Ten years ago I moved from the fantastic city of Seattle to the wonderful Twin Cities in Minnesota.  Big jump, huge life change.  Not only in demographics, but in my personal journey with technology.

Before I moved back to the Midwest, I’d had a limited time with the internet.  I used it.  I loved it.  But I checked my emails a few times a week, messaged once in a while with friends on MSN and AIM, and searched things I enjoyed to kill time.  However, until the fall of 2004, I was not an internet junkie.  Then, I got high speed.

Remember that?  The feeling of your first internet experience with high speed internet.  No more sounds of rats being scalded while you connected, no more waiting forever for one simple picture to download, and an amazing sense of euphoria when your songs could download in less than a half hour?

At that time, I was working ten hour shifts Monday through Friday at a coffee shop.  I did my best to ignore my laptop through my morning rush and then come noon I was a complete web-head until clock-out time.  I had MySpace, a photobucket account, became a regular commenter on more blogs than I can even remember, and read all the IMDB trivia of every movie and TV show I ever saw.

Life was simple.  Just me, my Dell Inspiron (that cost a mere 1700…likely because of the fancy disc drive) and unlimited cups of coffee.  When I would head to pick up my son from daycare, then three years old, I’d simply leave my laptop at work until the next day.  The concept seems so bizarre now.  Who leaves the internet behind?  It’s with us always with smart phones.  We have work computers,full access cell phones,tablets etc.

But I’ve been thinking, I want to be excited to get online again.  I want to not dread lack of originality on the same websites we visit every day, I want to be impressed when I open my web browser. But it’s not going to happen.  You can’t experience a new phenomenon a second time with the same excitement.

So for now, I am going to remember the last ten years of internet madness.  I actually made a handful of great friends in this world of web, and for that I’m truly grateful.  But I’m itchy for something new.