Week five, or about a month....

It is the start of week five of my Michigan sojourn--time goes by quickly up here in the woods.  Several weeks in May and now two weeks in June have convinced me that this is the correct job for me, so that is the overall positive take on all of this.  This is a good school with all the normal challenges of a community college in these changing times.  There are and will be enough challenges and tasks to keep this interesting!  I work with good people and that helps.  I just wonder if they know how good of a school this is or how great it can be--sometimes imagination is hard to see and measure.

I am getting settled in my house in the woods.  It is different to live surrounded so closely and completely with trees.  Generally I like it and really, it has been a goal to be so surrounded.  After all  this is what I have imagined for my 20 acres "back home."  Here it is just so complete.  I have driven on roads that appear to be almost tunnels through the trees and the trees do seem overly close sometimes.  But then they are beautiful, too.  I sat on my front porch yesterday for several hours and saw, felt and heard this.  It was windy and the wind was from all directions (keeping the mosquitoes at bay).  You could see the trees moving in all directions--the smaller trees swaying, the larger trees creaking and the leaves moving to and fro every which way.  The sound would swell from all directions but with imperfect stereophonic surround sound.  Sometimes it is pretty cool to live in the woods.

There are quibbles that I have to work out.  I am frustrated with cell coverage.  My goal was to use a hotspot of one kind of another, and while it sort of works, I will not be downloading any movies.  I can barely post a photo.  It took 17 minutes to download a book from those Kindle people.  You know, the people who say you can enjoy the book on your device in just a few moments?  So my provider has a solution.  Get high speed internet and then plug that into a network extender.  Then your wifi hotspot and your phone will work better.  I did mention that if I had high speed internet that  I probably wouldn't need a hotspot, but the clerk did not get the irony.  In the mean time, I am tired of wrapping myself in tin foil and hanging out of the top window by one arm if I want to make a call after 5:00.  I tried saran wrap but that didn't work as well and the neighbors were a bit put off by the view...

I have found that I just have to drive a bit for what I might want.  Tired of Folger's coffee?  Drive 45 miles.  Food from a different continent?  25-50 miles.  A really good grocery store with great  bread and cheese?  60-plus miles.  But finding all of this would have been a whole lot more challenging if I was in Bangladesh, so I am not isolated at all.  Comparatively.

Pictures are from yard mostly.  Included are views from my deck and flowers.  The road was taken (I'll let you figure that out) this morning on my way to work.