It should be obvious that this photoooo I took on the moominbeach this afternoon has nothing to do with reality. I took it with the Hipstamatic Salvador 84 lens on my iPhone and one of my fave Hipstamatic films, Big Up. It’s not real, but alternate moominbeach shorelines like this one have figured in my dreams since I was a small child.

I don’t really want to talk about shoreline dreams today though. You know, 15 years ago or maybe more, we began using the internet up here at the beach. It was a dial-up modem back then and one of my fav-o-rite memories of that was one evening when I was checking my email and somebody was sending me a LARGE photo or something. It was taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r and a couple of middle school-aged beach urchins were anxiously awaiting me to get off the computer so they could use it. I was seated at the edge of the double bed upstairs in the front of the cabin and they were impatiently hanging out behind me on the bed. F-i-n-a-l-l-y, an email came through from our friend The Marquis. Attached was a HUGE picture of The Marquis himself and a friend. They were wearing Hawaiian shirts and holding a pig. Explosive laughter from behind me indicated that the photo was worth the wait.

I bought my first-generation iPhone in August 2007. The next day I picked up Uber Kayak Woman from Daytwa Metro and we drove to the moominbeach and I posted a blahg entry from my phone. I POSTED A BLAHG ENTRY FROM MY PHONE… … … !!! Because I could.

Fast forward a bit. We have a wonderful DSL here now which reliably supplies us and the cabins on either side of us with broadband wifi. Aaaaannnnndddd… We have the 4G network all over the place. Here in the Yooperland. We occasionally get a nasty note telling us we’re in Canada but usually within a minute or so, we’re back on the 4G here in the United Snakes of America.

And text messaging? Lemme tell you. Today. After a bumping session with Our Northern Correspondent down at Doelle’s today (that would be a whole ‘nother blahg post, it was hilarious (and ultimately successful)!), the texting began. I made a mad dash in to Glen’s Grokkeries to obtain some provisions. As I arrived in the parking lot, I saw a text message from ONC offering onions from her garden (she knew that I did NOT want to go in to town). I texted back that we would love some onions but that I was also buying beer and beef and eggs and… did I say beer? (There have been so few folks here this summer that the Beer Refrigerator isn’t even plugged in!) Anyway, after I got back to the beach, ONC dropped off some gorgeous little onions, perfect for our kebabs tonight.

And then there was the whole vanilla extract thing. Mouse needed vanilla extract for some cookies and some bad person (aka, meeeee) blanketly got rid of a lot of herbs, spices, extracts and whatever after The Commander died. Thinking that a lot of that stuff was probably 40 years old or whatever but also just kind of cleaning myself out, yada yada yada. So, we talked about who might have vanilla extract on the beach and pretty soon Jane texted that there was some at the Old Cabin. Oh, and it wasn’t even old. Pooh needed it for something this summer. Anyway, the Old Cabin folks were happy to give us a teaspoon of vanilla extract, probably thinking something like, “Whew, that’s another teaspoon out of that bottle.

Anyway, it is fun to text back and forth between cabins and the beach and up the hill to ONC’s house and just kind of get things done that way. When I was a kid, getting things done often meant meeeee running back and forth between cabins to ferry provisions to other people or fetch things. Or whatever.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 1st, 2013 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.