“Can you hear me now?”
Does that give you visions of a dark haired spectacled nerd
riding a donkey through the west repeating over and over; “Can you hear me now?” That was our constant mantra with our
cell service especially at our new home, and the answer was most frequently;
“no!” We had to change our cell phone provider.
T-Mobile just does not have a viable footprint here in the Western North
Carolina Mountains. Some of you have made attempts to call us and can testify
to the poor quality reception we get at our house. To send a text I would
frequently need to walk to the front door and occasionally out onto the front
porch. To actually talk I’d have to continue down the driveway and sometimes I
would just continue up the hill and down the street. My extended walk might get
me two bars. And as frequently as we water our lawn out here, like this
morning, walking down the street is just not a practical option to make or take
a phone call. Our choices are Verizon, of course, and US Cellular. You can get
Sprint service in this area but you are advised to check the coverage map
first. If you have to check the coverage map that means you are going to have
spotty coverage at best in this area of the state even if you have decent
service at your house. So we’re back to the two big players. The better deal
is definitely US Cellular. They are prominent in this part of the country and
apparently have roughly 80% of the cell towers in the Weaverville area. I don’t
care for the Verizon pricing structure and the Verizon phones and service plans
are definitely the more expensive option. So our choice is US Cellular,
however.........................apparently US Cellular does not provide service
in southern California except through their partner, Verizon. Because they
don’t have a base in SoCal they don’t have access to the 951 area code. So even
though our existing numbers are portable to another service, US Cellular is NOT
one of our options if we want to keep our old cell phone numbers. So, “Can you hear me now?” Yes, despite my objections to
Verizon’s costs we have ported over to their network. Keeping connected with
all of our friends is too important to haggle over a few dollars or a few extra
gigabytes of data. All our friends are so special to Maureen and I that we are
not willing to chance loosing touch over something seemingly as innocuous as
changing our cell numbers. If you are reading this and don’t already have our
cell phone numbers you can ignore this paragraph.
Just kidding!
Many of you may not have our new address and since you are all
invited to descend upon us at any time (with a little courtesy notice if
possible but not mandatory) here is our contact information. We also have a
VOIP landline that we don’t have a reception issue with at all as long as our
internet is up. You can ship all our Christmas gifts to:
We saw the Google Earth car parked in
Asheville this week. You can Google Earth or Google Map our address with
the satellite view and see our house. Although we are remote enough that you
will not be able to get a street view of the house. You can’t even get a street
view of the street leading to the street that we live on.
What you won’t see in the Google Earth/Maps image is the ton
of leaves that have fallen into my yard.
Before & After: (sort
of...)
I think this might be the last time I try to hand rake an
acre. Liam came home over the weekend and helped rake. The leaves in the yard
were wet and so thick I could not run the lawn mower over the yard more than 20
feet or so without it clogging. Liam and I got the yard to a point that if it
ever stops raining long enough to dry out a bit I should be able to mulch the
rest. I got tired of trying to bag the leaves, cart the bags to the woods, and
then dump them. That blue thing you see is a giant tarp. We just raked the
leaves onto the tarp and then dragged the tarp into the woods and dumped the
leaves into a big pile. I think it’s common to burn the leaves at the end of
the season and I’m going to have to look into that. I’m imaging that even with
a half acre of woods I’m bound to fill it up with leaves eventually if I can’t
do something with them. The beautiful but excessive amount of leaves present
another problem. They have filled my rain gutters. This is not really an issue
on three sides of my house. But on one side I have a roughly 30 foot drop onto
asphalt. I got on amazon this morning and ordered a safety harness. I don’t
have an issue getting on my roof to clean the gutters but a minor mistake ten
feet above my lawn could cause a fall that would hurt, maybe even break a bone.
A minor misstep 30 feet above asphalt and you wouldn’t be receiving my NC
updates anymore! After Liam and I finished raking the lower 40, we watered the
lawn for a couple more days. Wednesday, our first sunny day for a few days, I
broke out the lawn mower, hopefully for the last time of the season. No matter
how hard I try I just can’t seem to get all of the big rocks out of the lawn off
the end of my patio and drive. And with the left over leaves and leaves that
have fallen since Sunday, I can’t see anything still lurking at blade height.
Because of the high blade RPMs, lawn mower blades have to be balanced.
Apparently I’ve hit enough large rocks that my blade actually bent slightly.
Then I ran over some raised earth over a mole tunnel and got this:
Keep in mind that what you see is after I took a small sledge
hammer to this blade until I was convinced that I was not going to straighten
the blade much less balance it. The replacement blade is less than $18 and it
costs somewhere between $40-$60 each time to have the lawn cut by a service. So
even if I go through a blade per cutting I’m dollars ahead. Let’s hope it
doesn’t come to that. I’m sure I’ll figure something out.
Liam’s Cross Country season is over now. The Western coach
intended to take the school’s two top runners, Liam for the men’s team and
Kaitlin for the women’s team, to the NCAA Regionals but Kaitlin was injured in
her last race, the SoCon Championships, and I guess the coach did not want to
make the trek to Charlottesville, VA for just one athlete. There was one
additional 5K race held at WCU last weekend that started out as an end of the
season time trial to let the athletes see how much they’d improved over the
season that ended up as a mini-invite with UNC Asheville and Wofford College in
attendance. Liam won the Western
Carolina Fast Cat Invitational with a personal best time for 5K of 15:23.8,
21 seconds better than his 2nd place finish in the 5K season opener. To lend a
little different perspective, at the beginning of the season he ran 3.1 miles at
roughly 5:05 per mile. His last race, Liam ran 3.1 miles at 4:58 per mile.
Liam’s best 8K (4.95 miles) time of 25:13.62 at the Southern Conference
Championships works out to a 5:05.76 per mile pace. Almost two additional miles
at roughly the same pace he ran for 3.1 miles at the beginning of the season.
Liam has a week off to rest. Next up, the Indoor Track Season. It will be
interesting to see how Liam does. He has never run on the mini-oval banked
indoor tracks before.
My high school (assistant) coaching job is over for this year
as well. Our team made the State Playoff Tournament. The North Buncombe
Blackhawks, ranked 25th in the state, faced off against the Winston-Salem, North
Forsyth High, ranked 8th. The team fought valiantly and maintained a 0-0 score
through 80 minutes of regulation and 19:30 of overtime. Unfortunately the
overtime went to 20: minutes and NFH scored with about :30 seconds left leaving
no time on the clock for the Blackhawks to come back. There’s always next year.
We have had a couple of chilly nights but the temperatures are
surprisingly mild. I was up early this morning and bundled up to take the dog
for his walk. It was so nice out I had to de-bundle before the walk. That’s
all for now!
Have a great day!
Rick, Maureen & Liam
PS A couple of you have called but were not able to leave a
message because my new Verizon voicemail box was not set up. It is now.
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