I live in a barn, in a one-room apartment.
My phone number is unlisted. My phone rarely rings.
My maximum connection speed on dial-up on my current phone line is 28.8. High speed is not available, and neither is cable.
I couldn't be happier.
The last two or three months have left me exhausted. I love almost everything I do, I feel lucky to be living my life and not anyone else's. But I also don't have enough hours in the day to get all that I want to achieve done. Lately, I've been staying at work later and later, and going home and continuing - with high-speed internet, what was the difference, anyway? If I forgot a file, I came back to the office.
My email was always on. I was usually near a phone - I'd say always, but I so rarely turn on the cell phone (though I did get voice mail for it). I could be counted on to return work-related emails at 11:30 p.m., or at 6 a.m. - next to brushing my teeth, attending to that was the last thing I did at night and the first thing I did in the morning.
It's not that hard to figure out - if you're that connected, and you have so many commitments to take care of, and become the contact person for a few things - it becomes impossible to turn off. It becomes easy to say, I'll just go to the gym, and get back to this later tonight. So, with the exception of the week I took off at Christmas, the last couple of months have been an exercise in exhaustion and being highly strung.
I'd like to say that it was much like a film speeding by, and the second I moved to the farm, somebody adjusted the dial to a more manageable speed. That's not true. But what I do have is a definite separation between home and work, and I suspect that I'll start sleeping for more than four hours at a time very soon. When I leave the office, I know that's it for the day. If you email me at 7p.m. about a work problem, it can't ruin my evening unless I'm still at work at 7.
That's an improvement. So is living in a place where it gets dark at night, where I can play the radio as loudly as I want at 6a.m. without worrying about waking up the neighbours, where I plug my car into the same outlet as a tractor, and where saying hello to the donkey and dog is a daily event.