Homesteading Without a Computer

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Homesteading Without a Computer
by Jessie Gibson, eastern Kentucky

I don't have a computer. I never have. I built this page, and I keep it up, on the two Internet computers at our county library, thirty minutes at a time. Every word you're reading got typed in a half hour with somebody's grandkid waiting behind me for the next turn.

I cook the breakfast shift at a truck stop off I-64. I'm on the grill at five in the morning and off at one-thirty. I'm raising two boys, Nick, who's sixteen, and Justin, who's fourteen, and between the two of them they eat more than the drivers do. A computer is not in the budget this year, and it may not be next year either. But the library is free, and so is GeoCities.us, and that turned out to be enough.

Last winter Nick learned some HTML in computer class at the high school. One Saturday he sat with me at the library and showed me the tags, and I wrote every one of them down in a spiral notebook. I've been working out of that notebook ever since. I'm putting my method on here because I bet there are a lot of people like me, and nobody writes the instructions for us. The instructions all start with "open the program on your computer."

How I Do It

1. Write it out on paper first. On my break at work I write out what I want to change, word for word, on the back of a guest check. If it's a new part with tags, I write the tags too, right out of my notebook. By the time I sit down at the library, all the thinking is done. The half hour is just for typing.

2. Come at opening time. On my days off I'm at the door when they unlock it. Nobody's waiting at nine in the morning, so if my turn runs a few minutes over, nobody minds. After school lets out, forget it. That's when the kids come in, and they've got homework to do.

3. Type it all in one sitting. I sign in, go to the File Manager, click on my page, and open it in the GeoCities.us Basic HTML Editor. That's a big box right in the Web browser with my whole page in it, tags and all. I find the spot, type in what's on my guest check, and click Save. No program to download, nothing to put on the library's computer. That matters, because they won't let you.

4. Look at it, and fix it. I open my page and read it over. If something's wrong, nine times out of ten I forgot a quote mark or a closing tag. I go back to the editor, fix it, save it again.

5. Keep two copies of my own. When the page is right, I copy the whole thing out of the editor box, paste it into Notepad on the library computer and save it on my floppy disk. I also write down in the spiral notebook what I changed that day and what I want to do next time. If GeoCities.us ever lost my page, I'd have it on the floppy. If I ever lost the floppy, I'd have the notebook. If I lost the notebook, I'd cry, and then I'd start over.

6. Check my e-mail last. I have free e-mail, and it's the easiest thing in the world to sit down and read your mail first and look up and your half hour's gone. So the page comes first, and the mail gets whatever minutes are left.

My Half Hour
Minutes 0 to 2	Sign in, open the File Manager
2 to 18	Type in what's on my guest check
18 to 23	Look at the page, fix what's wrong
23 to 26	Copy it to my floppy, write in the notebook
26 to 30	E-mail, sign out, say thank you

A Page Out of My Notebook

This is the first page, the one Nick and I did that Saturday. It's gotten some coffee on it since.

<B>  </B>       dark letters
<I>  </I>       slanted
<P>              new paragraph
<BR>             next line
<HR>             a line across
<CENTER> </CENTER>
<FONT SIZE="4" COLOR="navy">
   </FONT>
<A HREF="page.html">words</A>
<IMG SRC="pic.gif" WIDTH="32"
   HEIGHT="32" ALT="what it is">

EVERY " NEEDS ITS OTHER "
EVERY <B> NEEDS ITS </B>

The last two lines Nick wrote in big letters. He was right. Those two lines cover nine out of ten of my mistakes.

If You Don't Have a Computer Either

Find out what your library allows, and go by it. Ours doesn't let you download programs or change anything on the computers. Printing is ten cents a page. When somebody's waiting, your turn is thirty minutes, and they mean it. You can use a floppy disk if you hand it to the desk first so they can check it for viruses. Every library's different, so ask.

Be good to the librarians. Say thank you every time. Don't argue about the timer. Robbie and Deborah at our desk have helped me with more than they had to, including the morning my floppy got stuck in the drive. Every so often I bring them a sack of biscuits from work. I'm not saying that's why they're so nice to me. I'm not saying it isn't.

Plan before you sit down. If you take one thing off this page, take this. Thirty minutes is plenty of time if you walk in knowing exactly what you're going to type. It's no time at all if you walk in and start thinking.

Don't be ashamed of it. A lady in line behind me once asked why I didn't just do it at home. I told her I do do it at home, at my kitchen table, with a pencil. The library's just where I type it.

A page made thirty minutes at a time is still all yours. I've counted the half hours in my notebook. This page has taken forty-one of them so far. Every one of them was mine.

The Rest of My Life, Briefly

Nick plays on the line for the high school varsity this year and Justin is on the JV, so my Friday nights are spoken for till November. My mom grows German Johnson tomatoes in the side yard, big ugly pink ones, the best you ever ate, and she canned fifty-two quarts this summer and says it was a light year. I'm going to put her tomato pages on here next, once I get them written out on paper.

OUR COUNTY LIBRARY
INTERNET COMPUTER HOURS

Monday & Thursday 9 to 8
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 9 to 5
Saturday 9 to 1
Sunday closed

2 computers · 30 minutes a turn
sign up at the front desk
printing 10¢ a page

You are visitor number

since March 1999. Thank you for coming.

Write to me: [email protected]
I read my mail on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, my days off, at the end of my half hour.
Last updated Tuesday, September 21, 1999