The Move

The past week and a half have been pretty disheartening for me as I've seen what a hard time Jen and I have had in adjusting to a new home. Jen was just telling me last night that the trailer still doesn't feel like home to her yet. It has started feeling like home to me, except at night when the trailer starts making all sorts of night noises that are unfamiliar to me; then I can't sleep. For instance, the floor boards started creaking last night at about 11:15, as though someone was walking down the hall. It woke me up, and I thought it was Jen going to the bathroom, but then I opened my eyes, and she was lying right next to me. After that, every time I was just dropping back into unconsciousness, they'd creak again, for no good reason. I'm also really struggling to adjust to being at school all day, now that we don't live on campus anymore. We've already had to deal with a handful of minor repairs and upkeep issues, but the one we're faced with now is a doozie. We've been trying for over a week now to get our computer to connect to the wi-fi that runs through the trailer park. But when it gets to "acquiring network address" it just sits and sits and never gets any further. Now, I know our wireless works, because it instantly connected to the college when we first moved here. I called a computer-savvy friend, and he walked me through some troubleshooting before coming to the conclusion that it's something on the server's end of the connection. After hounding our landlord all weekend, we finally got him to bring the park's resident computer guy over to try and fix our situation, to no avail. Now it's looking like we're just not going to be able to have the internet at our home. Frankly, I'm perfectly fine with that. As you've no doubt already noticed, I don't spend a whole lot of time blogging or anything; I basically only use the internet for games and weather forecasts. But Jen's a different story. The internet is an extremely valuable tool for her to keep in touch with friends and family she left back in Michigan. For reasons we haven't completely figured out in the last two years, making friends in southern Arizona is like trying to catch a leprechaun; it just ain't happening. So most of Jen's social circle consists of the people she left behind. Now, if she doesn't have free access to the internet, she's basically shut off from that social circle. Being a guy, I see this basically as a problem that needs fixing, and I'm desperate to fix it for my wife's sake. The only real solution I'm coming up with, though, is to buy a laptop that can go wireless, so we can go to McDonald's or somewhere else that offers wi-fi, and tap into it whenever Jen gets the urge to check in with her circle. I'm thinking that our "economic stimulus" check would be more than enough to cover a laptop, but I've been unable to talk Jen into making the purchase. The girl doesn't even like to spend $5 on herself to buy a shirt; buying a laptop to meet her needs is almost unthinkable. It's just frustrating for me not to be able to provide my wife with something she really needs.