How much do I love the web?

I've been away on break, and do you know what? I realized I am REALLY dependent on the web. Yes, I might be a girl of contradiction. I'm a Laura-Ingalls-Wilder wannabe on one hand, but when it comes down to it, I like the immediate gratification of modern life, from flipping a switch to turn on the lights, to getting instant information online.

During my two weeks of playing outside, finishing projects, and hanging out with our extended family, I had many thoughts of "oh, I'd better google that!" Things like, "What does a snail eat?" "What is the best way to kill black ants?" "Are there such things as clamp-on-sprockets for bike wheels?" "Who has the best price for Quinacridone gold watercolor in a tube?" "Does anyone make a Pip costume (Pip, as in the chipmunk in Enchanted)?" "When is Asa Larsson's new book being published?"

I could go on and on. In fact, if you are still reading, I commend you. These are just a few of the varied and mundane little questions that pop up for me during the course of a week. And thanks to my computer, I usually can get answers to this sort of thing. It makes me wonder, though, what it was like before...I mean, would I still even try to figure out how to fix that antique bike wheel? Or would I take it to an "expert" at a shop? Would I just play trial and error with Snailey Grey and let Ada feed him whatever she wanted until he went to that great tomato leaf in the sky? I don't know.

What I do know is that it wasn't until I was in college that I started using a computer for more than creating rudimentary patterns of my name running across the screen. I was lucky enough to go to a school that was running a prototype of mosaic in 1994, and I had a windows version of email and a named account before many people I knew. There were newsgroups then, but I don't really recall using search engines until much, much later.

And now--well, I love, LOVE!! the different connections I can make, the depth of searches I can do online now. Look at Addictomatic, for instance. How great an engine is that? Or