60F with 75%RH in Houston. Chilly and damp in other words. Good time for outdoor work.
Got thru all my obligations yesterday and they have left me feeling like I was in a cement mixer with a dozen bowling balls. So out of shape it’s criminal.
So I’ll limp and shuffle thru another day packed with kid stuff, and try to get a little garden work in.
I hope all those folks up north learned a lesson from the last ‘winter’ and got some preps in order. I’ve got a feeling that most didn’t.
n
Partly cloudy – with some blue sky and ‘sun breaks’ – the sun peeking out every once in a while. Current temp is 50F, light winds.
Working on a printed book for one of my blog sites. Just a couple of “honey-do’s” on tap for today. Sitting in the living room, looking out the window at the ships going by between me and ‘Mutiny Bay’ across the way.
Where is everybody?
The Rapture?
The internet FUBAR?
“Where is everybody?”
Getting ready to see my tax lady @ 1:00 PM PST.
Still lurking.
Valuing charity deductions using Deduction-Pro. Only another 10 hours to go.
It’s a sunny day of 38 F in northern Minnesota and I’m thinking of Maple tapping and starting plants for the garden in a few weeks. Large snowfall scheduled for next week.
Last girls basketball game out of the way. Won one game this season which is actually pretty good as none had played before and the coach had never coached.
Girls softball got started with the first game of the season.
More stuff still to do….
M
OK, Dad found a toilet with an 18 inch tall seat and has ordered one for us.
https://www.amazon.com/TOTO-CST744SL-01-2-Piece-Elongated/dp/B000KQ3ZLK
The wife says that she will get a stool for her to put her feet on (the wife is 5’4″ and has incredibly short legs). We have four toilets in the house so finding a toilet elsewhere will not be a problem.
I am still looking for someone who installs toilet grab bars attached to the wall studs and installs them. No luck so far.
@CowboySlim, I forgot to answer you the other day. You are more than welcome to move to Texas. We have quite a few rocket scientists here in Texas and you will fit right in. However, you seem to have found a paradise on Earth at your current domicile.
It is all of the other Kalifornians that are torquing me off. They leave Kalifornia due to all of the grifters, land here in Texas, and immediately start voting the socialists here in office. This year they have succeeded in voting more for dumbocrats in the early voting than repuglicans. Not a good sign.
https://www.lmtonline.com/news/politics/texas/article/Texas-sets-early-voting-record-in-12721373.php
Ah the Toto. I didn’t check the specific model, but that’s all we install now here. Asked the pro plumber what toilet ALWAYS works, and TOTO was the answer.
I got a few things done this evening.
I did some more pruning on the citrus that was burned by the cold. They are leaving and the orange has flower buds, so just in time. The apples are budding leaves, as is the peach. The blueberries have little delicate pink things, don’t know if they are leaf buds or flowers. I’m gonna put in 4 more blueberry plants this weekend. I’ll try to get a complementary breed.
I amended one raised bed, and planted the zucs I bought as seedlings. No trying from seed this year. And I didn’t mix with cukes, so hopefully good plants and no monsters. We eat both, but I’m trying the zukes.
Pruned most of the dead stuff out of the grape arbor. One variety started to leaf, one is just barely ready.
Transplanted the tomato plant.
The cilantro I planted in the window boxes has sprouted so the squirrels didn’t get it after all. The onion slips seem to have adapted to the boxes and look to be growing.
Can’t find my packet of turnip and radish and beet seeds, so I might have to buy some for the window boxes.
I did some cleanup and patted the dirt into a water ring around the apple trees.
I still need to get the other three beds amended and planted with something…..
nick
How can one be homesick for a town one never grew up in?
To add insult to injury, how can a Liberturd like me fall in love with a Communist state?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Thrissur
I spent the afternoon at a Junior Achievement charity function. My IT Security Team was one of seven teams from our company bowling for charity. I was the oldest by far but still somehow turned in the highest pin count. Old Guys Rule.
Wife is recovering from her eye surgery and wasn’t able to cheer me on. I had wanted to go to theTunica gun show but bowling took priority. I need to get some more 223 the fill the 10 new magazines I got from a coworker.
I read this morning that the Florida school shooter didn’t use “high capacity” magazines, just 10 round California legal ones, because the bigger ones wouldn’t fit in his bag. Go figure. Article said he had fifteen 10 round magazines and his super evil AR type rifle jammed halfway through his planned killing spree, saving countless lives.
I just finished the book, The Phoenix Project, about troubles in IT Operations. It’s written as a novel but I can identify with every single screwed up incident in the novel. My introduction to Operations came about six months after I had taken the role of Messaging Manager for MCI in London and one morning was told that the Operations Manager had unexpectedly quit and would I like to be IT Ops manager for UK and Europe. It sounded good, for about an hour, until our primary SAN suffered a dual drive failure and died. I was on the hot seat because it took 76 hours to replace the drives and reload from tape.
I am sitting in NJ without power since 4:40 pm yesterday. I was hand bailing water since that time to keep my furnace from ending up underwater (no power for sump pump). Because of the heavy rain/wet snow high winds, I did not put the generator out until midnight. Kind of tricky carrying it from the detached garage to outside the house near the back door. So I have both refrigerators connected and the sump pump.
But it’s getting cold inside, so I connected the gas burner on my boiler to the generator. This does not work well. The gas burner motor runs for 2 – 10 minutes and then shuts off and needs to be reset. I suspect that quality of the AC put out by the generator is too irregular in frequency to allow the motor/controls to work properly.
And it’s getting colder inside and outside, with lows tonight expect around freezing and tomorrow down to 26 deg F. The generator is rated at 3250 peak and 2500 running watts. The power company (JCP&L) finally issued an estimate of Tuesday at 11:30 pm. I sent the wife, grandson, and other handicapped family member to a hotel. I will stay here and tend to the generator and feed the pets.
I have a whole house gas-fired generator on my list, but at $14K for equipment and install, it has not been our highest priority.
@IT Pro, hang in there! If you have a bigger ups at home you might try putting that between the gennie and the furnace. Some of the bigger ones have a switch on the back for “generator” which lets them take much more irregular power. Otherwise, the UPS will turn on when it sees the crappy power coming in. Heck if you have a bigger UPS it might run the fan better than the gennie….
n
Do you have gas stove or oven?
Turn on a couple of burners, boil some water, etc. Close off as many rooms as you can, stay in the kitchen. Bring your CO monitor in with you where ever you are, in case the gennie exhaust finds its way into the house, or you have problems with incomplete burning in your furnace/boiler/stove.
Heat up some soup, put it in thermos bottles, or drink cooler, eat when you are cold. Same for coffee or tea. My very simple coffee maker works fine on gennie power.
If you have hot water, fill the tub. That will give you a mass of heat for a little while any way.
And if you interior temps drop to near freezing, open the water faucet enough to keep water flowing to prevent freezing your pipes.
n
An electric blanket is usually just a resistive heating element, and should work fine on gennie power….
Away from the house and no WiFi yesterday, and no cell service even. Today, kind of banged up from yesterday’s exertions — hours of driving through a blizzard, pushing cars that were stuck in snow, and then shoveling an estimated ton and a half of wet, very heavy snow once I finally got home.
Nick – All great advice. We learned a lot of things we could have done better during our week long power outage last spring. We didn’t have the flooding and sub freezing temps to deal with. We have a gas log fireplace that worked well enough once we had hung blankets over the hallway and kitchen openings. I had recently purchased a reconditioned dual fuel 7500 kw generator that saved the food in our freezers and fridge. Loved running It on propane, easy to swap out bottles. But it’s freaking loud. Building a noise abatement enclosure is still on my list.
Yeah, keep in mind my whole house gennie is STILL sitting in my driveway and not hooked up…. Although my gasoline fired 5600w is still on the patio fueled and ready from the hurricane.
I do have the Mr Buddy radiant heater for on top of a propane bottle, and a couple of Coleman heaters that run on coleman fuel. Also the gas log in the fireplace. Needing heat is rarely the issue here, as most of our known unknowns are summer things. Still, prepping should cover all the things… in decreasing order of likelihood times severity, corrected for cost. In the case of heat, the Mr Buddy was cheap and I’ve got a dozen propane bottles anyway.
Even candles provide heat, about the same as a 40-60 watt bulb iirc and they make special ones for heating. At the moment, any candles will help, again with the proviso that you monitor air quality.
nick
I could save these for tomorrow, or not, so I’m putting them up today.
Dive Medic over at Confessions of a Street Pharmacist has posted a video of the active shooter training they’re doing in the schools in Florida right now. The first 30 minutes contains some good history on school attacks, and then you’ll see what they’re teaching as defense. You won’t be impressed. I recommend the video though both for the history lesson, and so you get an idea of why these keep happening.
http://street-pharmacy.blogspot.com/
And then there is this video, that I’m taking as a harbinger of the collapse….
“Calling it “a social network with an address”, Los Angeles entrepreneur Elvina Beck created PodShare, a coliving experiment where dozens of “Podestrians”- travelers, mobile workers or new arrivals to the city- share a communal space filled with sleeping pods or “bunk beds for adults”.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ILu-R-Nz8
Slickly produced video, concept is horrifying to me. Couple this with the continuing delaying of adulthood (extending adolescence), the tiny house movement (or at least the social forces pushing it), and the “van life” movement (search on youtube if needed), it seems to me that there is a concerted social effort to convince people to stop striving, be content with less, stay a child, accept that you’ll never have ‘the American Dream.’ This is the antithesis of the American narrative of the past.
nick
Where is everybody?
In Massachusetts we’re still bailing out from the nor’easter.
Longest power outage I’ve experienced in the past 50 years. A sign I need to do more prepping.
Yep, I believe we’ve said it before, bad things can happen anywhere…..
n
and with that, time to rest my weary bones. Good luck to Vince and IT Pro
“Calling it “a social network with an address”, Los Angeles entrepreneur Elvina Beck created PodShare, a coliving experiment where dozens of “Podestrians”- travelers, mobile workers or new arrivals to the city- share a communal space filled with sleeping pods or “bunk beds for adults”.”
This isn’t new. People have been doing this in Silicon Valley for quite a while, usually in violation of leases or condo regulations. All due to the insane cost of housing in the Bay Area – an 858 sq ft house in Sunnyvale sold in 2 days for 30% more than the asking price and ended up selling for $2 million, $2358/sq ft.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/02/sunnyvale-home-shatters-new-record-with-enormous-price-tag/
hours of driving through a blizzard, pushing cars that were stuck in snow, and then shoveling an estimated ton and a half of wet, very heavy snow once I finally got home.
But, St. Algore said that there would be no more snow in the lower 48 by now !
Seriously, pace yourself. I had my first heart attack at age 49 and you are past that age if I remember correctly. Of course, I have a possible congenital heart condition.
In the case of heat, the Mr Buddy was cheap and I’ve got a dozen propane bottles anyway.
Do you stash your propane bottles in your flameproof cabinet ? I have been tempted to buy 4 or 6 more than the 3 that I have.
Good luck to Vince and IT Pro
And Mr. SteveF. Amen.
Sounds like you guys are really getting it.
“Scientists Admit We Need Better Thermometers To Measure Climate Change”
http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/03/scientists-admit-better-thermometers-climate-change/
“For meteorologist Anthony Watts this is a big moment. Watts published research in 2015 that found scientists used “compromised” weather stations to make adjustments to U.S. temperature data that inflated the warming trend by as much as 50 percent.”
AGW is a scam, a total scam. Yes, the Earth is warming. Has been over the last 100,000 years.
I appreciate the concern, but the pushing and the shoveling were less intense than my normal gym workouts. Longer lasting, but less intense. And the shoveling used a few muscles I don’t normally hit, as evidenced by my hurting lower back. Oh, and yah, I just rolled over 55.
Thanks, Nick for the ideas on staying warm. And thanks to all for the concern.
It is 37 deg F here right now, about 55 inside. I have lit the gas burners on our cooktop this morning to supply a minimum level of heat. My Keurig coffee maker heats up pretty quickly (less than 5 min) when plugged into the generator. With the inside temperature so low, the refrigerators do not come on so often.
And one thing I did not mention yesterday is that we have kerosene lamps, lots of them as we grew up with them when we were young. I don’t have a lot of lamp oil, but probably enough for a few days. I will buy more before then. I could always use real kerosene that I have on hand (that’s what we used to use). I even have some old kerosene railroad lanterns. All are always ready to go, with about half fuel and good wicks.
The worst part is that our grandson’s birthday was yesterday. As we are raising him, it disrupted most of our plans. But I did get his ice cream cake (small one) late yesterday and bring it to the hotel where I put up the rest of my family so we could have a small celebration. And since my refrigerators are still working, I was able to put the rest in the freezer until today.
Some neighbors nearby are worse off without generators (you know when they have one!). A few are better off and have standby whole house units.
Nearby towns have over 50% of people without power.
Anyway, time to feed/walk the pets and refuel the generator. Generator is also supplying power for my laptop and my Verizon Mifi hotspot.
Thanks all. Fortunately, my immediate area is in pretty good shape now, although there are numerous areas south of me that are still having major problems.
Hope things get better for IT_Pro soon.
@IT_Pro,
Hmmm. Kerosene lamps are a smart idea. Have there been any improvements over the design of the last 150 years or so?
Hmmm. Kerosene lamps are a smart idea. Have there been any improvements over the design of the last 150 years or so?
My grandmother grew up without electricity here in Texas. It was her job to clean the soot off the kerosene lamps each morning. Her daddy’s lamp was the worst as he read every night until the very late hours.
@Lynn
Yes, that was tradition, every morning.
So technology has advanced, but I think it a very worthwhile idea to have some kerosene lamps — the thought never occured to me.
Just wondering if there have been improvements since your grandma’s day.
The fuel has gotten cleaner, that’s for sure!
*****
Saw a mover’s truck trekking up the hill from the market just now.
“Eco-Movers”.
LOL, if they were truly Eco-Movers, they’d have had a horse and buggy, not a diesel truck. What did PT Barnum say? “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Just wondering if there have been improvements since your grandma’s day.
The fuel has gotten cleaner, that’s for sure!
The soot on the lamp glass is unburned carbon. I would be highly surprised if it was not there still.
I’ve got kerosene lamps and during my testing, they did have a lot of soot. Some is down to not trimming the wick properly, but there is a lot of soot regardless.
Also, the oil evaporates from the wick and will empty your lamp….
n
(given the soot, poor light, and danger, I consider the oil lamp to be way down the list of preps. I do have a few gallons of oil and kerosene, and a big pile of wicks, and several lamps in different styles none the less…….)