06.23.07
The Street of Broken Broadband Dreams, Chapter 25
“Let me explain… No, there is too much, let me sum up.” - Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride
I try my best not to go all meta-blog around here, presenting my excuses for how I’m too busy or that I’m just too damn lazy to update this site. But I leave you with the following thought: A man’s gotta have his priorities. Moving on.
Much has transpired in the intervening months, albeit the goal is still tantalizingly out of reach. Dear reader, allow me to catch you up.
- We own a construction crawler, vintage 1985. Hey, it’s got a backhoe, what can I say?
- A trench was dug from the antenna site to the house.
- Part of that trench was dug along the straight section of the road to the vineyard, effectively destroying it.
- The Solar God smiled upon us and did grace us with a divine visitation to bury electrical cables and conduits along said road section.
- We still do not have the wires connected to the power panel in the garage, nor do we have the electrical boxes installed up at the antenna site.
- The fiber optic that will pump those lovely ones and zeros isn’t even ordered.
- We expect that we won’t be up and running until the end of July at the earliest.
Subchapter One: The Crawler Of DOOM
The crawler has an interesting story. Our next-door (meaning about a mile downhill from us) neighbor (a uniquely crusty old Brit, who made his fortune through logging in Northern California) moved to a Central American country last month. As part of his departure, Crusty was selling his old John Deere 450C loader crawler. A crawler, as opposed to a backhoe) uses tracks instead of tires, making it better suited for the ranch and its hilly terrain. Even though it was seriously old and long in the tooth, he wanted ten large. In an uncharacteristic turn, I haggled him down to eight. Of course, I’m still wondering who got the better deal.
Crusty spent a fair bit of time describing all that was wrong with the machine: hour meter broken, seats basically destroyed by the elements, lights not working, switches missing, hydraulic seals leaking like sieves, bushings completely gone on just about every pivot point, yada yada yada. So, as long as we used it in the daytime, didn’t lift hugely heavy items using the front loader, and we kept 20 gallons of hydraulic fluid on hand to keep the reservoir filled, the sucker would do work for us. Never mind that your ass would be sitting on bare metal and we literally have no idea how long that the crawler has actually been used over the years, those really are just subordinate issues. The crawler has a backhoe and it was shown to me that it could dig.
Of course, The Boss and I salivated mightily. We still recognized that we will need to have an agricultural tractor, so this crawler wouldn’t be able to do every little thing that we need around the ranch and vineyard. But the siren song of the backhoe could not be denied, even The Boss was taken in by it.
Subchapter Two: The Trench of DOOM (drink)
The trench presented several significant challenges. Originally, the Wunderkind was going to dig along the uphill side of the road to the vineyard, through all the twisty turns and across several culverts to go down, down to the house. But Mr. Handy (who, bless his heart, should be called Mr. Overtime, since he never knows when to frigging quit working) and I walked an alternate and slightly more direct route, which would avoid most (if not all) of the culverts, and stay off the road almost completely, so that we wouldn’t need to be concerned with vineyard traffic (which, at this time of year is basically about every ten days so they can spray sulphur on the vines). It also shaved about 100 feet off the distance that the Wunderkind originally estimated.
When the time came to dig the trench, Mr. Handy dropped everything and walked behind the big-ass trencher through hill and dale, suffering poison oak, bug bites, and sunburn to bring the trench down the hill, skipping across one of the seasonal gullies (because it was way too deep to dig under, and way too far to go around). We got to the final stretch before the meadow above the ranch house and realized that it was a rock garden. Correction, a boulder garden, and most of them were above ground, with no telling how much worse it would be underneath. No trencher known to man would cut through that, so we figured we would lay the conduit above ground and call it a day.
Of course, it wasn’t until the Solar God gazed upon our plan that He shone His holy wisdom down upon us: laying the pipes and conduit above ground would only work up until the first forest fire; the pipes and conduit would quickly melt and our glorious pipeline would be destroyed (and yes, I realize that if a forest fire blows through the ranch, we’ll be worried about more than whether our Internet connection is working, but stay with me on this). So, our hopes rested on the one thing we didn’t want to do: dig a trench down (part of) the road to the vineyard.
But there’s more, oh so much more. Stay tuned.