Goodbye and Good Riddance

The husband had his own to-do list to tackle yesterday, beginning with troubleshooting a water issue. The water coming out of the hot side of the tap has been lukewarm, at best. (I’ve been taking three-minute showers for the past week.) He suspected a mixing valve issue. I am not sure what he did to fix the problem, but we have hot water again. Yay.

The next item on the list was the Starlink dish installation. He decided not to put it up at the ridgeline of the roof, because getting the forklift over to that side of the house is tricky. I think its position will be fine:

Running the cable down into my office required that he drill a couple of holes, one in the porch roof and one in the wall. He built the house, so he knew what he was doing. After we got the cable through the wall, I plugged it into the router, the dish oriented itself to the satellites, and within about five minutes, we had internet service from Starlink.

And wow, is it fast. It is significantly faster than what we have been getting with CenturyLink. The only issue is that I can’t hook it up to the Orbi mesh system without an adapter, which I didn’t realize we needed. The Orbi is a secondary router with a main unit in my office and satellite units in the basement and upstairs. It extends the range of our wireless network. The Starlink router provides decent service to the TV in the living room—the device that is furthest from my office—but without the mesh system, the husband cannot get wireless service out in his shop.

I ordered the adapter. Hopefully, that will solve the problem. We will keep the CenturyLink service until we make sure that the Starlink service is working properly, but so far, we are very impressed. And I will not be sorry to say goodbye to CenturyLink.

It was almost 2:00 pm by the time we finished the Starlink installation, so we had a late lunch and then went out to plant potatoes. I try not to put crops in the same place in successive gardening seasons to minimize pest and pathogen problems. This year, we planted potatoes in a part of the garden that has been fallow, with black plastic over it, for two years. And rather than prepare that spot with the roto-tiller—the husband’s favorite method—I requested that he just dig some trenches. Tilling really does seem to exacerbate the weed problem. We have far fewer weeds when we disturb the soil as little as possible. The black plastic got moved to the spot where we had potatoes last year, on the other side of the garden.

We put in fingerlings, Red Norlands, Clearwater Russets, and German Butterballs. After covering the potatoes, we put strips of heavy landscape fabric between the rows.

The weather today is supposed to be even nicer than yesterday. (Don’t get excited—it is forecast to snow on Tuesday and be in the 40s all week.) I am going to try to get the rest of the garden cleaned up this afternoon. We’re still at least a month out from planting everything else, but the grapes need pruning and I need to decide where I want to put the other crops.

Blog posts may be few and far between for the next two weeks. I have something going on that will preclude regular posting. I seem to get a lot of concerned inquiries if I don’t post every couple of days, so I’m giving fair warning now.