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.
Y’know what’s weird? Hal, way the hell and gone up in CrustyTucky — population 4,704 as of the 2020 census — has had fiber available to him for ages.
When I was up there we used some shitty satellite service that caused me to burn an hour or so every couple weeks trying to send a 1.5 MB cartoon to VeloNews and/or BRAIN. You could see every pixel of the goddamn ’toon waving bye-bye as it departed. When it departed. Occasionally the signal dropped and I was back to square one.
Hal doesn’t use the fiber, of course. He’s been through every manner of ISP available to him and finally settled on Evil Musk’s SkyNet. Don’t get me started.
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.
Speaking of digging, Los Alamos has put in a lot of fiber in the last decade. Back when I lived there, I think our Internet was two soup cans with a string in between. But every year or so the diggers will accidently tear up one of the fiber trunk lines and half the town or more goes digitally dark. Interesting when you are suddenly plunged back into the 1970s’.
Whenever we lose power and/or our CenturyStink hookup we run the Macs and Apple TV off our iPhones in hotspot mode. That works astoundingly well, considering we sit at the bottom of a cul-de-sac with two bars of cell service … if the wind isn’t blowing the other way.
Our pissant download speed — 12 Mbps most days — is slow but surprisingly robust. We generally have two iPhones, two Macs, one PC, one iPad, and the Apple TV splitting that pitiful number and mostly everything works … OK.
Occasionally we see some pixelation on the TV. Websites heavy on extraneous bullshit — autoplay videos and ads — can take a while to load. The NYT is particularly bad in that respect and getting worse. They seem to think everybody is on the receiving end of some gigabit firehose. Nope.
POG-Your most recent posting made me laugh again and again. Thanks for keeping it going!!!
Thanks, matey. The news has been just too bloody awful to make fun of, and it remains a strong distraction.
I don’t want the blog to be some ongoing “How I spent my summer vacation” middle-school essay, but neither do I want it to be in shrieking-misfit mode all the damn’ time. So sometimes I just shut the fuck up because silence always sounds good.
The lawn is a pain in the butt, but mine is less than the two acres in Montana with a zero-turn mower. Takes less time with ego mower, but still, water and time are precious,
Here in NW Duke city, water from the sky is not as prevalent as it is in the east.
I am “fortunate” to be out of the clutches of CenturyLink with slooooowwww internet and crappy service. Infinity is marginally better with higher speeds and more consistent service. However, they want to give you a free phone for a year, then hose you forever. With a “free cell phone,” But the internet is cheaper by half.
Good luck with the contract digger and the fiber optic contractors. CenturyLink is like NASA; they use the low bidders. You get what you pay for. Nuff said. Been down that primrose path. Make MTN Bell look competent.,
The last time Herself spoke with “customer service” at CenturyStink the person on the other end of the line didn’t even discuss fiber options with her. Instead, he tried to upsell her on a $200 modem to deliver the “high speed” that we can’t get over the 20 or so meters of late-Sixties copper between the backyard pedestal and the phone/DSL plug in the living room.
So I think that if someone else can give us the zoom-zoom over fiber we will bid adios to CenturyStink. T-Mobile is one of the companies I see digging up the streets around our side of town lately. Our phones are Verizon, and for some unknown reason that outfit doesn’t seem able to provide our neighborhood with their cellular Innertubes.
Well, my digital vacation didn’t last but a day. But, I did not read any news site today. Mad Dog comments showed up in my email, and I thought go there and nowhere else. Anywho, this little piece explains the Biden Era BEAD act to expand high speed internet to rural areas. Fiber optics was chosen as the gold standard to deliver internet service. It is the gold standard in speed and reliability. Things were going fine until donvict and musk showed up. Musk wanted Starlink in the mix so they changed the rules and the grants slowed down then disappeared. Our local fiber optic company, Allo, almost went out of business. Investors saved them. Clear corruption, but nobody but us gives a shit. The republican party just called Sandy a minute ago. You all would have been proud. Calm and collected she was. The caller, a young women, didn’t hang up but had no answers to Sandy’s many questions. That’s what we all need to do when the chance comes. Preaching to the choir makes us feel better but solves nothing.
Good for Sandy! It’s hard to engage in what the diplomats call “a frank exchange of views” when what you really want to do is shriek, “Are you out of your ever-lovin’ mind?”
If we ever get to a point where it’s StarLink or nothing this blog will become a desktop-published ’zine, snail-mailed monthly to subscribers, if any. Assuming the USPS survives.
I’m temporarily on limited bike duty with a strained Achilles tendon. Painful and swollen. My foot doctor, DPM, also an avid cyclist, said I can ride, just stay off the mountains and no jackrabbit starts or sprint practice, just spinning. So I have to ride for a month like an old man, which I guess I am.
I wish we had some of that rain here. Seems Fanta Se is the hole in the cloud donut. I guess God really does hate…oh, never mind.
Aw, shit, not another injury? Your personal malevolent demon is working overtime. You have a nice low gear you can spin? There’s something to be said for a triple with that 24x34T low end. I have a couple of those that I can turn to when one of my bits is acting out.
I’d like to say my back has been behaving itself lately, but I don’t dare. It might be listening.
101 degrees in the shade according to the van thermometer. Probably not accurate. Probably closer to 98 but still. 70% humidity doesn’t help. I stood under the dryer vent to cool off today. I’m hoping it cools off a bit Thursday and Friday so I can get out on the bike. I rode to the gym on Monday and got caught by a traffic light. In the sun with no breeze and baking asphalt. I almost broke a sweat.
AT&T came through the neighborhood putting in fiber earlier this year. There were lots of Latinos doing a very good job of hand digging and putting the spoils on a tarp. Later the white kids came through with their mini excavator and boring machine to put in the conduit and boxed and left a bit of a mess. They bored through sewer lines and water lines. I was going to switch to AT&T because they were offering a better deal than Cox but the hassle isn’t worth it right now.
Yow! I remember that sort of thing from my San Antone days. Just 90-sumpin’ with 30 percent humidity here.
But we’re supposed to be heading into a stretch of high 90s/low 100s, depending upon whose forecast you believe.
We won’t be making any ISP changes until the dust settles. Can’t interrupt Herself’s hookup … she still works for a living, and pulls two of her four 10-hour shifts from home. Now, me, I could just toddle on down to the library or a java joint to post my little cavalcade of comedy. Or just rock the ol’ iPhone-Verizon hotspot.
I will get off of Cox ASAP. Predatory pricing and poor customer service. Gee, we can get you cell service for $16 a month. Great we say, sign us up. The next month our internet service, we do not have TV or any other service from them, went from $90 to $140. Reason? Oh, you changed plans by adding the cell phone. I’m changing the dog damn plans by switching to Allo, and will take great delight in telling them why.
Seven seas, and each one full of pirates.
The CenturyStink tool told Herself that he could get us the lower price and higher speed everyone else seems to be getting — some $30 a month less than we’re paying for 12 Mbps down and less than 1 Mbps up — but we’d have to lease or buy that $200 modem and it would require a “professional install,” which adds another $150 or so to the tab. Couldn’t just get it for, like, being long-term, valued customers an’ shit.
Ho ho, etc. That’s the same line of hooey they fed us last time we looked into lower-cost/higher-speed options with these brigands. Tech comes out, takes a look at that late-Sixties pedestal up against the arroyo wall, then eyeballs the plugs it feeds in the rancheroo, and sez to us he sez, “Cain’t do it, buckaroo. For openers, I don’t know how it gets here from there, and anyway I can’t funnel all that zoom through these shitty copper wires. I can set you up with that pricey new modem but it won’t do you a lick of good.”
It would be interesting to try running our little multimedia enterprise off the two Verizon iPhones. But they’re old as the hills too and would probably catch fire the first time a phone call came in while I was trying to load the NYT homepage.
Yep, the billionaire bros, and their private capital fund and executive branch accomplices, make sure that you leave this world as you came in. Penniless.
And, Elephant Butte is at 2% capacity. The river is part of the aquifer. When the wells close to the river go dry, it’s time to build a data center.
Speaking of going dry, you see what’s happening up in Taos?
Good times. Maybe not.
We also have this, from KUNM:
A long-awaited sequel to “The Milagro Beanfield War?” Stay tuned. …
With respect to being connected to the world, I always chuckle when I am asked whether I want to go paperless. From a logical perspective, it is a more than reasonable request – less timber pulp needed to produce the mega-tons of paper that our society used to go through transacting business and communication. But then along came electronic communication and the new methodology of transferring the communication medium cost over to the paying customer. The old business paper cost has now become my internet connection cost. If the business asking me to go paperless were to help support my internet connection, then going paperless would be great. But of course that doesn’t occur. So as business has evolved, it has been able to shift more of the cost directly to the customer. Isn’t modernism great.
As for the future of water in the west, I wonder when the program of “flush less” becomes accepted?
Yup. Your capitalist does like to make someone else pick up the tab.
Whenever one of my freelance checks went walkabout I liked to remind the offending party what a bargain I was for them. I could report, write, edit, draw, proof pages, run a live update, manage a website, and even shoot a passable pic if a photog wasn’t handy.
Plus I provided my own Mac, iPhone, cameras, office space/furniture, pencils, pens, paper, reporter’s notebooks, reference works, utilities, phone/fax lines, internet hookup, and technical support.
Best of all, I wasn’t in their offices, where they would have to deal with me. Not always a day at the beach.
All I asked was that the checks arrived on time, so I could pay for all the business-related bits that otherwise would be their problem. Also, moreover, furthermore, and too, non-essential items like food, drink, and shelter.
Privatize profit, socialize cost. I call it the walmart model.
My only visit to New York state was in the summer of 1977, after UNC in Greeley handed me the sheepskin I needed to be a real sure’nough journo.
Some friends invited me to visit them in Winooski, Vermont, and another buddy needed a lift to Wellsville, NY, just off the Southern Tier Expressway. I had that ’74 Datsun pickup, and was in no real rush to start my professional life, so off we went, with my dog Jojo because of course with my dog Jojo. If Jojo didn’t go, neither did I.
A diner in Wellsville was my first experience with “graveyard stew.” The second has yet to eventuate.
In Winooski I delivered pizzas and sammiches between bouts of pearl diving, drew cartoons for an underground rag, and pined for Colorado’s Mexican food. You wouldn’t believe the swill they called “Mexican food” in the greater Burlington area. That, another buddy’s surprise wedding, and the intel that winters were fierce off Lake Champlain, sent me racing back to Greality and then B-burg in fairly short order.