#we didn’t get sky tv (or cable I think Americans call it) until I was like 13 and there were no streaming services back then lol

[mickeym4ndy]

curious if you ever watched private practice

Kinda, I watched it as it was airing but pretty sporadically! Also I was like 12/13 when I was watching it so I haven’t watched it all the way through as an adult or anything

[austinpanda]

Bangor Bound, Ch. 5

[In case it needs stating, none of this even remotely happened.]

Transcript of NPR Interview with Rick Weidmann

NPR correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton: Good evening, and welcome to tonight’s interview, part of our continuing series Profiles in Courage. Our guest this evening is Rick Weidmann, who is leaving his job of twenty-three years in a car insurance call center--oh goodness, I’m sorry for your call center experience, Mr. Weidmann…

Rick Weidmann: Thank you. That’s kind of you.

Quist-Arcton: ...to move north, with his husband Zachary, to Bangor, Maine, just because they want so strongly to leave the snowless American South in favor of someplace that fought on the correct side of the Civil War and has snow. Truly, a profile in courage. Mr. Weidmann, welcome.

Weidmann: Thank you. It’s...it’s an honor to be with you. You’re my favorite NPR voice. 

Quist-Arcton: Ha-ha, thank you! I’d like to begin this interview by asking you to give our listeners some background. Who are you and your husband?

Weidmann: My name is Rick; I am 50, I have a degree in English. My husband is Zachary, he’s not yet old enough to dress himself, because I married an embryo. This is my humorous way of saying I’ve married someone younger than myself, but he’s a grown-up. We live in Austin, Texas. I attract hummingbirds and mostly sit inside where it’s air conditioned.

Quist-Arcton: Courageous, indeed. As I understand it, you’re just back from having your car prepared for the long journey north. 

Weidmann: Yes. I went to a place I trust, and they took $477 of my money to take action which, they assured me, will allow the car to continue to function as it did when I drove there. That was an oil change, full synthetic, replace a brake light, flush & fill brake fluid, which had never been done, and replace the battery, along with a battery cable that had corroded due to acid. 

Quist-Arcton: Fascinating. Terrifying, and fascinating. So why are you moving to Bangor?

Weidmann: Oh gosh, we came up with something like 18 reasons, but the main ones were financial; it’s getting too expensive to live in Austin, it’s too big and crowded for my husband, and it’s too hot. 

Quist-Arcton: Those are the main reasons, then: the cost, over-population, and temperature, and the increasing courage needed to cope. It’s literally hot and getting hotter in Austin, Texas.

Weidmann: Yes, getting hotter each year.

Quist-Arcton: What are some of the lesser reasons for moving? The things about which you need not have quite so much courage?

Weidmann: Uh...greater access to sin. Texas is so puritanical. In Bangor, there’s a casino, with a buffet. Liquor stores can operate every day, not six days a week, like here in Texas. And the state just ah...legalized it, you know?

Quist-Arcton: Really? Maine just ah...legalized it recently? 

Weidmann: Yes. Yes they did. It’s totally ah...legal now.

Quist-Arcton: Other reasons?

Weidmann: Um...We will almost certainly get a chance to see the northern lights. The aurora borealis. And Stephen King lives in Bangor. I’ve read it’s not unusual to run into him at the movie theater, or the hardware store. Oh, and Zach and I want to learn to ski. 

Quist-Arcton: So you and your husband decided to quit your jobs. Your husband worked at the IRS, is that right?

Weidmann: That’s right. 

Quist-Arcton: Goodness, I’m so sorry to hear he had to work for the IRS.

Weidmann: Thank you. That’s kind of you.

Quist-Arcton: You quit your jobs and now your plan is to screw your courage to the sticking place, to up stakes, as it were, and move to Bangor, Maine. How far away is that?

Weidmann: From Austin, it’s about 2,200 miles, or about 3,540 kilometers. Should take about three days to drive there.

Quist-Arcton: How ARE you able to do that?

Weidmann: Basically it’s because of how brave I am. I’m really, exceedingly brave.

Quist-Arcton: Well, obviously, leaving a bad job that you hate, after only 23 years, takes immense bravery, but what drew you to Bangor, specifically?

Weidmann: Well, it’s small enough to satisfy the husband. He remembers a time when he lived in Pensacola, Florida. Now living in Pensacola, Florida was exactly as awful as it sounds. Hot, humid, politically all over the place…

Quist-Arcton: And no snow.

Weidmann: No snow at all. But he goes to the grocery store at noon and it’s like...you could go there to be alone. It’s not packed with people. The parking lot isn’t packed with people. You don’t get panhandled walking through the packed parking lot. No strangers saying, “Sir? Sir!” He really has a hard time with stuff like that.

Quist-Arcton: And he hopes to reacquire something like this in Bangor? 

Weidmann: Yes. Like Pensacola, but on the North Pole. Bangor gets lots of snow. Everything else we need, we order off the internet.

Quist-Arcton: And you’ve lived in Texas for how long? 

Weidmann: Oh, all but a couple of my 50 years. 

Quist-Arcton: And that couple of years?

Weidmann: Chicago!

Quist-Arcton: Lots of snow?

Weidmann: TONS of snow.

Quist-Arcton: How did you like it?

Weidmann: Ofeibea, it was solid fucking gold. I’m aware that I didn’t have to have a job, because I was 9, but I learned what the snow-filled sky looks like. I learned about the silence of snow. We had a nice house with a fireplace, and Battlestar Galactica was on TV for the very first time. 

Quist-Arcton: It sounds like quite the idyll. 

Weidmann: Indeed. That, I suppose, is what I’m hoping to recapture. Zachary, the husband, he gets to cease working at the IRS, and find peace in an uncrowded grocery store. I get to cease working in the fifth circle of hell, the call center, and remember what the world was like when it was covered in white, and utterly silent, and the Cylons were still cool. Well, they weren’t THAT cool, but, you know, it was 1978. Star Wars was in the past and Empire Strikes Back wasn’t due for a couple more years, you know...we were starved for sci-fi. 

Quist-Arcton: So, to summarize, you, Rick Weidmann, bachelor of arts, are moving from the bottom center of the country, where you’ve lived 96% of your life, to the top right of the country, where you’ve never been, because your husband wants a grocery store to himself, and you want to watch it snow from inside, whilst gambling, drinking, blazing doobies, and watching Battlestar Galactica. Is that mostly it?

Weidmann: Entirely it, yes. And I felt strongly enough about it that I gave up my health insurance. In America, at age 50. Probably not smart. Well, I may have. There’s some shit about COBRA payments that I still have to read. That shit looks complicated.

Quist-Arcton: And how will you know when you’ve finally found your new home? When will it feel like this is where you belong?

Weidmann: Olfeibea, I’m not sure. I’m thinking the first time I make Hamburger Helper there. No place feels like it’s my home until I’ve made and consumed a helper in it. Also pooped in the bathroom. That’s unrelated to the helper thing. I’m just saying, once you’ve had a good poop, that pretty much marks the place as yours.

Quist-Arcton: On behalf of Profiles in Courage, I’d like to thank our guest, Mr. Rick Weidmann. Thank you, sir, for having the time and the courage to come speak with us today.

Weidmann: Oh, thank you. Thank you for your interest.

Quist-Arcton: This has been Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR news, Akraaaaaaaaa.

[sjohnson24]

The Earth Is Our Cathedral, and We’re Destroying It

Even for those who never saw Notre Dame Cathedral, even for those who have no use for organized religion, the fire engulfing one of humankind’s oldest and greatest architectural structures was a sad sight.

Some perspective is necessary however. It was man-made thing, and though great art has been lost, no lives were lost. What spiritual and global meanings can we draw from the loss of Notre Dame Cathedral?

“This building took 100 years to construct and was undone in less than a day. We long for some reason, some justification, something to help us mourn the loss of a bit of beauty in the world,” a scholar on medieval religion and violence said.

It took billions of years for present lifeforms on earth to evolve, and they are being decimated in a matter of decades through man’s greed, stupidity and inertia.

People here are still reeling from the wildfire that incinerated the nearby mountain town called Paradise, and killed nearly 90 people. The over-the-top coverage of Notre Dame’s fire on cable TV looks like another sign that elites are refusing to read.

Such intricate symbols of man-made grandeur were monuments the Catholic Church built to itself as much as they were intended to give illiterate people an experience of the divine. What is their loss if we continue to desecrate the earth and decimate the creatures that evolved along with us?

“The French,” an American columnist living in Paris wrote, “don’t spend much time in churches,” adding, with unintended irony, “residents might not have fully realized it until Monday, but I think it reassured them to know that at the heart of their highly planned city was someplace entirely non-rational and non-Cartesian.”

Why does the human heart revere most what the human mind and hand have wrought? Why do most people’s hearts soar within a cathedral but remain coffined when mountainous masses of cumulus slide across an azure sky?

“Notre Dame is our history, our literature, our imagination,” President Emmanuel Macron said. “The place of all our great events, our epidemics, our wars, our liberations, the epicenter of our lives.”

Humanity needs new epicenters, places not of symbol and stone, but cathedrals of nature where the heart and spirit can find healing and renewal. Perhaps that’s one metaphysical meaning serious people can draw from this cultural and architectural misfortune.

An author wrote after a fire in 1174 that destroyed the Canterbury Cathedral that this “house of God hitherto delightful as a paradise of pleasures, was now made a despicable heap of ashes, reduced to a dreary wilderness.”

Dreary wilderness? I’m reminded of John Muir lamenting the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley by the City of San Francisco for water and power. It broke his heart. Imagine damming Yosemite Valley for water and power. That’s what they did at Hetch Hetchy.

Muir wrote: “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”

“Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

As a young man I hiked into Hetch Hetchy one spring with a friend, cross-country skis strapped to our backpacks since snow still covered the slopes above what was once a majestic valley.

I’m glad Muir didn’t live to see truncated waterfalls fall into a man-made lake, or a dirty bathtub ring of the high water mark on the foreshortened granitic rockfaces.

Not having seen Notre Dame, I didn’t understand why they built the great cathedrals during medieval times, symbols of such magnificence amidst so much squalor, until my Russian cultural hosts took me to St. Isaac’s, the largest cathedral in Russia. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and the Russians knew that the USSR was about to collapse.

We were talking as we walked into the cavernous space, empty even of pews, and decorated with gold and jewels in the high Russian style. I was struck silent, and asked my hosts to be quiet as I walked alone and stood under the huge dome.

I had an intimation of the same feeling you get in the High Sierras with the “Range of Light” stretched out before you. At best, a few people of religious power and wealth designed the great cathedrals to recreate for the many the feeling of immensity, awe and sublimity.

They’ll rebuild Notre Dame; don’t grieve for it. Mourn what man is doing to the earth, and move beyond sorrow to save what is left.

As John Muir said, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

Martin LeFevre

[newstfionline]

Inside India’s epic effort to bring electricity to millions of people for the first time

By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times, Dec 29, 2017

BARNALI, INDIA--Anita Chauhan crouched over a flame in the semi-darkness, flipping rotis by the pale yellow light of a kerosene lamp. Smoke filled the shed and wafted into the cool, moonlit forest.

Chauhan hated the lamp. The fuel was expensive, and adjusting the glass singed her hands. Combined with the burning wood, the risk of fire was great. But her husband, Ganpath Singh Chauhan, didn’t like her cooking in the dark.

“What if insects crawl into our food?” he worried.

After dinner she sat at the foot of the bed holding their 2-year-old daughter. Ganpath Singh studied a day-old newspaper by the cold white beam of a flashlight, charged from the family’s weak solar battery.

They fell asleep early, as farmers do in these rugged hills in northern India. But as Chauhan closed her eyes, she felt a glimmer of excitement.

The next day, they would get electricity.

Seventy years after independence, India is racing to connect thousands of villages to power grids for the first time, a mammoth undertaking that aims to reach more than a quarter of a billion people who lack electricity and accelerate the country’s rise into the ranks of the world’s great economies.

The rural electrification drive also seeks to solve one of India’s most vexing contradictions: A country known for producing armadas of engineers and high-tech hubs that serve Fortune 500 companies still includes a vast hinterland where children study by flickering lamps, women hike long distances to collect firewood and men send their cellphones miles away to be charged.

In Barnali, an apple-growing community perched on a wooded slope in the Himalayan foothills, farmers had petitioned government departments for two decades asking to be connected to the power grid.

Solar batteries were unreliable, and difficult to charge between summer monsoons and winter storms. Families effectively lived only half their days, their movements all but frozen once the sun dipped below the rugged peaks to the west.

One day last year, a group of technicians drove into the village along the winding mountain road, armed with fancier smartphones than the Chauhans were accustomed to seeing. They snapped photos of the steep terrain and took down everyone’s names.

A few months later, a team of men in hard hats guided a 300-pound metal pole down the hillside and planted it on a patch of dirt below the apple orchard where two Chauhan brothers live with their families. The workers strung a cable through the beams of their long concrete house and hammered an electric meter into the wall.

The morning that the power was to go on, a half-dozen members of the Chauhan clan stood on their veranda under a cloudless sky. Talk turned to a heady future filled with appliances, and soon a debate broke out.

What kind of stove should they buy? How many lamps? Should they get an iron or an electric flour mill? Would the family’s older children, studying in a distant town, come home more often if they had a TV?

Anita Chauhan was nearly 40. Such a transformation at this stage of her life was hard to imagine.

“I really think that light will change everything,” she said.

Americans think nothing of plugging a cord into a wall at home and being rewarded with a beam of light or the whir of a machine. It was not always that way: It took the Rural Electrification Act in the 1930s to bring power to most farmhouses.

In India at the dawn of the 21st century, electricity was far from a given in many cities.

Schoolchildren endured year-end exams without fans or air conditioners, soaking their test sheets in pools of sweat. Women lit gas stoves with matches and families slept with windows open in the summer to let in the slightest breeze.

In rural areas, India’s central planners had focused on providing electricity for agricultural production, but powering households was not a priority. As India’s economy boomed, its predominantly state-run electricity companies struggled to meet the demands of cities while villages fell further behind.

The World Bank reported in 2015 that 311 million Indians--one-quarter of the population--lacked reliable power, nearly all in the countryside. India, which has four times the population of the United States, can produce one-quarter as much electricity: about 330,000 megawatts, more than half of which comes from coal.

As studies have underlined the benefits of universal electricity access--better educational outcomes for children, greater school attendance for girls, lower risk of respiratory illnesses brought on by kerosene use, and increased security--successive Indian governments have promised to bring power to all.

In 2005, India introduced a rural electrification plan that included free connections for its poorest citizens and better transmission lines in rural areas. A decade later, with more than 18,000 villages still lacking electricity, newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi rebranded the program and pledged $5 billion as part of a push to modernize India’s economy.

But since 2015, only 1,200 villages have seen all households joined to the grid. Officials say the slow pace reflects the difficulty of the task.

“It’s one of the biggest public sector undertakings India has ever done,” said Dinesh Arora, a former head of the state-run Rural Electrification Corp. who now leads NITI Aayog, a government think tank.

“The remaining villages are really the toughest to access. They are on mountaintops, deep in the forests, in insecure areas. In some cases we are the first central government department to reach these places.”

From Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand state, Barnali is 50 miles away as the crow flies--a distance that takes nearly eight hours to cover by road. It begins in a dusty valley and twists skyward through green carpets of farmland, babbling streams, thick pine groves and hamlets marked by desolate tea stalls.

The center of Barnali was electrified in the 1980s, but power was not extended to about two dozen houses in the hills above the village, where the Chauhans have farmed a one-acre plot for generations. Ganpath Singh, his brothers and their wives spent carefully and did the toughest work themselves. Their apple crop now fetches $30,000 in a good year, a decent income by Indian standards.

But the lack of electricity belied that success.

When her daughter Mannat awoke hungry in the middle of the night, Anita Chauhan, a slender woman with a beaked nose, fumbled in the dark for a flashlight or lantern. In the mornings, to fortify the family for a day’s work in the fields, she mixed lassis--Indian smoothies of yogurt, sugar and spices--by hand until her forearms ached.

At night she milked their cows and--with no water heater--took a cold shower before spending an hour cooking dinner in the smoky wooden kitchen shed.

Her elder sister-in-law, Manmala, a primary school teacher in a nearby village, sometimes showed up to work only to find a last-minute holiday had been declared. Her students watched television at home and stumped her with questions about the news.

“If there’s a bus crash and they ask, ‘How did it happen, how many people died?’ I shouldn’t have to ask someone else,” said Manmala, a stern, broad-shouldered 40-year-old. “As a teacher I should have better interactions with the children.”

Raised 10 miles away in a village that had electricity, Manmala struggled to adjust after she married Ganpath Singh’s older brother, Bijender Singh, and moved to Barnali. Her two sons attended college in Dehradun and came home only once a year.

“There is nothing here for them, no way to study for exams or relax in front of the TV,” she said. “They call every day, asking, ‘Has light arrived?’”

Several years ago, basic cellular coverage reached the village, but the phones proved more trouble than they were worth. The signal was spotty, and to recharge a battery usually required trudging 20 minutes down into Barnali to plug into a socket.

“There is no point in raising a family here,” said Anupa Rawat, a 45-year-old mother of two who lives below the Chauhans. Her sons worked outside the state for much of the year and, when they returned in summers to help with the apple harvest, spent nights in the village with friends, falling asleep to cricket matches on TV.

“I’ll be relieved when light comes,” Rawat said. “Someone looking at this place from far away wouldn’t even know there was life here. It’s like we don’t exist--until now.”

The next day, as the sun dipped below the hills, Ganpath Singh trudged in from the apple orchard. Anita was in the shed, cooking potatoes.

“Is the power on?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I didn’t switch on the light because I thought it would attract mosquitoes.”

He wiped his hands on his trousers and scooped up his daughter, pulling a wadded-up light bulb wrapper from her hands. He found the panel on the wall where the bulb was installed and hit the switch, flinching for an instant as it bathed the veranda in a warm yellow glow.

Life over the next several months was different, though it wasn’t exactly the revolution Anita Chauhan had expected.

The family bought a few simple appliances--a hand mixer, an iron, a small electric stove with one burner. It took less than half an hour to make dinner now that she didn’t have to collect wood or start a fire.

Their solar battery, housed in a plastic case the size of a toolbox, conked out yet again and for once they didn’t bother having it fixed.

Bijender Singh sped up work on a new family house on an outcropping above their current dwelling, drilling power sockets into the concrete walls in each of the three rooms. Instead of dirt floors he installed tiles, the builders’ mechanical saw buzzing as it shaped the pieces.

But they did not buy a TV or the water heater they had hoped for. A surprise hailstorm killed off half the apple crop, erasing most of their profits.

Over time, they saw the electricity supply could be just as unpredictable.

During heavy rains in July and August, the power sometimes went out for days. In September, they spent more than two weeks in the dark. Arun Kant, an official with the state power company, said a fallen tree knocked out a transformer in the forest during the rough weather.

The Chauhans went back to using firewood and kerosene, but their supplies nearly ran out after rockslides blocked the roads. Frustrated, the youngest Chauhan brother, Bharat Singh, threatened to lead villagers on a march to the local utility officer’s house.

Then one day, their lights worked again.

“These electricity officials are extremely corrupt and incompetent,” Bijender Singh said. “In the cities, there are big requirements for power. Here we just want to watch TV or read under a lamp.”

The frustrations in Barnali point to a challenge at the heart of India’s electrification drive: Poor villagers consume little electricity and generate hardly any revenue for utility companies, so companies see little incentive to make rural service more consistent.

“Utilities feel there is no financial case for extending the grid to areas where the ability to pay for electricity doesn’t exist,” said Karthik Ganesan, a research fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a New Delhi-based research organization.

“But many surveys indicate rural India does have an appetite to pay for it, because they pay more for services like kerosene. So the question is, are you able to deliver a system that is reliable enough that I am willing to pay.”

Still, even patchy electricity has brought villagers closer.

Many evenings, the Chauhan brothers gather in the clapboard bedroom of their neighbors, the Rawats, to watch TV. The $130 analog model had been the Rawats’ first purchase after the power came.

Anupa Rawat bought a small mixer to make chutneys. Some nights she stays up late knitting by the light of a lone bulb above their doorway.

“We don’t need much more than this for now,” she said. “We managed without machines for all this time.”

[travelingtheusa]

TEXAS

16 Nov 2017 (Thu) – Since the museums didn’t open until 10 a.m., we drove to J.C. Penny’s and bought new sneakers.  Then we drove to National Ranching Heritage Center.  The museum is run by Texas Tech University and admission was free.  The building displayed various ranching implements and contained stories of how the west was settled.  One of the displays was all about cattle rustling.  That was a very interesting read. When we were done inside, we walked the paths around the outside displays.  There were about 20 houses spread out over the grounds as examples of what homes looked like during the 1800 and early 1900s.  We saw some fascinating buildings.  There was a cow chip shed where the children in the family collected and stored cow chips for fuel; a cow scratcher that dispensed insecticide when cows rubbed on the cable; a squeeze chute that held livestock tightly in place so they could be examined.  

     When we were done, we looked around for a place to have lunch.  We landed at Mi Taco Village, a small, very local restaurant with very good food.  It was one of those places that all the locals know about.  Next, we went to the Silent Wings Museum.  It was all about the glider program of WWII.  There were lots of story boards and displays that told the story of very brave men.  It was quite enjoyable.

     We then drove to Prairie Dog Town.  In 1930, two friends captured two pairs of black-tailed prairie dogs and enclosed them in a large pen.  Ranchers were poisoning the prairie dogs at an alarming rate and the friends thought they would go extinct.  Fast forward 82 years and the prairie dogs have multiplied into the thousands.  They were everywhere and naturally, they have expanded well beyond the border of their pen.  The little guys were all fat and chubby – the eatin’ is good with all the tourists feeding them.  They look expectantly at you and when it’s apparent that you are going to throw them something to eat, they wag their tails and chirp at you.  I couldn’t feed them enough peanuts.  There were birds all over the place, too, trying to share in the prairie dogs’ good fortune.  It was fun.

15 Nov 2017 (Wed) – We drove to Ransom Canyon to see the Robert Bruno Steel House.  Some guy made it a hobby to work on an unusual shaped house made of steel and overlooking the canyon.  It was not open to the public and there were no signs around it (we found it on Trip Advisor).  I don’t think anyone lives in the place; it looked deserted and the driveway was overgrown. We walked around the property but never went up to the house.  Across the street was another unusual house that kind of looked like the icing on a cup cake.  The one person who rated the steel house on Trip Advisor described this other house as “the candy cane house.”

     We got back in the truck and drove down into Ransom Canyon to admire the houses built around the lake.  They were all very high end; we don’t believe any house sells for less than a million dollars.  There was a dam at one end that created the lake.  Nice area but happens if the dam breaks?  I wouldn’t live in the hole.  There was only one road in and out of the canyon.

     After exploring the area, we drove to the American Wind Power Center. This was a collection of wind generators from the early 1700s to the present.  Who would have thought anyone collects things like this?  Also in the center was a collection of counterweights for the wind generators, miniature doll houses, grind stones, and a toy train track with trains traveling over 3,300’ of track.  There were additional displays outside including two of the very large wind generators you see on wind farms today.  One was erected and working.  A second was in pieces on the ground so we could walk up to it and see how it was made and fit together.  That was very interesting.

     When we were finished at the center, we drove into town for lunch. We followed the GPS to the Ranch House only to find it closed.  We then walked to O’Reilly’s Irish Pub only to find that closed, too.  As we looked down the main road, we noticed that although there were many signs for eateries, most of them were closed.  It was just false storefronts.  So we wound up back at Triple J’s Chophouse for lunch. I got the Chicken Potted Pie.  It took some work to find any chicken in it. I didn’t think it was that good. Paul had the lunch special – chopped beef on a bun.  He had to eat it with a fork because there was no way to pick up without everything falling out of the bun.  It was not as enjoyable as last night.

     After lunch, we drove to the Bayer Museum of Agriculture.  I always thought that Bayer was a drug company so I was surprised to see the name here.  Inside were dozens of tractors, reapers, and other farm machinery.  We got the chance to sit in the cab of a Stripper and see what it is like to harvest a cotton crop.  The museum was very interesting.

     Since it was just 3:30 when we were done, we weren’t ready to go back to the campground yet so we went to Caprock Winery for a tasting.  It was a lovely facility and they host a lot of weddings.  Paul and I both did a tasting.  It was $10 a person, which was high for a tasting.  We liked several wines and wound up buying four bottles.

14 Nov 2017 (Tue) – The desk that Paul built shifted.  He had it screwed into the wall and it broke away. He spent an hour this morning trying to reattach the desk to the wall, so we didn’t leave Abilene until  10 a.m.  The temperatures remained in the high 60s and low 70s with gray skies.  We passed miles and miles of wind generators and cotton fields.  I was surprised to learn that the United States is the third largest cotton producer in the world (behind China and India), and Texas is the largest cotton producer in the United States (42% of all cotton grown).  Many of the cotton fields had wind generators on them.  It makes good sense to get double use out of the land.  I think Texas has the largest number of windmills in America.  They started in Sweetwater and continued through Roscoe and Inalade. There were thousands of them.  Palm Springs in California has over 600 windmills in a concentrated area.  Texas has twice as many spread over a very large area.

     At 12:30 we found a rest area, pulled over, popped out the slides, and made lunch.  Back on the road again, we arrived in Lubbock at 2 p.m.  We are parked at an Elks Lodge.  They have ten spaces aligned in a row on the side of lodge back against the fence.  All spaces are back in.  We have electric, water, and sewer hookups but no WiFi.

     Once set up, we headed to the Buddy Holly Museum.  It was small with a house sitting in back all fenced off. They give tours of the house (which was moved here from elsewhere) three times a day.  We missed it.  There were lots of storyboards and displays around the building with some of Buddy Holly’s guitars.  One room was set up with the bed and dresser that were in his bedroom.  It was weird.

      Across the street from the museum was a park with a statue of Buddy Holly. Behind him was a wall with plaques of many performers’ names on it.  It was billed as the “Wall of Fame.”

      We then drove to Triple J’s Chop House and had a delightful dinner. The restaurant was in a very historic building and the inside was very eclectic.  We sat in a booth that was on an upper level and looked down into the grill area.  There was one cook who was preparing all the food.  He cooked the steaks, made the salads, dished out the sides, and pulled pizzas in and out of the pizza oven.  He could have used help but there was not enough room behind the counter for two people.

     When we got back to the Elks Lodge, we went into the lounge to pay for our RV site.  The bar was pretty full and there was a small baby shower going on.  The bartender gave us a free drink as visiting Elks.  She gave us a schedule of events for the next few days.  We paid for three nights here. p

13 Nov 2017 (Mon) – We left Waco at 9 a.m. headed to Abilene. The sky was overcast all day and the temperature stayed at 62 degrees despite changes in elevation.  We arrived at Dyess Air Force Base FamCamp a little after 1 p.m.  This is a fairly new park; all concrete with no trees.  Most spaces are pull-through with a few back-ins along the perimeter. We have full hookups, laundry, and great WiFi.

     As soon as we were set up, we ran out to get fuel.  While out, we stopped in a grocery store called the Market Street.  It was a very nice shop and had all but one item we needed.  When we got back, we ate, then I spent the night working on the activities for our 2019 caravan.

 12 Nov 2017 (Sun) – We went to the Texas Ranger Museum. Someone lovingly collected memorabilia and paid honor to departed rangers.  There were several rooms that we wandered through with lots of storyboards describing events and persons.  A 45 minute video from The Enforcers (a TV show) was shown.  I guess it was a way to keep the costs low by just playing a TV special rather than making their own video.

    After we left the museum, we got fuel and then stopped at WalMart to get some groceries.  There were a few things we couldn’t find.  When we got back to the campground, we did the laundry.

11 Nov 2017 (Sat-Veterans Day) – The voice of Boris, the Ghoul, on the GPS has been replaced by Frosty, the Elf, with a little pipsqueak voice that tries to get you to go on a joyride with Santa’s sled or begs you to stop for some hot chocolate.  Cute.

     We left Beaumont a little after 9 a.m.  The sky was clear but grew cloudy as we drove on.  It was very cool this morning but got warmer as we moved north (what did I say about Mother Nature having a weird sense of humor?) and it was 74 degrees at the high point of the day.  We arrived in Waco at 3 p.m.  The campground has a kind of run down feel to it yet it doesn’t look neglected.  Maybe it’s just old.

     The clerk checked us in and demanded cash or check, no credit card. After we got set up, we hurried into town to the Dr. Pepper Museum (which won’t be open tomorrow).  It was something of a disappointment.  Certainly not as captivating as the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta.  

     After the museum, we drove to Magnolia Market at the Silos.  The couple on HGTV’s show, Fixer Upper (Chip and Joanna Gaines), own the shop. Next to it is a bakery shop that is rated #1 in the area.  There was a line for the bakery that wound out the door and down the block. Magnolia was a large boutique type store with many items that Joanna uses to decorate the houses they renovate. Behind the store is a large field where families are encouraged to play games together.  Ringing the field are food trucks selling interesting foodstuff. Since it was late in the day, several of the trucks were closed or closing.  We left and walked back to the truck.  

      Across the street was The Backyard, a BBQ place.  They have four bars but did not serve any draft beer (which Paul thought was very weird – what bar worth it’s weight does not serve draft beer?).  We ordered our meal and then sat down to await a text saying our food was ready. I ordered brisket and it looked like overcooked SPAM.  The meat was burnt and tough to chew.  There were beans that tasted like they came out of a Campbell’s can.  A glob of potato salad had been mixed with mustard. The sweet tea tasted like they dumped a full bag of sugar in the container.  It was NOT a good meal!  We sat out on the patio where they were getting ready to have a band play tonight. The speaker was playing out cowboy songs.  They had a great sound system – clear and loud.

10 Nov 2017 (Fri) – We left Port Allen, LA at 9:20 a.m.  The temperatures were unusually cold – in the low 40s.  The skies were clear and blue.  The ride was three and a half hours over bayous, swamps, rivers, lakes, ponds, and creeks.  We arrived in Beaumont, Texas a little after 1:00 p.m. at the Elks Lodge.

     They have space for about 20 RVs in back of the lodge.  There are full hook ups (you usually don’t get sewer hookups at an Elks Lodge) and access to the WiFi.

      After set up, we drove into town to get some fuel then to the post office to mail off some cards.  When we got back, we went into the lodge to pay for the night.  We bought cocktails and as visiting elks, they gave us a second drink free.  There were only two guys in the lounge when we got there and another woman arrived later. They were all very friendly.

[alstravelblog]

World Trip 2014 - Part 5

Here we are, the last section of my USA tour. There's a lot to cram into this one so bear with me. Me, Jonny and Maria set off from Portland in our rented Mazda - which cost a fair amount for two days, mainly because we're under 25 - and headed south towards the Californian coast. I don't count Seattle and Vancouver as being by the Pacific as they technically lie in the Puget Sound Bay, which isn't really ocean, so arriving at an eerily misty seaside town late at night was our first exciting glimpse of the Pacific. That night we slept in a motel run by the creepiest family, to the sound of sea lions barking. The next day was a mad dash down to San Francisco, admiring the amazingly tall redwood trees, checking out the coastal scenery of Route 1, and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge during rush hour (the carpool lane, however, was a big bonus).

San Francisco is one hell of a city. Rammed full of people, about twenty forms of public transport, and hills too steep to be in a city, it's just crazy, colourful and loud. Our first night was spent at an Indian restaurant/Irish bar (that's right, combined) before enjoying a whisky in Little Italy. The next couple of days saw us playing old fashioned arcade games down on the pier, riding the cable car up and down the hills, climbing Coit Tower to admire the view, cycling to the ocean and then up to the Golden Gate Bridge JUST missing sunset by a few minutes, couchsurfing with a woman named Jess who treated us to a meal in Chinatown, bumping into a guy from St Andrews in the street, and watching fireworks on Pier 39 (the famous one) whilst eating Mexican food.

Just a quick mention about the cycling: they told us to return the bikes on the other side of the city by 9pm, but what we didn't realise was they didn't give us lights on our bikes. This meant that after sunset we had to cycle along pavements illegally, and through pitch black parks avoiding pedestrians and just whistling to be make ourselves known - it was stupid and difficult, especially after getting lost. However, we DID play an on-rails interactive zombie laser-shooting game on the pier, as well accomplishing a Mission Impossible style laser maze (where I showed a nimbleness I didn't know I possessed) - so that made things better.

Anyway, one of the highlights of the trip was renting our own campervan and driving through the streets of the city while people admired our paintwork (a massive osprey, for some reason). We even rode down that famous steep winding road in San Francisco, win Jonny telling me "This is it Al, we've made it in life." We took the van down the Californian coast, then camped under the stars just outside of Yosemite. That took a lot of driving, and we did have crappy salad sat in a dark, misty car park on the way there, but it was worth it when we finally camped and saw how many stars were above us (hint: a crazy amount).

People will think we're crazy for not even spending a night in Yosemite Park, but Jonny didn't want to camp in the cold (we were at 8000ft, can you believe), and our lack of time meant we decided to head out for the desert sooner rather than later. However, the day we spent in the park was amazing; the trees, the lakes, mountains like I've never seen before. After all the hectic travelling we'd been doing, it was nice to just sit by a silent alpine lake and do nothing. Hiking's for chumps.

So yeah, that evening we just drove and drove until we'd descended about 7000ft and camped by a desert road in Death Valley.

The next morning, stood outside the campervan underneath a big blue scorching desert sky, I threw a Breaking Bad reference Jonny's way. "Yo Mr White!" I shouted, pretty chuffed when Jonny grumbled "Yes, Jessie?" "When we gonna cook, yo?" It was a good moment, but maybe you had to be there. (If any adults reading don't know Breaking Bad, then just ignore this whole paragraph)

Death Valley is an insane place. Just like a massive, empty park where people drive miles and miles to see each attraction. You just pass each other on the big empty roads with a thought like "I wonder if they're going to see the abandoned mining facility, or the canyon full of colourful rocks?" We camped at a ranch with a pool, golf course, tennis courts, bar, cafe, buffet restaurant, everything. A bit TOO much for one of the driest places on earth... Still, chilling by the pool was a treat. So was watching the sunset from a rocky hill in the middle of the desert, beer in hand.

We woke up early before leaving the valley, to watch the sunrise at the lowest place in the USA (200ft below sea level! I've never spoken about feet so much in my life until I got here.) It's called Badwater Basin and it's just covered in salty crust, salty pools, and surrounded by a mountain range that looks badass in the rising sun. Oh, and we saw a desert fox being all mysterious on some rocks. Like the nomads we've become, me and Jonny then hit the road for Las Vegas - not an ideal place for a campervan.

It turns out that you can park in any of the casinos for free, so we picked one and it turned out we were right in the middle of the Strip. This is the weirdest city I've ever been to: people walk the streets drinking huge cocktails, they smoke cigarettes indoors, they walk past homeless people right outside the casinos where they'll spend hours throwing their money away into slot machines. And then there's the buildings. Pirate ships, castles, volcanoes, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canal (complete with fake blue sky overhead so it feels like daytime all night), Roman palaces -they have everything just crammed together on this one road, with outdoor music and escalators to help you move from casino to casino. I put a dollar into a slot machine, and won twenty, which was pretty awesome. Vegas ain't dragging me under.

Me and Jonny spent some time playing arcade games, and spent our prize tickets on some tat from the gift shop (including fake tattoos for him and a sheriff's badge for me), before trying our very first oxygen bar on the Strip. The idea here is that you get tubes up your nose to breathe in oxygen from different coloured cylinders and it's supposed to energise you, while the girl walks up and down giving head massages. Nice. That evening we went to a Vegas comedy show, where Jonny built a little fortress out of our passports and wallets to hide the fact that we were drinking cocktails and so wouldn't get picked on by the comedians. We ended our night by just wandering the length of the strip, watching the volcano spout its lava, and the Bellagio fountains dance to Frank Sinatra. It was then we realised camping in the car park of the Linq casino might be a bad idea, what with the security racing round on segways, so we had to camp out by some casino in the middle of the desert - a real pain in the arse after such a long day.

The following morning started off with an unplanned detour to Hoover Dam; not much to say other than that it's an insanely big wall of concrete built in a big old gorge and it's bloody impressive. No wonder it's one the modern seven wonders of the world. We hit up a classic diner for some ranchos heuvos (I can't even tell you what that is, eggs and cheese and stuff) then rode our way along Route 66 in the sun, blasting Queen's greatest hits on the radio. I then fulfilled a dream I didn't know I had: camping in a Flintstones themed campsite. We drank beers round the campsite and listened to Mumford and Sons which was nice. (Although is it sexist that the campsite laundromat was called Wilma's laundry? You tell me...)

Conquering another classic American tourist landmark, me and John visited the Grand Canyon. It's big. Bigger than it looks on TV. It just stretches off as far as you can see, so obviously we took loads of touristy photos of ourselves, before visiting the geology museum right on the side of the cliff. The next couple of days was just road tripping through the desert back to California to visit Los Angeles, a city so big it's actually made up of 53 cities apparently. It's stupidly big, and not in a 'woah' Grand Canyon way but rather an 'urgh, it's just miles and miles of concrete strip malls' way. We slagged off the city quite a bit on our long drive through it. However, we finished the day driving through the Santa Monica Mountains to camp by the sea at Malibu - that, my friends, is a nice place to camp. Better than the truck stop from the night before, that's for sure.

I'm going to be honest, LA was not what I've seen in the movies. The traffic is horrendous, the pavements are packed, and to get between two places worth seeing it'll take you hours. We still managed to do some cool stuff though: open-top bus through Hollywood led by a tour guide in Slytherin robes, saw Nightmare Before Christmas at the El Capitan theatre with added snow and smoke effects etc., saw the red carpet premiere for Interstellar and even caught a glimpse of Matthew McConaughey, and walked along Santa Monica and Venice Beaches to work on our northern England tans. I'm sure there are many reasons to love LA, but it wasn't mine or Jonny's favourite city, meaning I felt even more guilty hopping on a plane to Fiji and leaving him there.

[mediafocus-blog1]

The Worst Internet In America

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The Worst Internet In America

o force the duration and breadth of Saguache County, Colorado, is a dangerous assignment. The roads, as a minimum in spring, are lonely, clean and straight — “power 30 miles then take a left” is the gist of maximum map directions. But the perspectives are what can pressure a person to distraction, veering recklessly over dotted yellow traces. There are hay fields drowned in water, blue and glassy so it looks like the sky fell on them, football fields complete of black farm animals standing stock-nevertheless like museum statuary, symptoms along empty stretches advertising meet and greets with the “Happy Gilmore” alligator, and crop planes that totter and swoop perilously over electricity strains earlier than misting fields so green you think they may have invented the colour.

The beauty of Saguache County may be an inconvenient one, although, particularly within the twenty-first century: It has some of the worst nets inside u. S . A .. That’s in element because of the mountains and the isolation they create. Saguache (sah-WATCH’) is nestled in among the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan stages, a 4-hour pressure southwest of Denver. Its populace of 6, get three hundred is unfolded across 3,169 rectangular miles 7,800 toes above sea level, but on land that is mostly flat, so that you can nearly see the overall scope of mountain levels as you force the county’s highways: the San Juans, melted into gentle brown peaks to the west, and the Sangre de Cristos, sharp, black and snow-capped, thrusting almost violently upward to the east.

FiveThirtyEight analyzed every country’s broadband usage the usage of information from researchers at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University1 and discovered that Saguache changed into at the lowest. Only five.6 percentage of adults were estimated to have broadband.

But Saguache isn’t alone in missing broadband. According to the Federal Communications Commission, 39 percent of rural Americans — 23 million human beings — don’t get admission to. In Pew surveys, folks that stay in rural regions were approximately twice as possibly no longer to use the internet as city or suburban Americans.

The FCC now defines broadband internet as the ability to download facts at 25 megabits consistent with 2nd and to add it at 3 megabits in step with 2nd. This sort of connection enables a person to do the things that most Americans with domestic net love to do — watch Netflix, play video games, and browse on a line with out interruption even supposing more than one gadgets are on the equal connection. For around $30 a month, New York City internet carriers offer basic programs of one hundred Mbps provider. In Saguache County, this kind of connection is rare; if a family needs a download velocity of 12 Mbps with an upload velocity of two Mbps, they are able to expect to pay a whopping $ninety.

This would be much less of a problem if the internet weren’t so valuable to fashionable existence. But taxes, activity applications, payroll operations, banking, newspapers, buying, university publications and video chats all are ubiquitous online. Saguache County’s students are expected to take their nation exams on line even though an administrator at one college that houses K-12 college students informed me that until the last yr, the internet frequently went down for more than one hours or maybe all day within the building.

The tide lengthy in the past grew to become from paper to virtual in American life, and but the disparities in getting admission to the net in elements of the united states of America may be stark. Rural communities frequently face logistics issues installing fiber-optic cable in sparsely populated areas. In Saguache, net problems are both logistical and financial; the county is three times the size of Rhode Island, at the same time as 30 percent of citizens live beneath the poverty line.

Some would argue that the social settlement has changed and that speedy net isn’t just a luxury — it’s a right of all 21st-century Americans. If that’s the case, we’re a long way from making sure it. Just spend some days hopping from metropolis to metropolis on Saguache’s long stretches of an avenue.

The U.S. Has a protracted record of trying to bring application get right of entry to all Americans. In the early 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt installed the Rural Electrification Administration, ninety percent of American farmers lived without power. Many families could not get entry to going for walks water, warmness and mild for the home. The price of running electric powered trains to the united states’ most faraway areas turned into prohibitive for income-looking for corporations, but the REA determined eager partners in rural electric cooperatives that had started out to spring up in small groups with an eye fixed towards modernization. The government commenced offering the co-ops loans to construct out their electric powered networks, and via the quiet of the Nineteen Forties, most farms in the united states of America had strength.

With clear eyes brought by 80 years of hindsight, it’s obvious that Americans need to have to get right to entry to electricity — u. S .’s monetary and social properly-being depends on it. Advocates of generic broadband argue the same will be said of the rapid net. Already, the law says that all Americans need to have to get right to entry to net offerings, thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which multiplied the belief of widely wide-spread carrier beyond simply the proper to phone provider. In 2017, many co-ops see bringing the high-velocity net to the maximum remote locations within the United States as the 21st century’s solution to rural electrification.

Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of the Rural Broadband Association, says rural America have to have fast broadband, in an element, as it’s proper for commercial enterprise.

She touted a 2016 study from the Hudson Institute that observed that sixty-six percent of the financial effect of rural broadband went to city economies in preference to rural ones, for the reason that most of the resources needed to construct these remote networks are sourced from urban regions. The equal have a look at predicted that if broadband was as true in rural areas as it is in urban ones, on line retail sales would be “as a minimum $1 billion higher.”

But there’s additionally a less-quantifiable social appropriate that rapid net gets right of entry to for all may carry to the use of a. Larry Downes, assignment director of the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy and an internet enterprise analyst, said that via a distinctive feature of except some, the net’s price as a network of connection was being diluted. “Any time we add one greater man or woman to the net, we get that many extra possible connections of humans, in order that has a greater cost.”

More pointedly: “The more you create 2d-elegance citizens, the greater we simply hold to look some of those political divides,” Bloomfield said. The closing election was proof of a breaking factor. “I think rural America sort of sat again and roared a little bit.”

the town of Crestone, Colorado, sits off Kingdom Route 17, on the give up of an extended avenue that cuts thru scrub-stuffed land at the base of the Sangre de Cristos. When I pulled in one early morning in late May, I didn’t see a soul, so I browsed the nearby bulletin board — a wooden range on the market, a lacking younger woman, yoga lessons — and surpassed plenty full of yurts and something that looked a lousy lot like a satellite tv for pc dish. Crestone has become domestic to a positive type of character, keen to live out of the 2017 mainstream, and the metropolis is filled with nonsecular retreat centers and transplants from out of the kingdom.

It’s additionally where Colorado Central Telecom has an office. The small operation gives net and make contact with plans to citizens in Saguache County and neighboring Chaffee County and has tailor-made its carrier to the wishes of the extra remote net consumer. While maximum urban and suburban companies use fiber cables laid inside the ground, rural companies often use some thing called fixed wireless network to keep away from the set up of miles of expensive cable. When the office opened, a technician named Joshua confirmed me a returned room packed with the equal form of satellite-looking dishes I had visible on the yurt. If a home wishes Colorado Central Telecom’s provider, the dish is hooked up to it and pointed within the course of the nearest constant wireless tower so that a sign can be beamed to the house. The dishes should be inside the line of sight of the tower, which can get intricate if trees or different obstructions are within the manner.

Maisie Ramsay, head of commercial enterprise development for Colorado Central Telecom, set out to expose me over the route of the morning the form of the route that airborne net signals have to tour around Saguache County. From Crestone’s center, we drove to a massive tower in a subject simply out of doors the city, then to a school in Moffat, a few minutes to the west, wherein a dish sat discreetly on the back of the building as children performed out the front. The excursion ended in the metropolis of Saguache, on the northern quit of the county, with Ramsay and I stare up at a tower on Cemetery Hill, a barren mound overlooking the tiny metropolis. A lady named Pat Miller came out to invite if we had been misplaced, and it turned out that she turned into a Central Telecom consumer. “CenturyLink, you’ve probably heard, simply became no longer going to present us the service,” Miller said, relating to the big telecom that services a few components of the San Luis Valley, in which Saguache County is situated. “It turned into horrendous.”

This type of complaint is commonplace in Saguache County. In 2011, Ralph Abrams, the previous mayor of Crestone, founded Colorado Central Telecom in direct reaction to bad service he said the town become getting from any other huge provider, Fairpoint. “Originally this started because Fairpoint was not supplying extra than half a [megabit],” Abrams instructed me. “Which is unusable,” Ramsay stated. According to Abrams, the metropolis turned into determined for the internet and the corporation became started because “none of the larger companies care about small rural regions.” The Internet is a software, Abrams said, and “utilities are a right for each person like street and sewer and water and energy and we will convey it.”