Dropping back in ~

In 2004, we moved down here with a simpler, slower lifestyle being one of our goals.  

We were really looking forward to a life where the only folks we'd see would be those we'd put forth an effort to see.  We'd become tired of seeing people every time we ventured into our front yard...take for example the teenage girl who lived across the cul de sac and her live in boyfriend.  Their fights were legendary and on display for anyone who lived in our circle who stepped out the front door.  We'd put up a privacy fence quickly after moving there because of the apparent inability to have a cuppa and a read on the back porch without it being an open invitation for a neighbor or two to come on over and chat.  I'd once been burning old tax records in our brick barbecue and had a neighbor peek over the fence to ask what I was burning....these kinds of things were wearing on us...we were ready to get out to the country.

We'd let our cell phones go a year or two before we moved down here and made it one whole year before our daughter gave us pre-paids for Christmas. The phone lines out here in cropland aren't very reliable...the phone doesn't always ring into the house; instead it goes straight to voice mail.  In the early days, we still were using dialup so I got a lot of flack for "always being on line" when I knew that wasn't the case.  

No one had our brick numbers but very close friends and family members so we were still pretty unconnected and available to folks only when we wanted to be....until it began to slowly change.  David was the first to get a real cell phone again in 2009; Nikki got it for him on a whim because it would only cost her $10.00 for an extra line on her plan.  

On Hunter's first day of high school in August 2010, he went to school with a brand new cell phone because he was going to be doing a lot of after school things and we'd need to stay in touch about pick up times etc. (which change at the drop of a hat because teachers and sponsors assume that every child and every parent has a cell).  On day three, there was an emergency at school....our phone didn't ring in the house and I didn't know about it until hours later.  I was at the AT&T store the next morning getting my own cell phone.  

By December of 2010, David and I had both gotten iPhones for Christmas...what a change from the old cells eh?  Now we were texting each other all day long; surfing the internet from wherever, taking photos and videos and getting them onto the computer without much effort.  Although we didn't give the numbers out to people at first, the ease of texting our friends and family and anybody else we wanted to quickly communicate with soon had us using our cells exclusively.  No one even calls the house phone anymore...

And now it comes to this...in April I finally replaced my ten year old Dell with a new Mac laptop.   I plugged in my iPhone and up pops iPhoto and iTunes....within seconds I've loaded photos and downloaded music and....well most of you have probably been using all these latest technologies for years...but I dropped out remember?

I've been turning our old VCR movies into DVD's, uploading the new movies to iTunes and putting them on our iPhones and....now I'm looking into getting Apple TV .....and well, all I've got to say is this...with all the new technology, its pretty easy to drop out but still remain pretty darn connected.  

Well, I do have one more thing to say..."once you try a Mac, you'll never go back"....!