It’s the first weekend of the new year. 2026. My dad was born 103 years ago come July, which seems absolutely insane to try and comprehend.

In 1923 his dad was still using mules to plow the fields. Cotton was the main cash crop. The boll weevil hadn’t shown its ugly little stinking head yet. Wagons were still being used. A few noisy cars were on the road. Cows were still being milked, and the butter was churned right there in the kitchen.

A hundred years makes a lot of difference. Just ten decades from the time in which most of my people from the rural south were using bed pans and outhouses, we’re now connecting our phones to satellites that orbit the earth. And by the way, there are almost 12,000 of those little buggers circling us up there, buzzing around like hungry mosquitoes sucking up and sending back data so we can all talk to our thermostats.

You may or may not recall me telling you that my internet has been about as efficient as a bed pan for the last six weeks. I stopped using my laptop altogether to write these stories because I couldn’t access my site due to unknown gateway gremlins who, I guess, stood at the gate and blocked me from getting to the outhouse.

Today…I am back online. This has to be kind of like the day my family dug their first well, mounted a centrifugal pump on a platform, hooked up the electric wires, and went inside the house to turn on the spigot. A hundred years ago, not everybody had running water. A lot of them didn’t even have electricity.

Right now I am hooked up to one of Elon’s satellite chains. No more messing around with “the company that built the original network.” They’re still using hand pumps and buckets for water over there. My internet world was becoming increasingly disconnected. My devices were falling like dead flies. I was concerned that I might have to revert to 1926.

I remember the first time I saw one of those satellite chains fly over my head. Marion and I were at FDR State Park, maybe a little over a year ago. We were kicked back around the campfire underneath the pines. I leaned back and looked up to watch the smoke from the fire drift up through the canopy around us. It was a quiet and peaceful moment.

Until something caught my eye overhead.

I don’t keep up with the news anymore. I don’t read magazines. I had heard of SpaceX but really knew nothing about it or what they were doing. I knew they were sending up rockets and that was about it.

What I saw out of the corner of my eye looked like six or seven little circles all in single file moving across the night sky. This was foreign to my brain cells. I could not compute. The closest thing I could think of was from back in the day when I played some of the Atari games in college. Galactica had something that looked like this chain in the sky, and it was attacking the earth at breakneck speeds.

I was quick enough to capture a pic with my camera. And I’ll admit, my stomach was a little queasy as I sent photographic evidence to my astro-nerd friend that we were under attack from outer space. He sent me a LOL in all caps and explained that I was looking at a chain of the Starlink satellites orbiting the earth.

I gotta think that my grandfather, born in 1886, had a similar reaction the first time he ever pulled the string on the lightbulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. Pull on. Pull off. Pull on. Pull off. No more lighting lamps. No more fumbling around in the dark. He even ran a single wire down to the barn and put a single bulb over the feed trough so he could milk the cow without having to have a lamp.

These here modern advances are game changers.

So, yup, I ordered the Starlink standard kit. It came yesterday. It was supposed to come on New Year’s Eve, but at 5:06pm the delivery driver decided he was going to be late for his party, entered a note that he couldn’t find my address, and dumped me like a bad habit.

I know. It’s the holidays. Deliveries get completely messed up. I’m sure he tried his best. I know this because when it did come on Friday, my neighbor found the box leaned up against my mailbox post down at the road. The mailbox is 1600ft from my house. Nearly a quarter mile…through the woods…over the hill…out of sight where anyone could have grabbed my box, took it home and I would never have known what happened to it.

But I have a good neighbor. We do stuff for each other all the time. We feed animals. Kill snakes. Report strange vehicles. Pick up mail. And deliver wayward boxes to each other’s front door when the delivery guy, for some reason, finds it impossible to do so.

I was up on the roof installing the bracket for the receiver, should it come, when my neighbor drove up.

“Thought you might be looking for this,” she said, “but probably not down by the road.”

God bless her.

I did look into paying somebody to install this thing for me. It ain’t cheap. I thought about hiring it out because I don’t like getting on the roof much anymore. It’s not that I’m scared something terrible might happen. It just ain’t as comfortable for me up there as it used to be. A fairly steep pitch. Up the ladder. Up the slope and over the ridge. Down to the chimney. Sit at some funny angle to do the work you’re trying to do.

But my determined old brain won out and convinced my tired old body that we could do this. And we did. We got it done, me and this not-so-young body of mine. But every time I went up the ladder, I thought about it. Every time I dug in my toes and pushed up the front slope of my roof, my glutes thought about it. Every time I stepped across the ridge and started down the six feet or so to the chimney, my inner ear was on high alert.

Then I needed a different drill bit and had to do it all over again. I’m pretty sure I made that trek up and down approximately 87 times yesterday. At least three of them were for the purpose of watering a bush in the front yard.

Then there were the trips up and down into the attic to get the cable run down inside the wall to the living room. I’d say, all in all, my glutes pulled more than their fair share of exercise yesterday. Thank God for Ibuprofen.

Anyway, I’m back online, baby. My internet world is like butter on a hot biscuit. Smooth. And it’s fast. Lightning fast.

Me. I’m a little slow. The glutes are still tight.