Connecting to the Oustide World

Well it's been an interesting first few weeks in the new house.  Slowly getting the creature comforts installed and making sense of things.

But we were shocked to learn that building a well insulated, concrete bunker of a house, in a tall forest of trees, in a valley, doesn't provide great cell phone service!  Shocked, I tell you!  Zero bars in the house means rapid battery depletion and inability to receive calls/texts/etc.  Leave us a message, people, and we'll step outside every so often to find a bar or two of service and check in.

One measly bar of poor signal and repeated failed messages.  Fun.

 UGH.

So before moving in we had contacted Comcast to provide internet service out to the house.  Should be easy, right?  Just drop a coax line and blade it a few inches into the dirt.  But, NO.  Because of how far we are off the main utility lines, they needed to run a "plant extension" - install a new system amplifier on the main line, a short aerial-span through neighbor-Bob's yard, with heavy gauge feeder cable up to an installed pedestal box and wire splice within 150' of the house.

The price for this install?  Oh, only $5000.  ahem, what?  Katy had to finally visit the regional comcast office to talk to a real person about why this would be so expensive.  Eventually we got  a call from a manager who was willing to work with us.  He eventually said, "if you get me a good trench cut for underground wire install, we can probably do it all for free".  Deal.

Enter, the machine.

I spent a busy weekend pounding 15 hours of run-time onto this bad boy.  Since I basically needed it for the whole weekend to ensure I got the all-important trench cut, I figured I would tackle a couple other projects also.

- 600 ft trench for comcast (through neighbor Bob's backyard, right by his barn, and across his already-planted vegetable garden.  All directly adjacent to our underground 480V electrical service!)
- A couple dozen imposing trees pulled, including the stumps
- Another 200' trench from house over to the barn, for electrical service over there
- Improved driveway drainage
- Open up future orchard area

It wasn't as fun as it should have been, due to persistent rain, bugs, machine problems, and the required fast paced work.  I had some mild vertigo for a couple days afterward after spinning the machine back and forth across our hilly terrain for so long.  :)

Unfortunately after opening up such a nice trench, it still took weeks for comcast to place the cable, run the aerial span, and splice/activate all our new cable.  The final install into the house is tomorrow... fingers crossed.  Hopefully the three of us will be able to communicate a whole lot better soon.  We'll have a new local phone number to share, and it will be amazing to have Netflix back, too, not gonna lie.

Once we have wifi in the house, we can install a wireless repeater to boost our cell signal inside. Should have that running soon also.

And, of course, we can't forget about the snail mail.  Finally got our mail box in and address formally changed over.  For some reason this made me really happy, like it triggered a formal acknowledgement in my brain that I really live here now... and forever.  Send us a post card!

View from our mailbox across the road back down our driveway.  It's been a lovely summer thus far!