Sep 14th, 2013

Author: marionmccune

Moving toward moving

We’re getting a bit closer to the big move now and went to see our new house today.  This time it was a beautiful day (not like when we decided to buy it when it was pouring with rain) and we actually saw the extent of our land for the first time.  There is way more space than we thought there would be and the river (which we thought was in a gorge all the way round our boundary) is in fact accessible in places.  There is a small waterfall and a pool which looks as though it would be good for swimming next year (weather permitting).

We also found out from the lady we are buying from that as well as deer and red squirrels (saw two today) there are other mysterious creatures which dig up the lawn from time to time, together with something which is eating all the fish from the pond.   We will need to find out what this is – the vendor thinks it is mink – but it may be otters.  I am not sure what the cats are going to make of this – I’m hoping they will decide that discretion is the better part of valor if they run into any of the local wildlife.

The cats also got bells on their collars this week in an attempt to protect the wildlife from them.  We were surprised because the noise doesn’t bother them at all – however not so sure that it is going to be an effective measure because Schrodi has already had (at least one) mouse since then.

We now have the phone number and were able to do an official ‘Sam Knows’ check on the ADSL broadband which came out at 2MB.  We have already tried it and know that it is 4MB so it is obviously a bit conservative in its estimates.  R is speaking to a provider about the satellite broadband tomorrow.  The basic consumer service is 20MB downstream and 6MB up, but we already know from trying it out at my parents’ house that the latency is too high for live testing over this kind of link.  We did notice however that the same provider are offering a business service with (for some reason) a slightly lower downstream rate, but which apparently specifically supports RDP and VOIP.  We are a bit dubious about how this can be (speed of light etc) but certainly prepared to try it out – if we can use RDP over it this would be great, particularly as we have moved most of our systems to the cloud (Office 365 and Azure) anyway.

Only bad thing we found out today was that there was no rubbish collection to the house – we have to take it about half a mile down the road.  An incentive to try to recycle more I suppose.

Twelve days to go…..