Shower taken, hair still wet, no hearing aids in yet, didn’t hear the bell.

I was standing in my kitchen at 8 a.m. when some random strange man walked past just outside the slider ten feet away, wearing a backpack with orange warning stripes and some kind of uniform and looking official as he was about to open the gate and leave our backyard.

In my astonishment I simply stood there and mouthed a bemused, Who? Are? You?

He laughed, bless him.

Turns out he was the AT&T lineman. They actually still exist, and we had been complaining for some time that ours was down. They just don’t seem to have a lot of people left who do that work but they were still good at charging us for it.

Wait, nope. They’re refunding us three months. Good.

Landlines carry more frequencies of speech than cellphones do so they’re easier for impaired ears to hear on.

Or were, but these hearing aids BlueTooth directly from my Iphone 16 and give as good as I’m going to get.

But the landline stays on when the power goes out, and there’s something to be said for not having to use up the juice on your connection to the outside world in an earthquake.

I cannot tell you how good it felt to hear the phone ring and to have it not be dead when I picked it up to answer.

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A side note: yesterday the peregrine eyasses stumbled out of their nest box for the first time. Today was banding day and there will be video posted of when the parents were going at the researchers and these babies got the first radio transmitters with their leg bands. For the first time in all these years the count was: four males!