What a difference a day makes. Or even a few short hours.
On Friday I rode down to the bosque because why the hell not? I was sick of all my usual foothills routes and wanted to log some respectable mileage for a change, so off I went.
Also sick of its usual route was the Rio Grande, which has buggered off to parts unknown. You can tell because rivers don’t usually sport tire tracks, not even if Jeebus is driving.
I knew the Rio had run dry since I last saw it back in April. But it’s one thing to know and another to see.
Anyway. The dearth of river notwithstanding, it was a lovely day, if warmish — 81° when I got a regrettably late start, 10 degrees hotter when I finished — and then Thor woke from his nap, got his clouds in a row, and began swinging Mjölnir like he meant business. Hammer time!
Boom! Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch in less time than it takes to type “Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch.” The National Weather Service told the Urinal that 1.74 inches fell at Indian School and Moon in a half hour, with near-record winds that peaked at 78 mph.
I mean, that storm flat parked itself overhead and let go, like a cow pissing on a flat rock.
“Remind me to turn off the sprinkler system,” I said to Herself. And it stayed off. Y’can’t touch this.
• • •
Now, of course, Loki is back on the job. Regular heat advisories from 1 to 8 p.m., high 90s to low triple digits.
No records set, as far as I know, but 9 in the a.m. is starting to feel a little late for the twice-weekly Geezer Rides. A second bottle goes in the seat-tube cage. Attacks are few and far between.
And mowing the lawn post-ride, like I did yesterday? That’s just stupid.
Having a lawn in the desert is stupid in and of itself, but having one and mowing it noonish moves the bar up a few notches.
Still, there’s the lawn, growing, and it won’t mow itself. I’ve been watching. That shit does not happen.
Maybe what I need is a bicycle with rotary blades attached. A velo-mower. And an early start. I could create a whole new thang and a magazine to chronicle its adventurers.
Nah. That’s even dumber than having a lawn in the desert.
• • •
Speaking of greenery stuffed into the ground, it seems that we may finally be getting the fabled fiber optic here in the cul-de-sac.
The Company Formerly Known As CenturyLink, a.k.a. CenturyTel, Qwest, et al., now calling itself Lumen Technologies, has provided our internet service for ages, even before we moved here in 2014. But for some reason Duck! City DSL is twice the price for half the speed we enjoyed in Bibleburg.
Even there, the tales of comically inept customer service were endless. Once we had a modem croak on us and The Company agreed to send us a new one. In that they proved better than their word. They sent us five of them, one after another, like Red Chinese soldiers marching to B-burg from Beijing over the bodies of their comrades.
I may still have one in an old-tech box around here somewhere. I’m fairly certain I brought one with us when we moved because, hey, you never know, amirite? Miss Mia Sopaipilla loved toasting her po-po on one of those Qwest-branded Motorola jobbers Back in the Day®.
But I digress. We were talking about getting some fiber in our digital diet.
The water-company boyos were out in the cul-de-sac yesterday afternoon, spraying their blue cryptograms and hieroglyphics ever’ whichaway, so I asked one what was up. Thus I learned that the diggers are coming to bring us The Future, which we had in the B-burg a dozen or so years ago before time-traveling back to the stone knives and copper wire of Albuquerque.
“Take photos of your property before they get started,” the water dude advised. And I followed his advice. At least three of the companies charged with bringing fiber optic to Duck!Burg have been slapped with temporary stop-work orders after reports that they made a shambles of various properties.
I won’t lie. It’ll be great to have a faster, cheaper on-ramp to the Infobahn. But be careful what you wish for. The news of the day — a river of sand in Duck!Burg, shit monsoons in DeeCee — is already bad enough at a piddling 13.5 Mbps.
And it comes in a whole lot faster if it’s breaking just beyond the office window, where some rando rocking a backhoe is uprooting your sewer line.
Mad Blog Media 
Just a coincidence but my B-burg (Blacksburg, VA) has finally got fiber internet. The town that was in on the internet early due to Virginia Tech (Virginia PoIytechnic Institute & State University) fell behind after the real start of things in the late ’80s and just a couple of years ago finally had a group that promoted and finally got fiber into the town, but ONLY if you had a large majority of your local neighborhood to sign up. I, of course, did since it was my job and I hated the lousy Verizon abandoned phone lines barely providing dial-up service still into 2010 or there abouts. I switched to Comcast cable internet which was faster but still wanted more. Fiber promised Gigabit – or eventually 5 gig down and at least gigabit up since it was symmetric. That’s better than the about 1 gig down and 50 M up. When you’re a computer professional working from home, these things matter. Well, fiber did come but my area in town decidedly does NOT have it. The group that initially promoted fiber was sold or bought out by a large company that is not local, GloFiber. I now have family and friends warning me off them. However, looking at a map of fiber availability in town, it literally surrounds where I live but is NOT in my street at all. Very frustrating. As an early proponent who actually plunked $500 down for this and promoted it by walking around my area and distributing pamphlets, it is doubly so. I got my money back after around 8 years of nothing happening. So, comcast still gets my $80/month for 1.2 G down and 50 M some up and it is sufficient but I know in a years time I’ll have to pay upwards of $150 for that same service for a few months before signing on for several years just to get the cost down to semi-reasonable.
This is what happens when government abandons rural areas to the whims of companies rather than push for the rural areas first for you name it. I know my history enough to know about the push FDR put for places like where I lived being serviced so it wasn’t only big cities that got the good stuff like telephones and electricity. My entire life the good we once establish has gone downhill to the hard scrabble we now have.
And a happy day to you too.
I began noticing men manually digging holes all over town this spring. And I mean ALL over. And the trucks sport a multitude of logos and brands so I can’t tell who is selling what. I ditched Comcast’s horrendous cable years ago and bundled AT&T which was equally as horrendous. Along came Verizon cellular internet to the rescue with very affordable pricing and we’ve been fine with their cell phone service for years. And…we can even understand our billings! But….the speed for internet here is sometimes so bad I could walk a websearch over to the business faster if I want to see what they are selling. My over-the-air antenae boyz are pushing satellite. $$$$!!! So’s I’ll put up with slow speeds until I see them digging holes up and down my road. Funny thing is as slow as our speeds are we can stream movies and content quite well.
POG-Your most recent posting made me laugh again and again. Thanks for keeping it going!!!