93F and 93%RH at 1040am.
Neither back, nor bladder, nor babbling babies woke me today. I went to bed way late, having eaten dinner at 10pm, and went back to sleep when I did wake up.
I spent part of yesterday putting some of my dad’s stuff away. I’ll be doing that in stages as I move and make room for it. I did get a big preliminary thing cut up and moved out so I can get to more stuff for the auction. The fact I could stay in bed means I’m dehydrated from the work yesterday. Not good.
I’m working at my secondary location that I stocked during the last Ebola scare. A lot of it is panic buy food, and wasn’t properly stored. Canned goods are fine, but the rice, flour, sugar, and salt were just put into the big black tubs with the yellow lids and literally stacked. (They are plastic rectangular tubs, that are a bit thicker and tougher than other choices. They hold 26 or 27 gallons, and if you fill them to the lid they will stack and support a LOT of weight.) With weight on the lids they are nearly airtight. The sugar and salt are of course fine, but the rice is probably too old. If the flour isn’t riddled with bugs I’ll be shocked. No sign of vermin though.
Because my storage situation is NOT ideal, I just accept that I’m going to have losses due to heat, vermin, time, humidity, etc. I’ll keep track of the rice and flour I replace and this time I’ll use buckets and O2 absorbers.
I have a lot more food stored there than I realized.
Keep stacking, and keep rotating or checking too! Battery month– check and replace all batteries in stored equipment! Might be time to upgrade to LED flashlights too, if you still have some maglites around. LED bulbs work well in them.
nick
In our current home we have very little interior, climate controlled, storage and have to keep the overflow in the garage where it gets over 90f normally in the summers. In our retirement home, we have loads and loads of interior storage as well as a cool, dry, underground shelter. Once we move in Jan. I will rebuild our food stores. And I will have room for considerable water storage. That’s the next challenge. How to store water long term and keep it safe.
The heat in Anchorage is oppressive. We hit an official 90 something at the airport recently. Airport typically is significantly cooler than the rest of town due to its proximity to Turnagain Arm / Cook Inlet and the associated ocean breezes. Lots of arm waving about global warming. Little talk of how the hundreds of fires around the state and the several close fires on the Kenai peninsular are generating vast quantities of smoke and contributing to the temperature rises. There have been several fires in town this past week, including one where they caught the person who allegedly started it.
The homeless camps littering the woods that run thru town, in combination with the thick underbrush and deadwood from spruce killed by spruce beetle infestation, are an enormous problem and present a large risk of fires kicked off by cook fires and cooking meth. City posts a 10 day warning before clearing camps (though city has recently said perhaps a 3 day warning under dangerous circumstances like cook fires might be ok). Scuttle butt is the camps pick up and move a few hundred yards down the trail before the clean up crews arrive, leaving behind tons of festering feces, dismantled stolen bikes, drug paraphernalia, and assorted rubbish.
Anchorage has a problem. Our personal zombie apocalypse has arrived, aided and abetted by our ‘leaders’.
Here is a long YouTube (~30 minutes) presented by ‘The Alaska Landmine’ titled ‘This is Anchorage’. I haven’t had an opportunity to watch with sound on yet and am not familiar with this organizations work. The scope of the problem is awful.
https://youtu.be/pVKkXX7WTfI?fbclid=IwAR2BfpnO5SThe-6JwFLsx4kRt_3U-jaBaUfw6oMflrnMXQtY8LB9rv99mlk
It’s been a year since I painted the fascia board on the back of the house. I need to get back on the roof and get another couple coats on. I’ve let the heat be an excuse and need to knock it off.
Educated our youngster on the fine art of lawn mowing yesterday. She was initially frightened but as she saw that she controlled the motor and direction, she gleefully charted patterns in the grass. Husband and I had done the first pass of the, -ahem- meadow, so most of the hard work was done for her. Still long enough to be satisfying on her second pass. I’m hoping to create a monster.
Our pantry needs to be pulled apart and restructured. Not really enough space to store what we have, which generates organizational problems. That task will probably wait for winter.
I want to pull up the Costco laminate in the dining area, not a big area. There are half a dozen water damaged planks that need to be replaced, however due to the layout we will probably wind up replacing most of the area. That’s okay. I overbought when we picked up the laminate on sale ($1/sf) in 2012.
I’ve got a long list of “to do’s”. Not as successful as last year at crossing things off. I’ve been spending more time with our kiddo. That has been a good trade off.
@Harold
We struggle with the water storage question. I’ve tried storing outside but haven’t found an economical container that is robust enough to last under the storage conditions I can provide. Changing the phase of H2O from solid to liquid is expensive in fuel, an important consideration for our climate. I’ve got an inadequate amount stacked in the garage.
I ponder the problem frequently. If I threw more money at the problem, or more time, I could find a solution. Maintaining a balance between daily financial needs, future financial needs, and prepping, presents challenges. (maybe take those 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there from ttgnet.com surfing to get some of this done – hah!)
I have a long list too, and whenever someh8ng gets knocked off, at least one other thing gets added on.
I’m working on refinishing my wife’s cedar chest. Her grandmother bought it for her in the late 80’s. The lid was pretty scratched up and other cosmetic issues, plus the lid hardware was broken.
I have it disassembled, and finished sanding it yesterday to remove the old finish. This thing was almost $2000 when new. The trim and bottom legs are veneer over particle board. The cedar inside is veneer, and an impressively thin one at that. Build quality is definitely not worth what was paid. Honestly, if it was mine, I’d trash it, but it has sentimental value, so I will save it.
Luckily it had a paint finish on it that looked like a stain – sanded right off. Oh, they used paint because they had to cover up the many knots in the wood that was used. Anyways, I have the imperfections filled and will sand later. I need to get the wife to the paint store to pick out a color for finishing.
Next project on deck is likely shelved for the bonus room closet. I want t9 do built in shelves, with possible base cabinets. Overkill, but could use the organized storage. The main reason though is to use a practice for the build techniques. I want t9 do built ins in the office downstairs too.
Sometime this fall I need to do another raised garden bed. The one I built this year is working out well. Getting plenty of tomatoes, beans, and cutting flowers. I might also do a compost bin too. I made one at our old house, and it was very handy.
I have been adding to my water storage. If you can find them locally, actual water storage tanks are the way to go in terms of robustness. If you are very lucky, you might find something like this —
https://www.publicsurplus.com/sms/auction/view?auc=2324001
or this —
https://www.wizardsports.com/hydration-systems-water-cows-football-hydration-pumpers.html
in a local school auction. There are lots of online sites with poly tanks, and Tractor Supply stores stock several (if you are lucky enough to live near a “Home Depot for farmers”. One that looks interesting is sized to fit thru normal house man doors and is aimed squarely at in-house storage of water.
I bought one of the ‘water cows’ from a different school auction this summer. I have a 225 gallon tank out behind the garage that I bought from a nearby city several years ago. It was part of my rainwater collection system, but I’ve closed it, treated the water with chlorine, and let the sediment settle. I will filter it before use, but basically it sits there, waiting.
Lately I’ve been leaning toward food safe 5 gallon buckets with pour spout lids. I don’t know the longevity, and I’m sure they would get brittle in the sun, but they’re pretty cheap compared to aquatainers and you can still move them (easier with a hand truck.)
n
I should add that I intend to use the 110 gallons of rainwater in the two catch barrels for either flushing, casual washing, or filtered for drinking. My “large tank” current capacity is 225 gal, 2x 55 gal, 1x 50 gal rainwater. 4x 100L stainless tanks, 5x aquatainers, many gallons of refilled juice bottles of ready to drink water. Water is heavy so most of it is near at hand, but there are several dozen juice bottles at my secondary.
I am thinking about adding the buckets to my secondary….
n
Climate of Anchorage
Seems to this Southerner that the winters in Anchorage would regularly prune back the homeless population. How do they survive the snow and the cold?
Feed the birds, tuppence a bag, tuppence a bag, tuppence……
Also probably plasma centers to sell their foul bodily fluids, and a liberal safety net of feeding centers, warming centers, public spaces now contaminated with their foul bodily fluids, etc.
They survive in NYFC and Chicongo too.
n
On another topic, how the hell did MS break windows so badly when it comes to disc ops?
Starting with the abysmal performance of copy from win7 onward to win10 file deletion.
I’m trying to delete a folder, first I had to sit thru a ‘file discovery’ phase that took minutes, while it LOOKS like it’s moving files to the recycle bin (which isn’t the command I gave, I told it to DELETE the files not recycle them) until it fails and gives a message that the files are too big to recycle and do I want to delete them??? YES F YOU MS. That’s what I wanted from the beginning.
So I say YES DELETE THE FREAKING FILES, and it’s been minutes and it is still churning away only 75% complete. FOR FILE OPS. Which should consist of marking a record for each file, and should be almost instantaneous.
wth M$…
n
@ITguy, I’m pretty sure you are already aware, but if not, cedar has some extra considerations for finishes. Fine Woodworking magazine used to feature it and the extra prep steps fairly often. Not as much lately though, I guess it’s fallen out of favor as a wood.
n
Seems to me aggressive enforcement of the vagrancy laws would go a long way to solving the “homeless” problem. Anyone loitering on public property for more than 24 hours is told to move along; any items left on public property for more than 24 hours is collected and destroyed.
A reminder of something I posted a while back: CATO4321
Crazy: 40%
Addicts/Alcoholics: 30%
Tramps/Bums: 20%
Other: 10%
The “other” category is composed of people capable of being helped. We as a society used to know how to deal with the other 90%.
I’m not heartless, but I don’t want to be overwhelmed by the dregs of society.
ADDED: Here in the Crescent City there has long been the practice of claiming a spot on the neutral ground prior to the actual day of the Mardi Gras parades. This has involved roping off areas, setting up sofas, putting up ladders with kids’ seats on top, etc., etc. Unsurprisingly, this practice has been abused in the past, so much so that the city passed an ordinance forbidding it more than 24 hours before the parade arrived. It was on the books, unenforced, for several years, until the city got serious last year and scooped up dozens if not hundreds of ladder/seat combos, some of them brand new, and took them to the landfill.
If the citoyens of New Orleans can have their property confiscated, why not the persons of no fixed address living in Anchorage?
BC: the first mortar
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2019/07/07
Oh no.
Daughter’s “baking club” is meeting in the kitchen atm…. I’ve got 3 extra 10yo girls in there and mine…
Lots of squealing and laughter, and LOTS of powdered mess being made. Of course Dad got out a nice array of cake mixes when asked– I’m stocking a lot of cake mixes for cupcakes and cakes with the kids being small. Never did much in the past, but I did stock some on the theory that nothing raises the spirits during a disaster better than cupcakes….
and as a prep for Real Life ™ I get “I need to bring cupcakes for the class tomorrow” requests fairly often during the school year. I could say no, or buy something, but baking is more fun.
n
Also probably plasma centers to sell their foul bodily fluids, and a liberal safety net of feeding centers, warming centers, public spaces now contaminated with their foul bodily fluids, etc.
As JEP famously said: If you want more of something, subsidize it.
Been away from Windows file management for a few years, but I see my favorite orthodox file manager (look that up), ZTreeWin, works on W10. It should get around the problems Nick is experiencing. Highly recommended, but do take time to learn it thoroughly, which can take effort. It is possible to do as much from a command line, but that takes even more effort, and can be dangerous… ask anyone who has made a disastrous typo on any command line that does not have an “undo.”
And, yes, I have played with W10’s file manager. What a mess. It has been dumbed down for idiots. Funny aside, I was trying to teach someone the fine art of file organization once. This person was no idiot, and had become quite good using Windows’ whatever (not just file) manager. I don’t remember the specifics, but he was able to accomplish something quite easily. Ever since, I am careful to learn before I criticise.
Anyway, ZTreeWin follows the old XTree methodology with some new tricks. I think so few people use these kind of file managers because, first, they are obscure, and, second, they are deceptive and a bit hard to learn.
Breaking Cat News: what is sand ?
https://www.gocomics.com/breaking-cat-news/2019/07/07
I love the pie chart !
@Jenny, Come back down here for another visit. Temps about the same as last time. ’70s predicted here for the coming week.
Hagar The Horrible: working vacations
https://www.comicskingdom.com/hagar-the-horrible/2019-07-07
Heh.
The baking club sounds like fun.
Cake mixes are handy to have. Home made frosting, even a “bad” batch, beats the plastic stuff in a tub. Heh, at least the baker tried.
Store bought cupcakes and cakes are good sometimes. But to me they usually taste like they are a week old and the frosting is horrid. Especially blue frosting.
As a bonus, the girls learn how to cook. And clean up the mess. 🙂
When I was a kid, there was a magazine called Boys Life. I think. It was thin, had some good stuff, a running comic strip, a few “how to” things. It wasn’t as interesting as Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, but still pretty good.
There was a recipe for a cake. Sift together flour, sugar, cocoa powder, and more stuff into a 10×10 baking dish. Spread it out, make three pits. One for some oil, one for water, and one for ? an egg?. Mix it all together and bake it. Pretty darn good for a scratch cake made by a kid. Plus you learn how to measure and sift and whisk and spatula and use pot holders and the old toothpick test to see if the cake was done.
If made for dessert, there were never any leftovers.
I lost the recipe somewhere… it’s probably in the box o’stuff that vanished in a move from one apartment to another.
Boy’s Life was the ?unofficial? scouting magazine and is still around. I loved it as a boy too. It had scifi short stories in it, and always ads for xray specs, hoverboards (made from old vacuum cleaners), and Grit magazine sales.
There is a scifi story from probably the late 60s early 70s that still bugs me today. What bugs me is I can’t find it…. my cousin gave me a stack of BL mags, and I read thru them one summer. IIRC there was a story about kids that lived secretly in a school building and there was a character called “Tomorrow Tommy”. It was probably post-apocalyptic, and I remember it because part of it revolved around an orrery. I’d like to reread it, but have had no luck finding it.
n
https://boyslife.org/
> A YASID (yet another story id) from a friend of mine:
>
> “There is a scifi story from probably the late 60s early 70s that still
> bugs me today. What bugs me is I can’t find it. my cousin gave me a
> stack of BL mags, and I read thru them one summer. IIRC there was a
> story about kids that lived secretly in a school building and there was
> a character called “Tomorrow Tommy”. It was probably post-apocalyptic,
> and I remember it because part of it revolved around an orrery. I’d like
> to reread it, but have had no luck finding it.”
>
> Lynn
I don’t remember a “Tomorrow Tommy” but the Time Machine did visit the
future some. Could it have been one of those stories? Looks like they
may all be online:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_series
btw, currently my weather station shows 109F in my driveway. It’s over 100F in the shade in the back yard too. “Feels like” is 122F. Yeah, I’m hiding in my office.
n
We had some miserably cold winters in the 1990’s. Made it uncomfortably deadly for homeless. Also kept the spruce beetles under control.
We haven’t had a nasty horrifically cold winter for years. I miss them. Several brutal winters in a row would solve some problems.
Anchorage got into it with the ACLU a few years ago and lost. That’s when the 10 day notice thing for clearing camps came in. And a few homeless died from exposure some years ago, unleashing reactive sympathy aid.
The problem grows under care and feeding.
Current governor has raised hackles by making line item vetoes. It’s not enough. If what he’s done stands it will help by forcing agencies to tighten belts. Fewer handouts.
@CowboySlim
I’d like to come down for another visit. It was marvelous chatting with you. Will see what unfolds this summer / fall.
The “other” category is composed of people capable of being helped. We as a society used to know how to deal with the other 90%.
My wife’s estimate of the percentage of the non-elderly/non-veteran population who truly need government help with heath issues at around 10%. Healthcare is a racket, but, as a society, we’ve also lost the nerve to tell the other 90% to grow up and take care of business using the resources at their disposal.
Ruh-roh. That section of the Gulf has nice, warm water this time of year.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/weather/hurricane/os-ne-tropical-story-barry-gulf-20190707-ytb2olcl35ehlbzkblu7pyg4oe-story.html
My wife’s estimate of the percentage of the non-elderly/non-veteran population who truly need government help with heath issues at around 10%. Healthcare is a racket, but, as a society, we’ve also lost the nerve to tell the other 90% to grow up and take care of business using the resources at their disposal.
Medicare for All ™ is coming. It is almost inevitable now.
The Balanced Billing laws are helping but are an imperfect cure. The health insurance companies have brought this on themselves. But, I am not sure MFA will be any better. In fact, I am concerned that MFA will be worse once Uncle Santa Claus realizes that he can reward and punish people using MFA bennies.
Got the pool set up. Third year in a row. Couldn’t get a replacement liner for the 12’ Intex we used in 2017, 2018. Got this pool for $90? at Fred Meyers. Had hoped the liner would be compatible. Nope. The Bestway is an all around cheaper product.
I’ll hydrate then get the old filter set up with the new hoses.
We will hang onto the sturdier Intex stuff in the hopes of replacing its liner next year.
A few hours to fill. It is HOT
https://www.amazon.com/Steel-Pro-Frame-Pool-Set/dp/B002ZVOXE6
I have an intrex inflatable pool as my SHTF water collection system. I was looking at the pump and sand filter to do first pass filtering on rainwater….
n
In fact, I am concerned that MFA will be worse once Uncle Santa Claus realizes that he can reward and punish people using MFA bennies.
Control has always been the real aim of the push for “free” medical care. Where have you been?
Certainly it has been the plan since the Harris Wofford victory in the 1991 PA Senate seat special election.
The key control freak mistake of HillaryCare which was not repeated in ObamaCare was outlawing paying cash for medical services. The AMA didn’t get on board, the plan went down in flames, and many Senators and Democrats — including Harris Wofford — were shown the door in 1994 after the tax increase disaster.
Once people realize that they’ve been had and that Medicare For All won’t include gratis supplement plans to make it work, we’ll be at the point of no return.
I got a couple of things done despite the heat.
I installed an arm and mounted one of my monitors on it. It’s the monitor for my NVR pc, and I moved it from my desk to above my main pc center monitor. It is just a bit high to really be comfortable which is fine for the use I’m making of it.
This opens more room on my desk for radio/repair/or other hobby stuff. Honestly it will probably be another monitor for a ham radio pc, but that will be at least a few weeks away. in the mean time, I get easier access to the window sill behind the desk to get my test equipment reorganized. I’ve got a new spectrum analyzer, and a communications test set to put into the stack, and one or two pieces to pull and sell.
I also got some of the parts I need to continue working on my pile o chainsaws, with the idea that at least one gas saw should be running for hurricane season. Admittedly, I’ve gotten thru everything to this point with either the electric chainsaw, or my battery dewalt sawzall with a pruning blade. Still, chainsaws are cool, and I should have one that works.
n
Tropical system could develop in Gulf of Mexico and Euro model predicts swing into Louisiana
At least we might get some relief from the heat!
I’m currently trying to rebuild my iSpy NVR software. I tried a bunch of stuff earlier, but it got more and more unstable.
I tried to uninstall and it looked like it did, but each attempt at a clean new install brought it up with my config file active. SO I uninstalled the 32bit version. Then uninstalled the 64bit version. then tried a clean install. Nope, still old config, still boot looping….
uninstall again, followed up by windows search of the disk. Tons of stuff hanging around. App install cache? WTF? And stuff in a /roaming/ profile? nuke nuke nuke.
FINALLY get a clean 32 bit install. and it seems to be working correctly. None of the GUI issues I was seeing. So now to reinstall all the camera links. except I can’t remember how I finally got some of them working. RTSP and jpeg, and mpeg, and mjpeg oh my. I’ve got my two new good cams up, at 3 times the framerate as before, and I’m slowly adding the others back with much poking around in settings. CPU and memory usage is much lower so far too.
n
So now to reinstall all the camera links. except I can’t remember how I finally got some of them working.
When JEP was writing his Byte column he kept track of all the details of his software and hardware installs in a notebook.
Really good advice! Sometimes I even follow it myself. 😉
I’ve got all the cams back and config’d. I’m currently seeing 33% CPU and 777MB memory usage. I was getting 70% CPU and much higher memory utilization.
I think I can call it a tentative success. I’m getting higher frame rates too.
I’ll wait and set my recording options tomorrow. I need to tweak the motion triggers, pre and post event recording, etc. I have the backup of recording to internal SD card on the two main hi rez cams so I can wait.
I do have one cam with a really low rez image that was very nice. I think I must be looking at one of the lower rez streams but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how it’s different from the same model that I’m using elsewhere. More stuff to look at tomorrow I guess.
For now, it’s off to bed.
n
fwiw, some discussion over at raconteur report with his repost of his previous quake reporting and prepping for same….
“Really good advice! Sometimes I even follow it myself. ”
–oh, I wrote it down somewhere. maybe in one of the directories I nuked….
n
For a while now, I have been downloading things to a download folder that contains product sub-directories. When installing I create an @@Readme.txt file in There. Sometimes, when doing config changes to the product I even update it. This way, you have the exact starting point and process in a separate place than the installed product and if something happens it will allow you confidently to get back where you were before having the problems.
@marcelo, that is a great idea. On other machines I work on, I always create a file on the desktop called “ServiceLog” and I keep a running log of changes and issues from every service call. I meant to do something similar on my own machines, but didn’t think thru the location of the file.
And I thought I could remember, and I was angry when I killed the directories…. never a good idea.
nick
I use OneNote to keep track of all the necessary information on client systems. Thus it is available on all my devices with the OneNote notebooks stored in the cloud using OneDrive.
OneNote is really a very good information storehouse. You can place images, text, links, hand drawn stuff, move it stuff around, multiple notebooks with multiple pages. Nice product.
@ray, I liked OneNote with my convertible lappy for hand drawn and annotated stuff. Jerry Pournelle liked it a lot. I never got in the habit though.
For work, I start a new yellow pad for each project and write a day’s notes for every work day. I’ve tried covered notebooks, but still prefer black ink on yellow pages. When I was working, I’d periodically scan the yellow pads, and put those images in the project folders. There is a legal distinction between “my notes” on yellow pad, and “the site supervisor’s notes” in a bound book. One being legally admissible, one being protected… which is where I got started using the yellow pads.
Like most people, I find it harder to keep up a standard on my personal work vs. paid work. The carpenter’s house is never finished, the shoemaker’s kids go barefoot, and all that…..
n