Rationing

As homesick as we (ok, mainly me) have been, the sting of being so far away has really been lessened through regular texting (so glad I decided to get a cellphone – especially since we still don’t have a home phone, but that’s a whole other annoying story I won’t get into), emails and Skype. I think we’re actually talking more to our families now than before we left, and it’s been really great!

You’ll recall my post about internet pricing plans from when we were researching pre-move, that we only get 10GB of bandwidth a month. I honestly didn’t understand how little that was when I checked our account usage a few days ago and noticed that in the past two weeks we’ve used 82% of our cap. I was floored! How did that even happen? I feel as though we weren’t doing much…a few emails here, a couple of tweets there…I guess it all adds up! Coming off an 80GB cap in Ontario (that we never came close to reaching) to this has been an adjustment.

So we’ve decided to ration our internet usage. We’ll be watching it pretty closely for the rest of the month, and next month we’ll try to split it so we use no more than 5GB in the first half of the month, and see how we make out with that. We also turned off the wi-fi connections on the laptop and the iPad when they’re on and we’re not browsing, just in case we left an email program open or something like that. Every megabyte counts!

I suppose it’s not the end of the world if we go over the cap, they just bump us down to dial-up speeds (*SOB*) which is probably when I’ll cave and buy more bandwidth at a crazy price of $20/GB to bring us to the next month. If I was our internet provider I’d start offering gift certificates so people can gift extra bandwidth to others. When there’s no shopping, restaurants or entertainment, that’d be a great gift certificate idea! 

Oh technology, what would we do without you?

-L