One of the wonders of life on a tropical island just south of the Equator ... and by 'wonder' I mean, 'I wonder why I have to put up with this every day' ... is a sporadic Internet connection.

Lately, it's been especially bad, and it's been up and down more often than a toddler's training pants for the past couple of weeks with no rhyme or reason given ... and a rhyme would be a nice touch when the phone calls to Botched Internet Inc. become a tedious kvetch.

Often, part of the no rhyme/reason bit has to do with those three famous links to success in business -- location, location, location -- and lately my dear friend Gay's location just up the hill a bit from me blanks out the part of her connection that lets her listen to her favorite radio program, the bazillion-year-long-running British soap, "The Archers".

Part of our new Saturday routine, therefore, includes Gay making the seven minute trek from her place to ours with her laptop, head phones and knitting to spend an hour catching up with the latest from the radio-land version of true life that takes place in a fabricated English village called Ambridge.

Her antics while knitting and listening are so amusing that Sam and Cj can spend the whole hour of the Omnibus version ... the week's events encapsulated into an entertaining (apparently) sixty minute program ... watching Gay with so much amusement you'd be forgiven for thinking she was covered in red fur and said "Ta da!" in a high-pitched, grating tone once every twelve minutes.

She laughs, scoffs, giggles, boos, gasps, rails, nods, tsk-tsks, hrumphs, chokes, chortles, sneers, grins, whimpers, shrugs, rolls her eyes and freely gives pieces of her mind to the characters in it for the duration of the show.

No doubt about it, she's HIGHlarryous, and amazingly also manages to get a lot of knitting done.

This multi-tasking ... and that is how Sam describes Gay's actions in the new routine ... is high quality kid entertainment, and as you can see from the photo, everyone is engrossed and happy.

Of course, at least twice in the hour the connection here goes down, too, so we all get to rant, something else the kids find amusing, but the blips do little to take away the enjoyment of the new highlight of weekends.

I strongly suspect that Gay might have hidden somewhere deep in her personal plans for my kids a thought that Sam and Cj will eventually be hooked on "The Archers" as well. Since she started listening when she was not much older than Sam is now, it could happen.

Ack.

Oh well. At least it's not "Desperate Housewives".