The future we're living in

Coast Fork Willamette River, flowing fast left-to-right (Mount Pisgah Arboretum, Jan. 9)

I’m typing around and over a cat on my lap—little Fleur, all curled up tight—with the MacBook balanced on the right arm of this rocking chair. Luckily its arms are flat and wide. We just got back from a stroll on the old Weyerhaeuser road at the western edge of the Thurston Hills Natural Area. Good thing we had the brollies in the boot, as it was raining when we started out. But by the time we got back to the car at Quartz Park, the sun was breaking out over the south end of Mount Pisgah. I had to take yesterday off from hiking because I somehow tweaked my left foot near the big toe the day before, when we took our longest hike in some time—Trail 5 at Pisgah/Buford—so maybe I just overdid it. After limping around the house most of Thursday, I’m all good today. Hypothesis: I had overtightened my left boot. So today before hiking I loosened it significantly over the toes. I think that did the trick.

Renewed my annual Mixcloud Pro subscription on December 28—for $135—and since then I’ve streamed 65.5 hours of live Radio Free Random shows. That brings my per-hour cost of the subscription down to just over $2.06—and it’s only been 14 days. My goal is to get it down to between, say, 10 and 25¢ per hour, by the time the renewal date comes up again. Rather silly to think of it that way, I suppose, but it’s similar to when Mrs. Random buys a dress and divides the number of times she wears it into the original cost. The more usages, the lower the per-use cost. Basically, it’s an amortization perspective on things. And a reminder to use the stuff we buy!

Got an email today from T-Mobile celebrating “our first year together”—meaning a year since we started getting 5G home internet from them. I have to say, it’s been amazingly good! Way more speedy bandwidth than we would ever need, with hardly any glitches or downtime. And only $50/month. Hard to believe we subsisted on super-slow but not-cheap DSL from Century Link for so long. But the 5G home option only became viable within the last couple years, and before that we didn’t want any new wires to our house (cable, fiber), so that’s why we stuck it out. Quite astounding, even after a year, to have such powerful connectivity with no wires! Just a router sitting in an upstairs window aimed at the cell tower a couple blocks away. Certain aspects of the future we’re living in are pretty dang cool.