Thanks!

Thank you!
and that is enough of the mush because many of you are British and the American stereotype of the British is that all this emotional stuff is excessive

What I learned at work: definition of pig
Not peg
Actually, it was remembering not learning because I had learned it before but forgotten, so I got to a sentence about pigging a pipe and was completely lost. And no, the online dictionary didn't give me any definition that made sense. I didn't figure it out until I looked up "pig launcher" and learned/remembered that the thing you put through a pipe to clean it is called a pig. Apparently way back when the cleaning thing would squeak while it was going through and it sounded like a pig. 

What I learned in free time:  pitch a woo. 
Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who has become wildly popular and helped many of us through the last election. Every night she posts a thought piece about the day's events and twice a week she talks for an hour. Today I just happened to be eating lunch while she was talking so I listened. Why were my history classes so dull? She talked about the 20s in America, the terrible state of our roads, who got to enjoy the decade and who didn't, the proliferation of consumer goods and advertising, and how we got to the stock market crash. She told us about, "pitch a woo" which was a phrase used then to mean to court or to make love to. 

Broadband:
In the Before Times I went to Uganda. Uganda had the best cell phone network. We didn't go to the very north because there was a group of evil lunatics called the Lord's Army kidnapping and killing people, but we went midway. The cell phone coverage was excellent everywhere we went. 

Then I went to visit my grandmother in Montana and the cell phone coverage was terrible. I would leave her room and go walking until I had enough bars to get through. 

Today one out of three Montanans lacks access to reliable broadband. This made education during the pandemic difficult. Poor internet makes it difficult for small businesses to exist. It is hard to job hunt without the internet. It is hard to connect with family without the internet. The folks in the rural areas who are lucky enough to be able to get high-speed internet have no competition and pay high rates. 

Long, long ago the US government intervened in the market to make sure rural areas had access to electricity and telephones. With the infrastructure bill we would spend $100B over 8 years to get every home access to broadband. This will also give people in rural areas better access to telemedicine and tele-therapy. Maybe people who telecommute in the future can live truly anywhere and it will be easier for them to move close to their parents in affordable areas.