Month: March 2018

39F and dry here in Santa Fe. Breakfast coming up soon.

Since I forgot last week and didn’t get much response to the reminder, what did you do to prep?

I got two of my raised beds conditioned and planted. Got the window boxes planted. Cilantro is coming up fine. Got the citrus trees pruned and the orange is in blossom. So is the peach. Got 4 more blueberry bushes planted.

I got the antenna mast installed and secured. That meant getting the fence section rebuilt, and reinforced.

Did some work on getting OFD’s pc ready.

And that’s it.

Two days after getting home I have the Rosenburg hamfest and swapmeet. I always do the swapmeet to sell a bunch of stuff that has built up over the year. They’ll be testing for new and upgrade licenses so if you are in the area, Saturday next…get your ticket.

And now for some Santa Fe breakfast….

Nick

Cool and partly cloudy today here, Well, COLD. Might get snow. Ski lesson in humiliy and aging later today. Might not survive that 🙂 Kids should enjoy it. Hope I don’t do a Kennedy….

Appetizers at the hotel bar were awesome last night. Looking forward to some good eats.

Albequergue airport is a bit tired but is getting renovated.

The drive was nice. Those are some black skies still, although my wife says not as black as 20 years ago.

BTW, @Lynn- finally finished the book you recco’d- The Girl With All The Gifts. What a creepshow. Good, but creepy. I think I’ll skip the movie.

And I’m skipping the news, so I hope the world hasn’t lost its mind last night.

Nick

Oh, and because of the time zone, and DST I think I’m back on my home time this am which is weird.

68Fand misty drizzle. Still, I have plants that must get in the ground before I leave town. Therefore, I better get to it.

n

OH, and since I forgot on Friday, What did you do to prep this week?

50F when I got up this am, with the smell of moisture in the air. I could see my breath when I put the kids in the car. Sunny and bright, scattered clouds. NOAA had us in the middle of a T-storm area for today. Hope that isn’t coming as I’ve still got a bunch to do.

Still riding the update, rinse, repeat cycle to get OFD’s lappy going. Lenovo’s updater is a full on POS. Oh, it will check and get you all the drivers, etc it thinks you need, but you still have to click Accept on each license. The worst bit is that on SOME, but only some, the license page is a ‘pop under’ so you just see the stalled progress bar on the Updater. So much fail. If each bit really needs a license acceptance, why not allow checkboxing the whole list when it’s assembled and before starting the update? And POP UNDER? WTF.

More Grumpy old man syndrome. I try not to be a grammar nazi online. Even on written posts, sometimes the fingers just type and you get a there, they’re, their error, or some other common error. Its and it’s get me about half the time too. One that catches my eye though is fewer vs. less. I see this more and more often including in printed and copy-edited material where someone should have known better. There is a rule folks. Fewer when talking about numbers of stuff you can count, less when talking about the amount of something. Last night we were playing a game with the kids, needed to check the rules, and our 8yo read something with a fewer/less error. I corrected her, but she said that’s how it’s written. Sure enough. Layers of editors my hind end….

More work on the gate, more work on the fence, more work on the garden, more work……

Get to it then!!!

nick

50F and clear this morning. I’m pretty sure I’ve got more outdoor work in my day. Better now than when it’s 100F I guess.

Driveway gate, and vertical multi-band antenna are top of the list, with raised beds pretty near the top too.

I’ll be traveling and away from home Sat. pm thru Thursday next week, so it would be nice to get some seeds in the ground before then.

I guess we’ll see……

n

50 degrees Fahrenheit low humidity partly cloudy generally a beautiful day here in Houston.

In Utah however we have a teenage high school student claiming allegiance with Isis and setting backpack bombs, oh joy.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-06/teenage-isis-supporter-arrested-after-utah-school-backpack-bomb-fails-detonate

Utah.

Nick

Well, it’s 66F with 46%RH which is a nice change. Yesterday was very humid with overcast and storm clouds in the distance. Today is sunny, partly cloudy, cool, and dry. This is the first time that I’ve noticed the NOAA national forecast for the area to be wrong. Yesterday it had Houston in the middle of a t-storm zone. I suppose it’s still possible we’ll get storms later today. I hope not.

This is a bit worrying, and typically it is a tiny mention, way down the page….

Lassa fever death toll hits 110: Fatalities in Nigeria rocket by 22% in a week amid ‘unusually severe’ outbreak of the killer disease

Global health chiefs declared this is Nigeria’s worst ever outbreak of Lassa fever
There has been 1,121 suspected cases of the disease since January, figures show
This year’s outbreak carries a significantly higher death rate than the usual 1%

snip

Elsie Ilori, head of the NCDC’s Lassa Fever Emergency Operations Centre, described the situation as ‘overwhelming’ last week.

In an interview with Bloomberg, she explained that the current outbreak is ‘more than what we have seen before’. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5468093/Lassa-fever-death-toll-hits-110.html

From a tiny, casual mention back when Indonesia was suffering the black plague outbreak to ” the worst outbreak of the deadly bug to have ever rocked Nigeria” in only a month or two.

Good thing for us we’re not allowing unlimited immigration and travel from sh1thole countries…..  oh, wait….

nick

71F and 95%RH with overcast and gusts. Got just a sprinkle of rain yesterday.

I’ve got a bunch of errands to run today, so mostly it’s up to you guys… anyone watch the Oscars? I worked in the business and never watch them. Add the political element, and I’d go out of my way to avoid them.

Seems that there are larger and larger chunks of popular culture and society that I avoid, either passively or actively. Not sure if that’s just Grumpy Old Man Syndrome, or general pushback against people and institutions who don’t share my values.

nick

Anyone in the extreme weather zone, stay warm, safe, and dry. This is why we prep. Weather is much more likely than global systemic collapse… if you can’t deal with the weather, you won’t be ready for anything worse.

I put up some hints for staying warm late yesterday in the comments. We’ve got at least a couple of readers stuck in the bad weather. One I left off is to keep your caloric intake up. You’re body needs fuel to stay warm. This is incidentally where most of the “buckets-o-disaster-food” fail. They assume crazy low calories per person per day in order to get their day count up. Day count sells buckets, but it doesn’t keep you warm if you’re starving slowly.

Lots more to do outside today if the rain holds off, currently 72F and 90%RH and kinda grey.

nick

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