(written on the 17th and 19th-21st 😅 from notes)
It’s coming up on midnight, and I’m fading quickly. 🥱
It’s been quite the productive day today for all of us here, but I just don’t think I’m going to try and push through and write a journal entry tonight. I had plenty of time to do it, but I procrastinated, wasting my time on other things, and I’m just really tired now.
So I guess I’ll be back here in the morning… 😅
…
I think I got up about 8:00 this morning, spending some time doing gospel stuff and spending some time replying to somebody on YouTube who had replied to one of my comments.
Basically, someone had posted a really mean-spirited comment, and as I sometimes do, I kindly requested that said person refrain from such comments, as it’s a downer for as a comment reader to have to sift through such comments.
The reply that I got from that person was asking whether or not I was going to censure the other person he had originally directed his comment to.
No, I wasn’t.
The irony of the whole situation is it seemed that the person who had reacted so angrily and negatively had actually completely misunderstood the original poster’s comment (at least I hadn’t understood it at all in the way the angry commenter had). The angry poster seemed to be a Tesla lover who thought that the other poster was simply ragging on Tesla without knowledge. But that’s… not at all how I read the comment. It seemed exactly the opposite to me. My understanding of the original poster’s comment was that he was actually defending Tesla. 🙃
Anyway, I fairly regularly try to, kindly and respectfully, encourage kindness and civil discourse on YouTube. Don’t know that it makes a lot of difference, but hopefully it does make some.
After consuming some light and responding to the gentleman on YouTube, mucking out the barn, and then writing a little bit more on YouTube, I chatted a bit with Heather, ate breakfast, and worked on journal writing (Heather was taking the day off today, because there was so much on the docket to get done).
Just before Heather left, I hopped on the phone with T-Mobile to try and gather some information about the price rise that we’re about to experience. I’m on Heather and Hans’s plan, and it’s been an amazingly priced plan, but they are going to be raising prices, even though we’re grandfathered in from I think over a decade ago?
Anyway, I chatted with customer service for a while and understood that the plan itself was being upgraded fairly significantly, which normally would be great and possibly worth the extra money, but since the main issue that we have living out here in the country is simply reception, plan upgrades don’t really help. 🙃
I even spoke with their tech people to see if there are any plans to increase the number of towers in the area, but… doesn’t look like it.
I wish there were, honestly, as the tech support guy I talked to was absolutely wonderful. He was a total straight shooter, completely honest, didn’t feed me a line to try to keep us. He said that honestly, even though they don’t really get notified until 2 weeks before the announcement of a new tower, he figured it wasn’t really realistic to think that things would change appreciably in the area. He also told me that, yes, new phones will have better antenna, but no, it wouldn’t be worth it.
Give that man a raise. 🙃
At first, I didn’t think Verizon, the company that Heather and Hans are looking at switching to, offered a free trial. No one at the store mentioned one when I was there on Tuesday in Casper. I know T-Mobile offers one, which I think is an absolutely fabulous opportunity to make sure that you know you have signal where you’re going to be using it most often.
Gratefully, after doing a little bit of research on my own, I was able to find that Verizon does indeed offer a free 30-day trial, so after mowing the lawn and doing a little bit more Journal writing, I got my phone all set up for my free trial with Verizon and got started testing it out.
I called Heather who was out shopping in Rapid City by that point, and I wandered all over the property, in the house, everywhere, and never lost signal. 🎉
That’s already loads better than what we get with T-Mobile out here. T-Mobile apparently has the faster Network, but Verizon still dominates on the connectivity front in rural areas.
Since I’m not even a tiny bit of a gamer, and I don’t do a whole lot of video production, I don’t need a whole lot of bandwidth.
Heather had some things she needed to do, so I tried to find somebody else to talk to to continue my test off Ranch, and wouldn’t you know it, but I couldn’t get in touch with just about anybody. 😆
Here I was rearin’ to go out in test, but I couldn’t get a hold of anybody. 😆
Eventually, I was able to get in touch with my mom, and she hung out on the phone with me as I drove down to JH Keith Park and then Cascades Falls, and then all the way into town the other direction.
Amazingly, I had reception all the way until just about JH Keith Park! In fact, on the far East end of the parking lot, the higher end of the parking lot, I had reception going in and out.
I didn’t have any in the park itself, but that’s okay. It’s amazing to even have a tiny bit there at the East end of parking lot.
Oddly, and I guess maybe it’s just tower placement, but I didn’t have any reception almost at all at Cascade Falls. I could swear that with T-Mobile I’ve got reception there, as I remember having a maybe an hour-long conversation with the woman I met in Canada back in ’24 while I was walking around the Cascade Falls Park area.
I suppose I could have just been using my starlink connection? I don’t remember. 🤔
Anyway, the short of it is Verizon is much much much better in our area here in the outskirts of Hot Springs, so that’ll be nice if we do end up switching, which it looks like we’re likely to.
While I was in town, I decided to stop off at the grocery store and buy some sweet goodness, some orange creamsicles and some ice cream. 🙃
Back at the ranch, I started working on the trench again, making only a little bit of progress. Unfortunately, after a fabulous section of the trench where it was just hardened clay that was relatively easy to level, I’m in a section where the bottom is quite Rocky, which is really making it hard to create a uniform slope. The bottom tears up, which then softens it, which makes it a pain in the butt because even if you tamp it back down as hard as you can, it’s still softer than it was before, which could end up potentially causing low spots in the French drain.
Oh well. You can only do what you can do.
Helped Hans a little bit with the hay (he brought back a huge load from way up north), worked a little bit more on the trench, chatted with Daniel, the Amish gentleman who might be working on the house more in the near future, and then headed over to JH Keith park with Hans, showing him the little soaking pool that I built.
Fun fun. 😊
After getting back, we hung out for a little while and called it a night. It was a super productive day for everyone, which was really nice to throw into the mix, when oftentimes don’t seem very productive. 🙏
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 