Our phone and internet connection has finally made it into the new place - now there's catching up galore for me to do.
It really is amazing how the non-accessibility of things (including basic things like dictionaries and online dictionaries) can hamper the workflow. And I was astonished at how much I rely on the internet for my daily work. I already knew that searches and online resources are a large help for me, but total lack of the internet has shown me to what extent.
And now I'm not entirely sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. The good part of it is that since I rely so much on the Internet, I can work almost anywhere provided I have my computer and the internet (and can concentrate, of course). Questions about HTML? There are plenty of wonderful sites. A quick check of the vegetation and blooming period of madder? Wikipedia is a good starting point (though I'll make sure to whip out a proper book about plants or dye plants the moment I want to cite this, and double-check). Phone number or contact data missing? The internet knows them (almost) all. Trouble finding a word? I have learned that for me, typing into an online dictionary interface is so much faster than leafing through an actual book dictionary - so I heavily rely on
LEO (praise be heaped on LEO!),
Heinzelnisse and a small stack of other dictionaries. I even make a point not to buy cookbooks, because in any cookbook there are about ten recipies that sound really interesting and an unspecified, but much larger number that are not interesting. And searching for "recipe" and single ingredients will turn up enough recipes and variations to find something to cook. (I have a little stack of cookbooks that I don't want to miss and use frequently, though - I'm not so firm when it comes to not buying books.)
The bad part? Not having online connection really thwarts my style of work - and that sort of bugs me, because I rather like to be independent. And should the Net ever go down and stay down, I will have to re-learn working without it. (And I'll probably buy even more books then.)