Off grid, under the radar

Vacation took me off grid, and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver has forced me under the radar.

In other words, I was disconnected from the news and from the Internet, a curious combination since my retirement income depends on access to news and the Internet.

And you know what ... I've survived.

The vacation took me to northern New Hampshire for skiing with family. And my intent was to carve out time to work. I packed my laptop along with my skis, boots and poles. I packed my Verizon-supplied portable network WiFi along with my long underwear and socks.

I got plenty of use out of the ski gear. I didn't crack open the laptop or fire up the WiFi card once.

As a contract writer and blogger, there are no defined vacations as there were when I went to an office every day and scheduled my vacation days and weeks along with everybody else in the facility. My obligations these days are to the deadlines of the people who contract me to write.

But retirement gave me the chance to re-engineer myself by working for myself.

In that respect I planned to mix business with pleasure, but we crammed in so much pleasure -- basically skiing, eating and sleeping -- that I didn't leave time for anything else, and a vacation became all pleasure and no business.

Since some of my work involves keeping up with what's going on in the world, the fact that I was off grid helped keep me totally unaware of what was going on with the Olympics in Vancouver until we paused after dinner to watch the primetime coverage on NBC.

It became a little more difficult when I got home. I didn't have skiing to fill my day. I've been working but staying enough under the radar to be pretty much unaware of results in Vancouver.

As I write this, for example, I have forced myself to be blissfully unaware of Lindsey Vonn's results earlier today in the Olympics giant slalom event until I see the coverage later today.

That means I've avoided all the news sites I normally cruise both on the web with my laptop and my BlackBerry. I have to turn away from the television news and keep my car radio tuned away from NPR during the news hours.

But there have been occasional violations of the cone of the silence. Twice this week, despite my best attempts to cruise the web and do my job with Olympic blinders on, I stumbled on results of Bode Miller races before actually seeing the races later that night.

Frankly, it's the ludicrous coverage by NBC and its affiliates that forces me to such ridiculous machinations. NBC insists on tape-delayed coverage of certain events that, in my estimation, could have been aired live.

Sunday's men's alpine super combined event on Sunday is an example. Why couldn't I have seen Bode Miller win his gold medal live on Sunday afternoon, rather than wait until the taped coverage later that night?

As fun as it was to be unplugged for a while, it'll be a lot easier -- and I'll be a lot less anxious -- once I'm plugged back in.