Working from a Rural Home in 2020

September has always felt like a new year to me with summer winding down and kids heading back to school. I have always felt a sense of excitement and I enjoy planning something new that I want to learn or revisiting my goals for the next few months. I also look forward to the local fall fairs happening throughout Grey County starting in late August and being held throughout the month of September. Seeing who has placed first in baking, floral, arts and crafts, photography, garden produce, bushels of grain, hay or straw bales, the tallest sunflower or longest zucchini is always fun. Quilts are arranged around the arena along with posters produced by students depicting safety on the farm. Outside the arena you can watch the 4H cattle and sheep shows, and the truck and tractor pulls draw a large audience. Plus (the best part) talking to people you haven’t seen in a very, very long time!

As the days get shorter and cooler, it isn’t as difficult to stay indoors and work. Speaking of working, I remembered something that happened 3 few years ago. I was working for a client who wanted to have short instructional videos on her website (pre-Covid when this was still relatively new). We were going to upload a 12 minute video to YouTube and then stream it onto her website. I started to upload the video and watched as the loader was calculating how long it was going to take… 1 hour… 3 hours…. 22 hours!  I left my computer alone and just kept watching the progress. Somehow the connection was lost and I had to start again. I checked the next morning, and it didn’t appear to be doing anything. Somehow the connection had been lost overnight and I had to upload it again. I decided to walk my client through the upload process over the phone and see if it was faster for her to upload the video than me. I explained what to do step by step and then said, “Now we just have to wait”. “No, it’s done!” she said. “Pardon? It’s done?? Are you sure?” I questioned. Something must have gone wrong, so I double checked. Sure enough, the video was uploaded to YouTube and ready to publish. What was going to take me 22 hours to upload was done in less than 1 minute. I was raised to follow the 10 commandments but right then and there I was breaking one…. I was coveting my neighbours high speed internet connection.

As published in Hello Country Magazine – September 2022 edition

Working from a Rural Home in the late 2010s

Summer is my favourite season by far. It’s now August and everyone is preparing for September, back to work and back to school. I wish summer would last as long as winter does here in Grey County.

In the June issue of Hello Country, I left off writing about the Rocket Hub wireless internet. It was a small box that looked like a router and had it’s own cell number, which made it portable. It was working quite well and was fairly fast for working online. Of course, everything is relative, fast for rural internet in 2014 is a lot different than fast for cable internet. We didn’t have Netflix or any other streaming devices yet, so it was adequate for working online. I had a flex plan, the top rate was $90 for up to 20GB of data, overage charges were $10 per GB. It didn’t take long before I was incurring overage charges as my monthly usage was easily surpassing 20GB.  The highest I reached was 45GB in one month and that was when I switched to Xplornet. 

Xplornet was the only mobile tower that reached our corner of Grey Highlands at the time.  I hired a local installer who also happened to buy hay from us. We discovered our farmhouse was in a bit of a hollow and couldn’t pick up the signal from the closest internet tower located in the hamlet of McIntyre. Our technician was tech savvy and climbed onto the roof of another building located at the corner of our farm and installed a dish about 6 feet in the air. He then installed radio technology that sent the signal from a small dish at the side of the building, to a dish at the side of the farmhouse, which then plugged into a router inside. 

Our download speed was now roughly 5mb/s and we were thrilled! Over the years Xplornet has been pretty reliable, but whenever I have an issue, it does become a problem. While on the phone with support, I will have to drive over to the other building to unplug the wireless receiver to reset it, then race back to the farmhouse to see if it is working. It shows what lengths we will go to when we are determined to connect with the outside world.

As published in Hello Country Magazine – August 2022 edition

Working from Home in the 2000s

Summer in the country

Ah July, such an amazing time of year, picnics, hiking, camping, barbecues with friends and family, sounds perfect. Too perfect. This is not a reality if you are a farmer or work in agriculture, like our family. This is a very hectic time of year; cutting hay, waiting 2 to 3 days for it to dry in the sun completely and then baling it. Large round bales are easy; they get loaded onto wagons and unloaded either inside coveralls or outside in long rows. Small square bales used to feed horses and sheep are much more work; they have to somehow get loaded onto the wagon, and somehow be unloaded into the barn for storage. On our farm the unloading is a manual process, requiring any available family member to unload off the wagon onto a hay elevator, which carries it up into the barn and then get grabbed by family members and stacked in the mow. This is usually done on the hottest days of July; the barn literally feels like an oven and the unfortunate workers in the barn down jugs of water after each load to keep hydrated.

The good thing is I work from home. The bad thing is I work from home so I help on the farm too. Sometimes that help is unloading a wagon or driving to our local farm equipment store to pick up parts or supplies. Mostly I help by preparing meals and delivering them to different locations on the farm while my husband and sons keep working in the fields. 

The weather can also cause a lot of stress if the hay has been cut and it’s going to rain, rain ruins the quality of the hay. If the hay isn’t completely dry, it can’t be used for square bales (damp square bales will rot and can actually heat up in the barn and cause a barn fire!) and must be round baled and wrapped in plastic to preserve its quality.  Wrapped hay ferments and has a sweet/sour odour when fed out in the winter.

Farmers can’t make any plans until the hay is done. Any invitation to a summer pool party or picnic is answered with ‘depends on the weather, if the hay is ready, we will be busy, but if it rains, we can come’.

This summer while you are driving through the country enroute to your summer vacation or fun family excursion and see the farmers working in the fields, take some time to consider what they are doing.  Are you going to eat today? Thank a farmer.

As published in Hello Country Magazine – July 2022 edition

Summer is finally here, it’s my favourite season! Which makes it difficult to sit indoors working when I want to be outside. The past few years has taught us that we can effectively work from home, even from our back decks or, in my case, the front porch. Where we work while at home brings me to my next story… 

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For those celebrating an anniversary this month (wedding, birthday, business, relationship, fitness or health goal), Happy Anniversary! I am celebrating 14 years in business this spring, which translates to 14 years of educating myself. Education doesn’t stop after high school, college or university, it continues throughout life. I learned that dial-up was pretty cool, but realized it was way too slow.

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I was shocked when I mentioned to 2 people that I had written an article for Hello Country about dial-up internet and was told they both knew someone who still used it!  Curious, I called my old dial-up provider; they still offer dial-up to remote customers who aren’t within their cable coverage area. I didn’t think people would still use it when there were so many faster options available.

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When my husband and I first got married I worked in an IT department for a large insurance company in Mississauga. Part of my job entailed being on call when the batch programs ran overnight, if anything went wrong, I would have to analyze the error and fix it so that the programs could complete overnight. I hated being on call …. all we had was dial-up internet.

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