Old Habits Die Hard

1963: I'm not sure why my parents allowed me to climb the water tower at my grandparent's remote desert cabin, unless it was to ensure that I didn't play with the rattlesnakes on the ground. Of course, I didn't have a belt and lanyard, climbing harness, helmet, or any other safety equipment, aside from a strong grip and determination to not fall. Whenever things got slow and there wasn't anything else interesting to do, I went up and visited the water tank.
 
2023: At the end of Spring this year, I decided to fire the telephone company and instead install a Starlink satellite internet system that would allow me to use my cellular phone at home where there is no usual cellular phone service. The difference in monthly rates is only about $35, so by getting rid of the crappy landline service, I now also have internet service that blisters paint off the walls. Add to this free long distance, call waiting, caller ID and voicemail (all things that CenturyLink charges additionally for), and it was pretty simple to decide to make the switch.
 
The dialup phone service was never very reliable, I've had to call repair service too many times, and had the phone be dead for a week or two at a time while they "wait for parts to ship". During power failures, the phone works for a few hours, but then the battery would die in some equipment six miles back towards town, then it was all over until the utility got the power lines repaired, usually anywhere between a day and a week after the initial failure. Since I make all my own electricity whether the utility power is on or not, the satellite system will always be online and working.
 
The phone company (LastCenturyLink, as I've come to call them) has no high speed internet options, actually no data options at all, and there are no other wired or wireless internet providers this far out in the sticks. Traditional satellite providers (cough, Hughes Net, cough) provided dismal service for the last 14 years. Good riddance to them as well. The local broadband mob had big plans to bring fiberoptic through here, but it stalled about two miles out from town (ten miles from here), so there's a big coil of fiber hanging from the top of a utility pole down by the shingle mill alongside the river. I doubt that it will ever make it this far out, in spite of the government grant money that Hyak accepted to complete the job.
 
Overall, it all added up to too much failure and too little service for too much money.
 
Oh yeah, the tower. Well, since I needed to have the dish see the western sky, and my yard has tall trees in that direction, I built the tower this summer to improve the already adequate reception to be flawless. It was a massive amount of work, but that's the kind of stuff I've been doing for income for the last 40 years, it was just a matter of pecking away at the job when other things weren't taking up my time.
 
In the photo, the shadow of the tower is hitting the ground almost parallel to the trench I put in to bury the network cable back to the house. I actually (literally) hung around on the tower for an extra 10 minutes or so this afternoon, waiting for the shadow to move to the side of the trench a little. And yes, this time, I was wearing safety gear, including a helmet. I didn't have to fall to learn how to work safer.