Gary: Today is the first day of our regular schedule. Wendy starts work at her new job here in New Mexico. Busy day today as I’ll be picking up our building permit for the house, getting quotes for a new gate to the property (tired of going out in the cold to open the cattle gate) and FINALLY getting the truck washed. Just the usual boring stuff. Of course, I’m still working remotely, but I’ll mix that in with appointments and chores.
Hoping to see our belongs from Renton sometime this week. We’re definitely not a fashion show as we’ve been wearing the same clothes for the last two weeks. Funny thing about rural living, the only the animals see you most of the time, so what you wear isn’t really an issue. It gets dirty, so worrying about fashion isn’t a big deal. I have noticed that here, most people don’t give any thought to what they wear. It’s actually hysterical, like you’ve traveled back in time 20 years. I’ll have to post pictures of some of the more “interesting” fashion trends. And then you have the urbanites that have moved from the city to the country to escape the crowds but still dress up everywhere they go. The contrast is humorous.
Our 5th wheel is cold again this morning. 23 degrees outside. Our furnace isn’t big enough to keep the trailer warm, and the trailer isn’t a 4-season trailer. We had no idea what we were doing when we bought it even though I did a lot of research. I compromised with Wendy and got the trailer that had her ideal layout. And this trailer was built during COVID, so the construction is marginal. Just like any travel trailer, you have to fix things all the time. After the house is build, there may be a mysterious trailer fire….
We’ve discovered that Internet access here is marginal. My brother-in-law is using DSL from a local provider. Being in the “country”, it’s constantly going down for hours at a time. After calling Xfinity, they wanted $52,000 dollars to run fiber to our property. Ridiculous! Internet in rural America isn’t a reality. And 5G Internet isn’t available here – yet. So, we’re trying out my father-in-law’s Starlink system, and frankly it’s pretty good. Instead of the 40Mbps from DSL, we get around 120Mbps for a little less than 2x the prices of DSL. I think we’ll move to Starlink for now until the Russians or the Chinese destroy Starlink, and we’ll keep DSL as a fail-over. Crazy what you think about for work connectivity.
Well, I need to shove Wendy out the door so she can make money, and I can retire. I’ll have to call our electrician today to get another 50-amp circuit installed for the EV. It’s darn expensive to build up infrastructure so pastureland is livable. We’re going to minimize our living footprint so we can save grazing pasture for our cousin’s goats and cows. Need to be responsible for saving water and grazable land.
Enough for now.
Leave a Reply