Three straight driving days in June of 2021 — Abilene to Lubbock, Lubbock to Amarillo, Amarillo to Oklahoma City — were notable for wind, and for the thousands of wind turbines we saw from the highway. These otherworldly contraptions never were part of my experience, not in Ohio or anywhere else I lived, so seeing that many was, for me, a curiosity.
Very impressive. They also creeped my ass out. I bring that up because I had the same feeling last night.
Deb, to be honest, was the one who made sure that we were outside precisely at 9:12pm. Employing headlamps to guide our steps, we climbed up above where the cabin will be and stood right in front of The Amphitheater, our best view of the southwestern sky.
Right on time, an eerie string of tiny lights appeared among the stars. They spread out and drifted to the south before fading from sight.
This, for the uninitiated, was a “Starlink train,” the deployment of 22 satellites carried by an August 16th launch. They joined more than 4,500 other such satellites in Earth orbit.
It was the first Starlink train we’d seen. Very impressive.
And it creeped my ass out.
I’m no Luddite. I’m neither anti-tech nor anti-progress, not anti-space or anti-SpaceX. We may eventually become Starlink customers ourselves. There’s just something disturbingly unearthly about a string of objects in my night sky, reflecting sunlight peeking around from the other side of the planet.
Truly, it evoked the same feeling as did those monstrous, alien-looking windmills on the High Plains of Texas. It’s hard for me to describe, but it’s almost a sense of dread, doom, like War of The Worlds.
I can’t justify it. It’s irrational. But that’s what it is for me.
The county transfer station is at the western edge of our “territory,” as defined by the roads we travel routinely. It’s west of the post office, the feed mill and the hardware, all of which are regular stops on my Monday-morning rounds.
But I always go to the transfer station first. Why? Because nobody at the hardware or the feed mill or the post office wants to walk by a pickup truck with sun-baked bags of stinky trash in the bed.
This morning the transfer station and the post office were my only stops. I wished I’d had more than that to do, because I needed time to shed some frustration — our site contractor hit us with yet another complication, another delay, more problems with his dump truck.
I know, it seems like it’s always something. And you, dear reader, don’t know the half of it.
We like the guy and we like his crews. He does excellent work, priced fairly. But the constant parade of delays has worn us down.
As much as I hate to say it out loud, once we pulled the plug on the original (much larger) project, this contractor’s “explanations” became more frequent and more perplexing. In a way, I suppose, that’s one approach to making business decisions — go where the revenue is and the rest can wait.
In short, we no longer are The Gift That Keeps On Giving. That’s a disappointing conclusion to draw.
By 4pm today, however, we had two fresh loads of base deposited on the pad. The contractor said that he’d be out later today to complete the job.
Oh, and for the first time in all the months we’ve worked with him, for no reason we can discern, he insisted on being paid today. That was a surprise, but it made no difference to us — Deb ran to the bank this afternoon and cut him a check for the whole (finished) job.
What wasn’t a surprise was his call at 6:30pm, saying that he wouldn’t make it today. He’ll be here, he says, at first light tomorrow.
So no, we’re (still) not there yet.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB