Remember "Flash Sessions?"

I first learned about the internet the same way most people in my generation learned about it: America Online, or AOL. I remember the first time we connected to the internet. The whir and buzz of our blazing fast 14.4 kbps modem, the tiny, blurry images, and the frustration of hearing the phone ring. Why would that be frustrating? Because if someone called us while we were online, we knew it meant that we would be kicked offline as the phone line took priority. It was an incredible innovation for its day. Our family started using AOL when it came with a whopping 10 free hours for one month of internet usage. "TEN HOURS!" I remember thinking. "Who in their right mind would need more than 10 hours of internet access in one month?!" Ah, those were the days.

In order to not use up all of our allotted time and have an overage charge, we employed "flash sessions." Here was the basic gist of a flash session: You would press "Start Flash Session," it would connect to AOL's servers, send all of your mail you had already written offline, grab all of your new mail, and sign you off, usually taking only about 1-2 minutes of time. Of course, as the internet expanded, and high-speed internet access anywhere and everywhere became the norm, we forgot about "Flash Sessions."

That is, we forgot about them until we came home from our Pesach trip.

You see, for the first few weeks of living here, we were...well...taking advantage of the fact that our neighbors didn't have a password on their wireless network. When we got back from the north, we discovered that they had added a password, thus leaving us without internet. Long story short (trust me, a very long story not worth repeating), because of Pesach, the soonest that the internet company could come and install our internet would be one week. It was our only option.

Since we didn't have internet in the house, we had to find it outside our apartment complex. We found the two best places to be the coffee house down the street, and a little walk-way right outside our apartment. Yet, it was a life-changing week. We are so used to having constant internet access in our house, we had to plan out our internet usage.

And we had to do our own, updated version of "flash sessions." We would go downstairs, make sure we were connected, our iPhone/iPod Touches would pull in new mail, send mail, and we would go back upstairs until the next time we went outside. But this didn't just happen outside our homes. We eventually found ourselves taking 15 minutes to walk a 5 minute distance, because there was wifi along the way. It changed the way we lived for that week.

Now, there is some value to the idea of being completely disconnected. For the entire week of our travels in the north, we didn't have constant internet access either. For the short-term, we were fine pulling in emails only when we could. It was liberating and gave us time to focus on the family we were there to visit. Yet, after a week, we were ready to get back to our digital lives, connecting with our families, catch up on the blogs providing news and commentaries about the world outside Israel. However, dealing with the lack of internet for another week was a real challenge. We became lethargic, easily frustrated. We were addicts who needed a long-term fix.

And then something strange happened: we had internet, and we still acted like we didn't. We found ourselves thrilled to find wifi along any path we were walking. We still fell into the habits we developed when we didn't have internet.

It's now been almost two weeks since our internet was installed, and life is back to normal. We catch up with family, we connected with the outside world, we observed the world's outpouring of emotions at the killing of Osama bin Laden, we caught up on our shows. And we do it all from the comfort of our living room.

We're slowly getting settled in this foreign land. This has been part of the process. We started with scraps, lost what we had, and obtained our own through legitimate means. And in that simple story, we continued our journey of establishing ourselves as one-year residents.

The Israeli song goes, "Bashana haba'ah neshev al ha'mirpeset - Next year, we will sit on the porch." For us, the line continues: "v'lichtov et ha'blog shelanu - and write our blog."