March 25th, 26th, and 27th

As much as I would like to bitch about this winter that seems to be lasting forever, in all honesty it never really began. I mean, it was March before I ever had to put chains on my truck: a record, really. So, I suppose I shouldn’t complain that we spent the entirety of Saturday the 25th driving between Richmond and Gerlach. I also shouldn’t complain that we were stuck at a standstill in the Sierras for so long that I finished the last 100 pages of Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Puppets and Tina watched four episodes of Firefly on her portable DVD Player before we accelerated up to 30 MPH.

I shouldn’t complain. But I just did.

On Sunday I finished skirting the office trailer. If you read my previous posts from a few months back, you will find that this is my second attempt at this unglamorous, yet necessary, project. The windy Desert Plains so beloved by Rob Halford reduced my first effort to so much scrap tossed ingloriously onto (or, more accurately, into) the trash heap of history. This next effort will hopefully prove more robust, and therefore successful, than the first. I also built a new door for the water heater cubbyhole and repaired the left side of the ranch house, which had suffered some wind damage.

On Monday the satellite Internet guy paid us a visit. He was not only a punctual and amusing fellow, but he installed a wireless network as well as our link. It reaches around the radius of the entire homestead. I hope the augment this setup by using the existing antennas and wireless bridge we already have to create a focused link between the upper and lower property, allowing anyone in the warehouse to jump on the net. This will probably have to wait a few months but I am pretty sure I can set it up quickly, given the time to do so.