Implanting Fiber

One day when I lived at my last house I got a letter saying AT&T had this thing called U-verse.  It was fast.  It was so fast I wouldn't know what to do with all that internet fastness.   If I wanted to get U-verse, contact AT&T right now, because I totally needed the fastness.

I liked fast internet connections with large bandwidths.  I contacted AT&T.   "Oh dear, we are sorry to let you know U-verse isn't available in your area yet," their web site told me.    There was no fiber in our neighborhood.  We didn't know why the mailing had been sent to me, but it was fun to think about those blazing internet speeds for a while.

Then I got another mailing about U-verse.   The situation was the same thing in our neighborhood three weeks later, so I'm not sure what was happening with their mail sorting.    That wasn't the last of the mail either.   We got more and more.  Sometimes, we'd get two in a week.   It became a joke: we'd try and guess how many U-verse mailings we'd get in the mailbox that day.  

I don't know if U-verse has come to that neighborhood, but three days ago it started to come to our new neighborhood.    There were men spray painting underground lines all over the entire neighborhood.    A man went around handing out a sheet explaining U-verse (and it's massive bandwidth) and the plan to put it into our neighborhood over the next several days.  We got an email from the community manager saying mostly the same thing and to welcome them in as they worked to place the lines.

The next morning the neighborhood was invaded by what I would guess was easily a hundred workers.    Most of these men were hole diggers.   These guys were experts at digging holes.   They dug perfect holes with beautiful straight walls.   They skillfully pulled up the grass and carefully kept all the dirt on tarps.    Then the orange tube came around that would eventually contain the fiber.   Holes were bored horizontally from dug hole to dug hole until the orange tube was run all around the neighborhood.

The hole diggers then put the dirt back in the holes.   They packed the dirt back down with a compactor tool and then replaced the grass.    We had three holes dug in our yard and unless you go looking for them, they're not even noticeable.  

This crew ran conduit through our neighborhood with amazing speed.   They came back today to do more work finalizing things.   I'm not sure when the fiber itself will arrive, but it's been exciting to watch the progress so far.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was talking to me, telling me who he was, who his sister was and who daddy was.   I asked him who I was and he told me, "you don't have a name.  Someone took your memory away."   Is it uncanny for a three-year-old to say something like that?   Or, did he hear it from somewhere else and was simply repeating it?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter's face does not like her mucous.   She has lovely skin in the morning when she leaves for school and a short four hours later she comes home with raw-looking, red cheeks.   This is because her nose is runny and she's too busy doing other things to get a tissue and blow it like she should, so she wipes it on her sleeve and much of it gets on her cheeks.