A little over 5 years ago, hubby & I lived in NW Ontario in a very small town. The only radio station we could get was CBC Radio (which is talk all day, classical or jazz at night) & only world or national news. They would break in for some local news every hour or so, but the “local” was a minimum of 4 – 6 hours away, so it wasn’t very local to us.

We had a PC, but mostly it was used by me to create a local newsletter for the town, by hubby to maintain the books for our store & by both of us occasionally to play computer games purchased when we were out of town shopping.  I also created all the advertising for the store on the computer because I have a pretty good creative streak & I also created a yearly newsletter to send to the relatives in our Christmas cards.

We had a dial-up internet connection, so we very rarely used the internet except to track our banking for the business.  A couple years before we left the small town, they did bring high speed internet to town, but the cost was something in the neighborhood of $70/month, so we just went without.  Our PC got a real workout when we decided to leave town while we used the internet to search for jobs across the country.

When we first moved to Alberta we were homeless for about 3 weeks while we lived in a hotel, so if we wanted to use the internet to look for a job my husband would take his laptop & go sit in the parking lot of Future Shop to use their wifi (they gave him permission after he told them our sob story).  Then we finally moved into a house & we set up our PC again.  This time we signed up for high speed internet because my husband was still looking for work (& it was more reasonably priced).

I used the internet at work of course to do research when needed & hubby used it at home to look for work, manage our banking, etc.  The laptop sat in our office & never got used.  Our evenings were typically spent in front of the TV after dinner.  We joined a bowling league to try to make friends, but that was only 1 night a week & we also went to Bingo one night a week.

Then I started working for the IT department of the corporation I am currently employed by.  I learned about Twitter, Facebook, The Cloud, Googledocs & a whole lot more.  I stated slowly by tweeting from time to time.  Then my daughter convinced me to join Facebook so we could stay in touch better & they had games I could play for free.  So I became a big Facebook fan & spent hours every evening seeing what friends & family were up to & playing games.

Then hubby started complaining I was spending too much time on the PC & not enough time with him, so I introduced him to Facebook & free games.  Now he spends more time playing games than I ever did!   Then I started to blog & it was a very slow process at the beginning.  I followed a “few” other bloggers & wrote a post a couple times a week.  Then I got laid off for about 6 weeks.

Suddenly I had oodles of time to blog & play free games.  Hubby couldn’t get near the PC anymore because I was always on it & our old laptop was way too slow for playing games, so he got a brand new shiny laptop with more memory & speed than our PC.

Now if you were to look in our windows in the evening you would typically see my hubby & I on the couch, with the TV on, each of us with a laptop in front of us – hubby playing games & me trying to keep caught up with my bloggy buddies or playing a game.  How times have changed, now we are back in civilization!