Station manager.

Living on this island is so completely different from my lifestyle in almost every conceivable way.  Fisherman has been here almost 2 years now, and he is still not fully acclimated to the way of life here - which makes me feel a wee tiny bit better about my meltdowns that I have had.

Living in the lower 48 I have never had to wonder where the water came from, or wonder how long it would take to fix a common household item.  I have always had access to FedEx, UPS, regular mail, a mailbox, etc.  I have always had the cable companies throwing money and men at me to get my business in attempts to steal it away from a rival company.  I have never had to worry about bandwidth issues when it comes to my own personal computing nor having to wait for several hours for a movie to download from iTunes.  To put it mildly, I consider myself a little bit "spoiled rotten".

When I arrived in Anchorage, Fisherman had done much of the leg work to ease the transition to island life by switching cell phone carriers, and purchasing a cable box, etc.  When I got to the island my new cell phone was waiting for me complete with a new number, new carrier, etc.  As I have stated my good and kindly Fisherman got us an iPhone so not EVERY aspect of my world would be such a BIG change...yeah, right.  Though I have an iPhone there is no 3G on the island.  This makes using the iPhone limited to being connected to a network.  If I am on the road, walking, at the store, etc., I cannot just google something or look it up.  I have to wait to get home or to the school where it has access to an internet network.  We literally use NO DATA while on this island whatsoever.  I have learned to...deal.  Finally the cost of the internet here it is almost (no exaggeration) $200 per month and we are limited in download and upload data - so, no video streaming at all, it would push us over our limit and further increase the internet bill.  ALL downloads and any major webinar etc., MUST be done at the school.

Television, also an epic tale.  When I arrived we watched DVD's or downloaded (at the school) episodes of our favorite TV shows.  We patiently waited for the cable box to arrive, then the actual satellite to arrive, then waited for a person with a satellite finder to help us hook it up, all to have it knocked loose and out of signal with the wind.  The brief 2 months we had cable television we watched news from San Francisco (extremely odd) which was considered our local station.  Fisherman and I have totally thrown up our hands at this point because we have approximately 11 weeks remaining here until the end of school. It is not even worth it to pay the monthly fee when the winds will inevitably pick up again, shake down the house, and fry our satellite connection, yet again.

Long story short, we have not seen one minute of Olympic coverage.  We have however kept up with "The Big Bang Theory", "Blue Bloods" and of course "Downton Abbey".

Chiseling on stone here in the Aleutians,

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