I’ll be bidding this summer so we’ve started talking a lot recently about where we’d like to go next. (Truth be told, we’ve been thinking about this for a long time. We’re planners. So sue us.) Although we at one point had dreams of Paris or London, reality has set in. We’re currently serving at a hardship post, but not at enough of a hardship post for Paris or London to be realistic goals. (Not that we won’t try. Don’t worry Mom, we’ll try.) We’ve begun warming to the idea of serving at another hardship post, so long as the hardship is a different sort of hardship than what we’re currently experiencing.

Conjested traffic and long commutes? No problem. We’re city people. We can handle that.

Smog? Pollution? No big deal.

Crime? We can manage that too.

What can’t we handle, you ask? Well here’s one thing: bad Internet. We’ve spent the last five days without Internet and let me tell you, it was pretty close to torture. We almost made our way through Downton Abbey and I have to tell you, I don’t entirely understand the craze surrounding that show. It’s fine, it’s watchable, but would I have been glued to it if I could have been obsessively checking Facebook and parenting message boards like I usually do? Definitely not. Andy has also finished the entire series of Hunger Games books, something I’d like to think he would not have been so absorbed in with lots of other entertainment options.

We missed the Internet big time while it was gone, but even when we “have” internet here it’s decent quality at best, despite paying about five times what we would be back in the U.S. Sometimes we can Skype with our parents. Sometimes the pictures on websites load. Sometimes Target.com is slightly faster than molasses. Not often.

Is high bandwidth a valid bidding criterea? Here’s hoping.