OK. I ran two more tests when I got home. One to hitechcreations.com, just to see if it is still ugly (it is). And another to dload.hitechcreations.com. The ping to the download server is showing some heavy packet loss, but only from one Level3 router. This is from Cox communications, I think I am coming out of the El Cajon headend, if that helps.
Again, this was just an FYI. Thanks for checking it out.