Poop Cruise!
We did binge Andor – which you should really do as well, honestly excellent writing – but we also saw Poop Cruise.
Now, if you were ever hesitant to go on a cruise, I would strongly recommend that you not watch it.
But it was pretty compelling, and we both found ourselves – probably because we were killing an entire bottle of wine between the two of us – randomly yelling out, Poop Cruise! for no real reason.
Me: Can I pay you a compliment?
Her: Sure!
Me: I always waaay overestimate how much time something will take when you help me out.
One of the first things that Buckley did when he moved into the pad with me over a quarter-of-a-century ago was hardwire the whole pad for ethernet.
At the time, the fastest speed was gigabit, or 1,000 megabits per second (Mbps), which you could only get with Cat5e, the fastest commercially available ethernet cable at the time.
Regular Cat5 could do something called “Fast Ethernet,” which is about 100 Mbps.
We wired the pad with a combo of the two – with a couplea branches using Cat4 – never dreaming we’d ever need gigabit speeds or greater.

Then, during COVID, I decided to rip out all the Cat5 and Cat4 and just do Cat5e everywhere.
Well, we had a lightning strike here about a month ago that dropped us from roughly 500 Mbps to 80 Mbps, which was just awful (it’s less than 1/10th a gigabit)
So, this past weekend, the Firecracker and I both tore out every single centimeter of cable that Buckley and I laid out 25+ years ago and replaced it with 90% Cat8 cable, which has a theoretical maximum speed of 40,000 Mbps (!!!!).
AND because the Firecracker’s just so damn organized and focused, what we thought was gonna take the whole day, we were able to bang out in just four hours.
Afterwards, I tested everything and was pleasantly surprised at the results: While the cabling can handle up to 40,000 Mbps, with our current routers, we topped out at “only” 113 MB/s, which is just under a gigabit at 904 Mbps.
This is compared to the 80 Mbps that we were working with the past month.
Honestly, this was the best possible outcome since we were approaching theoretical limits on the current hardware we had.

Because we finished so quickly, we also decided to clean out TWO closets, and managed to replace the hoses on the washer/dryer as well (you’re supposed to change your washer hoses every five years, so if you’ve not done that, you should).
In return for her help, I picked up some Xi’an Famous Food, from around the way – it just opened up less than a year ago and I’d been to the more famous one in Flushing and wanted to try it out.
The food was absolutely killer, and it was a great way to close out the day.
Me: Hey, thanks so much for all the help today.
Her: For you? Anytime.
Location: the gym, taking an elbow to my hose
Mood: ache-y
Music: got sunshine even on a cloudy day (Spotify)
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