Mainly the Weather

It's been kind of a weird winter.  Last winter was really cold, it snowed, and received the dreaded "worst winter ever" award.  This year hasn't been all that cold, but it has been wet.  Yesterday it pretty much rained all day, and then most of the night.  Today it rained in the afternoon.  The desert is eerily green due to the amount of water received.  Today may be the last day of this weather pattern, with highs in the 70s on the way.

The skies have been impressive.  This was today, coming back from the grocery store.  Look lower right, those people are getting wet.

Tuesday we had a sun dog over the park model.  

There was a short hike one day.  Notice how colorless the sky is.  The ocotillos are very juicy at present, and some are starting to bloom.  It's nice to see. 

The round tail ground squirrels are out.  They're early this year.  We think we've seen juveniles above ground, so they've been busy in their burrows.

Tuesday Century Link came out again.  That was tech number four.  He spent a lot of time with test equipment listening for noise on the lines.  The lines are laying on the ground and they're hard to see because the light was so harsh.  Tech number two also spent a lot of time out here, but accomplished nothing. 

At the end, he came and talked to me and said our cable to the main switch at the office was "shit."  All the lines have noise on them, which accounts for slow speeds and internet dropping.  So he put us back on the pair we had been on and said he would notify the department that digs up the road to come out and replace the cable.  Wednesday we got a text from Century Link saying that Dave was coming out.  We never saw him.  Thirty minutes later, Dave was done and leaving.  Since tech number four was here, we've had close to 40Mbps, and zero dropping of the internet.  I have no idea what, if anything, was fixed, and whether it will stay fixed.  For now, we are happy campers.  It does not seem to me that it should be this difficult. 

Who watched State of the Union last night?  We saw about half of it.  President Biden did good.  The Republican rebuttal was just pathetic and Senator Britt has been completely and thoroughly dragged on twitter for sitting at her kitchen table over-acting.

Here's another troubling thing we can't do anything about.  The country is running out of electrical transmission capacity.  Between bitcoin, AI, and cloud computing, the grid is running out of capacity.  It's one of those things that can be ameliorated by a large application of money, but the question remains of who will pay.  Here is an interesting article on the subject.