Nicole asked why I am expecting other people to pay for the booster. Well, I’m not. I’ve been crunching numbers for days trying to figure out how the hell I’m going to make this happen this month. It’s either the booster or I find an apartment in town for the rest of my time here. I’m just grateful the company in Texas is helping me spend my money in the right place.

Yes, I had a very good month of July. I also had the July money earmarked for several other things because I have been backed up on other things. The booster wasn’t in the budget so I’m now having work extra hours to make up for it. I have been doing 14-hour days now since about July 15th with no end in sight because of this extra $1,200 expense. Yes, I can cover it. But it is causing me stress that I shouldn’t be experiencing. Just because you can pay for something doesn’t mean you can afford it.

I’m never made such a blatant a public request for help in my seven years full-timing. I didn’t ask for help when I had $4,000 worth of damage after losing my brakes on the Sea to Sky Highway. I didn’t ask for help after my car was totaled and motorhome home being badly damaged after being rear ended in 2012. I didn’t ask for help after my truck broke down in New Orleans in early 2013. I didn’t ask for help when I had breakdown after breakdown coming north in 2013, which was the same time I didn’t ask for help putting down my cat because it was going to cost my entire food budget for the entire month. And speaking of food, I didn’t ask for help in February of 2014 when a client was a month late paying me and I literally had nothing to eat in the house for three days or in December of 2014 when I got dropped without warning by a client and had no income for a month while stranded in a foreign country. Just a few examples of the top of my head.

I’ve hinted at times that I could use some help and been very grateful to receive it in the form of blog donations, a meal out, or a place to park my rig while watching other people in my online community hold fundraisers for other RVers in distress and come out in droves to help.

I haven’t asked for help because I believe in personal accountability and that my budget shortfalls are not anyone else’s responsibility. But you know what? This isn’t a budget shortfall. This isn’t something I could have prevented because I sure as hell didn’t vote for the government that gave SaskTel all this power.

Yes, I chose to live here. But come on, was I that crazy to believe that a community located between the U.S. border and the Transcanada, the most densely populated part of all the other provinces, would not be online at SOME point in the next decade?!

So going through GoFundMe was more of a social exercise and these four ladies who commented on my last post definitely helped to prove my theory:

How many people hear of someone in distress halfway around the world and rush to send them help when there is someone in their own community needing help? It’s as though because we are in the first world, we are so much better off than anyone else that we shouldn’t have the audacity to ask for more.

I don’t blow my own horn the way some people do on their blogs and talk about what I do for other people and how much time I volunteer or how I make it an effort when I am financially able to to take someone else out. I don’t talk about the hundreds if not thousands of hours I have donated to answering the questions of other RVers, although I might have mentioned once or twice that blogging has been at times nearly a full time job.

So pardon me for saying that for once, it’s my turn to get some help. Nobody has ever offered to hold a fundraiser for me, so I’m holding it for myself. Some of you might be lucky to have parents or family to go when times are tough. I’ve been on my own for a very long time. You are my community. And like with any community, there are those who help each other out and there are those who don’t. I’d rather be part of the community. Sometimes you give and sometimes you receive. That’s how it works.

Once again, thank you to everyone who has saved me about 12 hours of work towards paying for the booster.

BTW, yes, it is for work, but I’ll be lucky to be allowed to claim a third of the cost on my taxes.

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An Update About my GoFundMe Campaign For a Stronger Cell Signal Booster

In response to a comment left by Linda last night, I’ve updated my GoFundMe Campaign For a Stronger Cell Signal Booster:

This is the booster I need to buy: https://www.repeaterstore.com/collections/home-office-kits/products/surecall-triflex?variant=858334729

The tech who recommended it understands my topographic situation and based on how my current booster is working promises a 30-day money back guarantee that I will see a ‘night and day difference.’

With shipping to Canada, this booster comes in at just over 1,200CAD. It is ridiculous that I need to buy something like that when there is a great signal in the uninhabited hills above my valley, but that’s my situation.

My community is slow to get together on projects like these. I’m the only person who needs internet access NOW. Please help me improve my internet situation in the next couple of weeks rather than months.

How does this help the bigger issue of the Canadian government giving telecom monopolies too much power? It doesn’t. But it could change the life of one person in distress.

I’ll close off by sharing a story Dr. Jane Goodall told me one day that has always resonated with me and which I feel is relevant here:

There was a man taking a morning walk at the beach. He saw that along with the morning tide came hundreds of starfish and when the tide receded, they were left behind. With the morning sun rays, they would die. The tide was fresh and the starfish were alive. The man took a few steps, picked one, and threw it into the water. He did that repeatedly.

Right behind him there was another person who couldn’t understand what this man was doing. He caught up with him and asked, “What are you doing? There are hundreds of starfish. How many can you help? What difference does it make?”

This man did not reply, took two more steps, picked up another one, threw it into the water, and said, “It makes a difference to this one.”

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GoFundMe Campaign For a Stronger Cell Signal Booster

I have  started a GoFundMe Campaign for a Stronger Cell Signal as a social experiment. We are so quick to help those in the developing world, but what about closer to home?

My community doesn’t have cellular service and won’t for at least the next 10 years, so I have to use a signal booster to amplify the very weak signal that passes over our valley. They range in price but because the signal I can tap into is so weak, I need a commercial-grade unit. Your donation to my GoFundMeCampaign will help me towards the purchase of the booster.

I didn’t vote for this government and I sure didn’t vote for the government that gave telecom monopolies power to deny me affordable internet access that can meet the needs of a 21st century user. My internet issues go beyond just me. It is egregious and unconscionable to me that people are dying all over the world today to take away from the governments of developing countries this kind of power over their people, but when it’s happening in a first world country, I just get told to get a grip and move. I will not be displaced!

Please help if you can. Just letting me know you’re listening would be appreciated right now.

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How I Cook

Now that I’m eating red meat again and have rediscovered the deliciousness that is a hamburger, I’m bringing home ground beef. It is one of the cheapest meats I can buy around here and I cut it with ground pork, which is so cheap they are practically giving it away. One of the things I’ve wanted to try to make is meatloaf. It was simply not something we had growing up, so I’d never made it.

On my break this afternoon, I Googled meatloaf recipes to see what’s in them. It turned out that the common ingredients were ground meat, seasoning, bread crumbs, egg, and ketchup as a topping/sauce, and that the baking time for about a pound of meat was 45 minutes to an hour.

Seasoning is to taste, bread crumbs are a filler, egg is a binder, and ketchup is sweet and slightly tangy sauce. Okay, I could work with that and what I had in my pantry.

Come dinner prep time, I dumped the following into a big bowl:

-about a pound total of ground pork and ground beef

-an amount that looked right of garlic powder and onion soup mix

-a small handful of quick cooking oats for my filler

-ground chia seeds for my binder

-a little water to make up for the lack of moisture from an egg

-BBQ sauce for the topping

I mixed everything but the BBQ sauce well, adding a little more water until the consistency looked ‘right’.

I then put it into my silicon loaf pan, smoothed out the top, and set a time for 4o minutes since my oven runs hot.

At the 30ish minute mark, I did a quick check and the juices were still pink. At the 40ish minute mark, the juices were brown, so I checked the internal temperature and the loaf was just about done. I spread BBQ sauce over the top and returned the loaf to the oven for another 10 minutes.

End result? A perfectly seasoned, perfectly loaf shaped (and not crumbly — it holds its shape!), meatloaf good enough for company.

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There is something about cooking that makes me feel like a magician. I very, very rarely have complete fails and utter successes like these are most often the norm.

But you can see why I rarely share ‘recipes’ — I don’t use them. I’ve been cooking for so long that I can eyeball measurements. I know how certain foods look at a point in their cooking time, so I very rarely overcook or burn anything and I can get the meat and the perfectly cooked veggies to the table at the same time.

I’m completely self-taught from watching my parents in the kitchen and just doing a heck of a lot of it professionally when I worked in a group home as a teenager. I think that for this winter, it might be fun to find a cooking class in Maz!

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Canadian Telecom Monopolies Have Too Much Power

So this is the bureaucratic hole I am in right now: no reliable internet access at home and no hope to EVER get it. I have been communicating with SaskTel extensively and that is their final verdict: no future plans to develop in my area.

Because I am in such a deep rural area, the only option is cellular internet. That service is absolutely awesome and reasonably priced where it exists. If I could get that service, I would be very happy. Right now, I pay for it, but because there is no service in my community (zero bars), I can only get a tenuous signal using a cell signal amplifier/booster. I frequently have to drive 3KM up a hill to a neighbour’s lentil field just to send an email with a small text attachment.

SaskTel holds the monopoly for telecom development in this province. In 2013, they put up a tower in my area, that in theory, would have connected my community to the 21st century. Only they did not corroborate topographic and population data and so that tower’s signals pass right over my community and essentially serve no one.

SaskTel refuses to investigate this mistake and tell me that they don’t plan to do any development in my area in at least the next 10 years.

Today, I got a flier from Industry Canada (where I used to work, coincidentally) telling me, hey, high speed internet is coming your way! I visited their site, Connecting Canadians and saw that this is FALSE. My community is not on the books to get any infrastructure changes. And according to my ISP (ie. SaskTel), we’re on the coverage map, so why should they have to do anything else? Yes, we are on the coverage map, but this is a mistake. Because we are in a valley, the signal from the tower that was meant to serve us actually passes right over us!

This ‘Connecting Canadians’ initiative is going to supposedly bring high speed internet to 98% of Canadians. SaskTel’s development in the last several years has brought connectivity to about 98% of Saskatchewan. I find it hard to swallow that my community of 500 people, never mind all the tourists who come to visit our petroglyphs, museums, and campgrounds, are part of that 2%.

I’ve been to what I thought was the end of the world, like northern Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Communities there are extremely well connected. They get a lot of attention and money. But no one seems to know about this little strip of land between the TransCanada and the US border, between Alberta and Lake Superior, that is still living in the dark ages. And when they find out about it, they don’t care.

I have no other option for internet except for dial up or satellite. That SaskTel considers these to be a reasonable alternative to high speed broadband internet is hilarious.

I need internet for my business and to stay in touch with the outside world (we don’t have cable TV or radio out here either!). In 2011, the United Nations declared internet access to be as basic a human right as access to fresh water. I live in a non-isolated community in a developed country and I will never have internet access in a place I love and was hoping to make a life.

According to federal law, my fate entirely rests in the hands of one company with an extraordinary amount of power: “Canadians currently without 5 Mbps service are encouraged to contact local Internet service providers to discuss the possibility of extending high-speed Internet access to their area. The final decision to offer high-speed Internet in a given area rests with individual ISPs” (emphasis mine).

This is the second time in my life that I have found myself in this position. The first was when I lived a mere 50KM from Ottawa in the heart of cottage country where politicians and celebrities have homes. If I still lived there, I would still be waiting for cellular and broadband service. So with that knowledge, I know that my situation here in Saskatchewans is truly hopeless.

I would be grateful if you share this story to show the kind of malarkey we get from the Canadian government. The ‘Connecting Canadians’ initiative is a joke . If they really wanted to connect us, they wouldn’t give telecom monopolies all the power.