Slower than a heard of turtles stampeding through peanut butter

Although I would like to take credit for this clever title, I got it from pinterest which is the source for most of my life now and I sincerely hope that the MLA people have someone on the task of figuring out how to properly cite a pin from pinterest. After all, they have already figured out how to cite a tweet.

My home internet is slow. I don’t mean like “waiting a few extra seconds for a youtube video to buffer” kind of slow. I mean like “most of the time I cannot even dream of playing a youtube video because it WILL NOT HAPPEN” kind of slow. No joke. It’s easier for us to watch videos on our phone’s 3G than it is on our home internet.

My inspiration for this post came while I spent a solid half an hour trying to get one, JUST ONE, picture into my previous post. It took me that long to find a viable Wendy’s logo image, get the upload dialog box to show up, and get it to properly fit into the post before publishing it.

Here are just a few examples of how slow my internet is:

• It took about twelve hours for pinterest to finally load yesterday.
• We have lived here about nine months and have yet to get Netflix to work on our PS3.
• It can sometimes take ten minutes to load one blog page. Not exactly media heavy.
• Trying to load animated weather maps will not happen.
• I absolutely cannot have more than five tabs open at once and expect them all to load property.

That's just to name a few. It's not always horrendous. Sometimes, it depends on what kind of mood our internet is in. For instance, we managed to watch season 4 of Arrested Development in just two sittings. Now...I had to get out my old PC laptop and hook it up to the TV via VGA cord for us to be able to watch it on an actual television because, like I mentioned, we cannot get Netflix to work on our PS3, but it still played. Things have gotten so bleak that I got a text from AT&T that my data usage exceeded 3 gb, and therefore my data speeds on my phone will now decrease. That's a different post to itself.

All of this creates a crapstorm of difficulty in really making a high quality blog that includes pictures, videos, drawings, comics, and whatnot. Is that going to keep me from blogging altogether? I hope not. I suppose if I want to illustrate a post or add lots of pictures, I’ll just have to go to my in-laws or the library. I would say Panera, but the closest one is about 35 minutes away. More evidence to support the idea that we live in Mordor...which I think is what I’m actually going to call where we live. No offense to the internet, but I don’t want everyone knowing where we actually live. I digress.

Words cannot describe the first world problems type of inconvenience this creates. I fully realize that there are far worse problems in the world and that there could be far worse things even in my own life, but guess what? That doesn’t make it any less frustrating to deal with.

I've heard people say that you should never pray for patience because then God will present you with the opportunity to be patient, in other words, he'll make you wait. I do not recall praying such a thing in recent history, but our turtle runner internet has undoubtedly been an exercise in patience. That being said, I would much rather continue to be patient regarding crappy internet than continue to be patient about finding a freaking teaching job. More on that another day.