Thursday, January 8, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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Dawn at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 8, 2009
It's up!
I wake up in the middle of the night and my eye catches a reflected blinking green light on the ceiling. That's the indicator light on the USB720 modem - indicating data is moving. I have a connection!
The race is on... to get to the laptop, connect to a couple of banks and credit card accounts and get my online banking done before the the signal drops again...
Success! Phew! That takes the pressure off for a while.
By breakfast time the signal has disappeared again. Could a pattern be developing here where there is night time access for some reason? That would be better than nothing and might be enough to keep me from leaving the park in search of better access. I really don't feel like moving. We'll see.
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.