The Partial Week in Review

Greetings Earthlings.  How have you been?  We have been doing stuff in the house and yard. 

The TDS fiber folks have been extremely busy in the neighborhood down the hill from us manually digging holes in peoples' front yards and using equipment to pull conduit through the dirt.  Eventually there will be fiber for high speed internet running through the conduit.  Since we are in an HOA controlled neighborhood, we all had to vote on getting fiber.  We voted yes, but I haven't decided if I'm actually going to sign up.  Their introductory pricing is only good for one year, and then the prices go up.  They make it very difficult to run cost comparisons with Comcast.  Their sales rep for our area is a complete and total ass hat and I would prefer to never speak to him again.

This is the pre-staging of the conduit.

Look mid photo and you can see one of the workers standing in a hole he has dug for the conduit.  That is all manual labor. Allegedly they will be shoving our conduit under the streets.  One wonders how they will do in the yards that have the massive basalt boulders.  One also wonders if they will break the irrigation systems.

We have spent some time in the basement assembling a universal gym.  It has a lot of parts.  The video they provide is animated, with no words spoken.  There are no words in the assembly manual, either.  There was a pretty good video on You tube done by a speaking human, my only complaint was that he did the turning of tools in time lapse, and some of those things really deserved to be in real time - like pulling the cables, for example.

There it is, back in the corner of the basement.  That giant room is getting smaller.

Yesterday we finally got closure on the blackout curtains for the primary bedroom.  After buying, and returning, several fairly expensive panels, I tried Walmart.  Yes, Walmart.  Two panels for $39 and they do the job.  They're 83 5/8 inches long, both panels are the same length and we're declaring victory.  The neighbor's security lights have been vanquished.

Today we rode in the woods from the Wilber trail head.  It was good, we've found some more single track trails which are fun to ride because they are not terrifying like so many of the trails in Tucson.  On the way there one drives by a horse boarding operation.  It's fairly large. 

There is also an air strip behind a trail head up the road.  It's rudimentary, there is no segmented circle (which is a wind direction indicator) nor is there a wind sock. 

We arrived at the Wilber trailhead about 12:30.  The phone said it was 53 degrees.  At that time the sun was still out and the winds were not high.  About an hour into it, the clouds thickened up, the winds picked up and it felt colder.  We were not over dressed.

Me:  Jersey, undershirt, shorts, heavy tights, heavy arm warmers, jacket, heavy head sock under the helmet and a helmet cover.  I was wearing my full fingered warmer bike gloves, they were marginal.  My socks (grey Wright socks) were too short, there was an inch of exposed skin between the sock and the bottoms of the tights.  We wore the regular MTB shoes, and not the clown shoes, and my toes were chilly but not painful.

Jim.  Jersey, undershirt, shorts, heavy tights, heavy arm warmers, jacket, heavy head sock under the helmet and a helmet cover.  Jim has warmer gloves than I do, and his socks were tall enough.  His feet are generally warmer than mine, and his toes were good.

These are the clown shoes.  They're down hill shoes and they're full of padding and they look huge.  They're also warm, but they kind of look ridiculous on benign trails.

Those of you who were reading the blog when we were spending time in the Seattle area no doubt recall my frequent complaining about the traffic.  This morning was particularly bad.  This happened early in the morning on west bound I90 which is one of the two bridges over Lake Washington that people drive to get into down town Seattle.  Every single lane - blocked by an overturned semi.

Tomorrow Junk and Dump comes to remove this pile of vegetation.  There's a dead Pyramidalis on top of the pile of day lilies.  I will be happy to see it all go.

That's it!  That's all I've got.