Hot and humid. Like yesterday. Possibility of rain.
Yesterday it was very hot and very humid. The sun, when it was out, was set to ‘crispy’. Just putting a few bins of auction items in my truck had me soaked to the skin.
I took the bins to the auction house, and got my settlement check from the last time. It was short by half, as some numbnuts didn’t pay or pickup, and he bought a bunch of my items. The auction will have to relist them and we’ll see where the prices end up.
My wife spent the afternoon setting up the salt water chlorination system for our pool. I told her if she wanted to get fancy with the chemicals it would be her job, and she’s stepped up.
Dinner was frozen fish, baked on the grill, canned beans, and boiled carrots from the kids’ school lunches.
I noticed that the corn in the garden has at least two small ears started. Hooray me. We’ll see if I get them or the squirrels.
Today, however, is Independence Day here in the States. Traditionally an unabashed good time. The freaking wokescolds have got their bony fingers pointed at everyone this year though, and the wuflu got the fireworks shows.
Take some time today and celebrate independence, both our original departure from Merry Olde, and your personal independence. If, upon reflection, you don’t have all you’d like, then by all means make a plan to get to where you’d like to be… make big picture plans, and small personal plans. Start accumulating the resources. Declare your independence.
And get ready for what may be coming. Lots of opportunity in periods of great change.
Keep stacking, enjoy the 4th, and please don’t shoot your guns into the air. Shoot them into the targets.
nick
Happy 7th April, USAians!
G,
LOL The 4th back at ya.
The Fourth is with us!!
Speaking of dates, I have used YYYYMMDD format for as long as I have used computers. It sorts chronologically, avoids punctuation, and fits the 8 character limit imposed by older operating systems. The latter two reasons means I could use that format as a file name, either alone or with additional characters. Thoughts?
WRT the 4th: Roger That!
JimB, you are using the One True Date Format. Go forth and proselytize.
That’s what I use. I have a pictures folder on my file server. Inside, each folder is named YYYYMMDD. I’ve since gone back and put a general description as part of the folder name, such as “birthday party or vacation.”
Some day, I really should go through and cull the number of pictures down. Space is cheap though, and it’s fun to look at even the not so great pictures of my son when he was very young.
Speaking of pictures, I’m slowly (very slowly) scanning some of my old pictures. I’m using the criteria of “would anyone other than me care about this?” In reality, I know that the answer is no, but I’m doing some historical record and to preserve family history.
The Fourth is with us!!
Thay! Maybe I am Cathtilian*!!
*OK, OK, OK, poor humor while I wait for the coffee to do its magic.
I remember visiting España and learning a little of the local language. Pronunciation was challenging. One of our travel mates was an almost native Spanish speaker, but it was Venezuelan Spanish (way before today’s problems.) He had trouble, too, but different. On a different note, it was a riot to hear him try to converse in Catalan with someone who was bilingual in Catalan and Castilian Spanish. Totally different. Don’t even mention Basque. 😉
JimB, you are using the One True Date Format. Go forth and proselytize.
Ooooh, sends shivers up my spine!
Uh, my post about Castilian probably offended at least someone. Truly sorry, but if you can’t take a joke…
…can’t take a joke…
I was once in a somewhat PC office, and orders came down to stop telling ethnic jokes. I was truly offended, because I think good humor is more than ice cream. After a couple days, I hit on a solution. I told the same lame jokes, but thenceforth they were about Yankees. My boss quietly told me to knock it off… with a wink.
Some day, I really should go through and cull the number of pictures down.
Suggestion: when I copy photos from a camera to my computer, I create an appropriately named folder, with a folder inside named Originals. I never change those. I also create a folder named Culls, where I put all the blemished ones. I also create other folders as the subject matter suggests, and COPY to those. As you say, storage is cheap.
I also enjoy looking at my (and others’ who have shared with me) old photos. Helps me relive old memories, and it is sooo convenient on a computer. I have piles of old slides, prints, and negatives. I wish they could magically jump to digital. I have considered one of those services that scan, but that also takes time and effort. Some day…
Oh, and I often forget this: take pictures of EVERYTHING! Keep them, at least until you don’t need them any more. Death is a good reminder to delete photos. My relatives will almost certainly do that. They only seem to value paper. Ugh!
Enjoy your 4th of July, if the [blankedly] [blankedly] [blank]s have their way this will be the last
Enjoy your monuments, they may be gone soon if the [blankedly] [blankedly] [blank]s have their way.
Enjoy your state’s name, it may be gone soon if the [blankedly] [blankedly] [blank]s have their way.
Enjoy your state’s flag, it may be gone soon if the [blankedly] [blankedly] [blank]s have their way.
Forget all your sports teams, the [blankedly] [blankedly] [blank]s have had their way.
How the WuHu Flu has changed our lives forever is small compared to what the [blankedly] [blankedly] [blank]s are doing.
In spite of all of this, God Bless the USA.
Happy 4th! The Declaration, at least, is still revered.
In other hornet’s nests:
https://reason.com/2020/07/03/phony-overtime-fictional-drug-buys-and-mysterious-c-i-payments-offer-a-glimpse-of-houston-police-corruption/
We went out to watch the fireworks last night. The town of Seminole was having their display on the 3rd so we drove over there (15 min away) and parked in the Sir Save-a-Lot parking lot facing the water park across the road. We put out lawn chairs on the grassy verge and watched the display. The arial bursts were preceded by an impromptu parade of pickups, classic cars, and motorcycles flying American and Trump flags as everyone honked in approval. This is middle America you know. It all ended about 11pm and we brought a sleepy little girl home. She mentioned that she didn’t know what was so special about the 4th as they never taught it in school. That will be a topic of discussion today. This morning the storms rolled in with rain and thunder. Temperature dropped from the high 80s to the 70s. Nice change.
I was just reading that the Redskns are going to change their name. All the obvious jokes, like renaming them the Palefaces. Only…I suppose naming them after their actual skin color would be politically incorrect? The Blackies?
The whole BLM crap is truly setting race relations back by decades.
–my wife culls. I don’t cull. I use the somewhat morbid observation that if we somehow lost a child, even the bad pictures would be good.
By all means, copy out the good ones to a special place, and use that place for source material when you need to load up a photo frame for grandma, or to point your screensaver at. I see a lot more of my photos just by pointing my screensaver at the “my pics” folder. My dad used to sit at his desk and just watch the screensaver show him pictures of the family.
n
A funny meme that goes around this time of year from the point of view of the UK:
“Happy Treason Day, You Ungrateful Colonists.”
🙂
One of my favorite paragraphs:
@JimB
YYYYMMDD format
Those who don’t use this format are leper outcast, unclean
Had responsibility for a 50 disk jukebox years ago, storing tiffs of invoices. I used YYYYMMDD naming format. Some philistine on the day shift created a couple disks named MMDDYYYY. Who does that? Screwed up the sort order and caused me gritted teeth. Smite worthy.
Quiet here today. We make a point of responding Happy Independence Day to greetings of a Happy 4th. Probably petty and annoying.
Kits are 5 weeks old Tuesday. Weaned them over the last three days and mama rabbit is now in her own space. She looks relaxed. The six kits are super cute and zooming everywhere. I’ll need to do another split as soon as I can tell male from female. I’ve got six cages, banks of two, all with a manure tarp system. There’s a lot of urine. Four rabbits are producing four liters of urine every four days. Jeez. It’s a lot to get rid of and too much for the soil to absorb without stink. My system is making it pretty easy to deal with. I swap full bottles for empties twice a week. I need to put some effort into finding someone who gardens larger scale than I do to take it regularly. Or set up a sideline or reselling it (ugh) – there is local precedent for selling manure tea by the gallon at farmers markets. I don’t have a lot of interest in spending time / energy that way, though. The poop / hay are going into the raspberry patch for now. Mulching the weeds nicely. No smell whatsoever.
My pump and heater arrived so I can start on the winter watering system as soon as I acquire 1/2” PVC pipe. The ReStore has some, no prices marked. I’ll go back next week.
If the interviewees in this video are truly representative of this country’s younger generation (and let us fervently hope that they are not) then the US educational system needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch:
Young Americans Know Nothing About The 4th of July
(Yes, I know, there’s no shortage of these sorts of videos this time of year–which only serves to highlight the problem!)
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/07/two-women-activists-hit-car-5-outside-seattle-suffer-serious-injuries-hitting-windshield-front-grill/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/07/not-tough-talking-now-woke-harvard-grad-meltdown-says-lost-job-deloitte-ima-stab-video-went-viral/
These are the fireworks antifa are using to attack police & the public in Portland. Last night one of their own comrades was injured by their explosive outside the federal courthouse.
An oldie but they used my headline https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7480593/Porsche-driver-tries-overtake-turning-truck-crushed.html
n
@lynn
Still watching? What season are you up to?
Most of the yard is in shade so I cut the grass. Did some light pruning, which was in the sun, so now I’m cooling down my brain inside for a while.
Broke a window with the string trimmer. Threw a rock. And THAT kids is why we wear safety glasses and don’t have spectators while we cut the grass.
n
> Over The Hedge: fixing the humans quarantine
> https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2020/07/03
>
> This will end badly.
Whoa, better than I thought.
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2020/07/04
Except the boys forgot the snacks.
Am binging “Homeland” now. I am not sure about it yet.
@lynn
Still watching? What season are you up to?
The second season. The first season was wild and the second is even wilder so far. Warning: lots of nudity and sex. And lots of the F word, the wife does not like the series as she abhors the f word.
The wife and I are binging “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” today on IMDB, an Amazon Company, for free.
“Elon Musk visits Tulsa as site for new Tesla plant is considered”
https://www.chron.com/business/technology/article/elon-musk-tesla-plant-tulsa-oklahoma-15386216.php?cmpid=hpctp
Looks like the Austin, TX site is not a done deal.
WRT the dirty narcs in HPD, it would be better if they hang them.
wrt Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, I don’t like her. Especially after this, “every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented.”
SHE’S the DA. The DA’s office decides to prosecute or not. THEY are one of those checks and balances. She might not have held the office at the time, but all those wrongful convictions didn’t happen without the DA’s office prosecuting. And when she says “could never have preyed on our community” I’m pretty sure she’s not talking about Houston in general.
n
I had a rule that files would be named in the format “customer 20200704”. One of my guys would randomly name them “customer update 20200704” or “customer 742020”, but not every time. Just enough to break the sort order.
Quickbooks names backups like this: “Saturday July 04, 2020”. Dumb.
Speaking of dates, I have used YYYYMMDD format for as long as I have used computers. It sorts chronologically, avoids punctuation, and fits the 8 character limit imposed by older operating systems. The latter two reasons means I could use that format as a file name, either alone or with additional characters. Thoughts?
I use YYYYMMDD as a directory name when I backup my website weekly.
I think you need to camp out in the Cleaning Supplies aisle and wait for the 30 second window once a month when they’ve put their allocation of six cans on the shelf. Or start buying more Powerball tickets – probably better odds…
@lynn
Was about to recommend “Ray Donovan”, also on Showtime, but, as in many made-for-cable dramas, the cursing flows freely…
Ever type a post and hit the wrong button? Like, the red X up there that closes the browser?
Guilty.
Ever type a post and hit the wrong button?
Everything should have an undo option. Not just on computers 😉
I bought a water softener on the 30th, it arrived via UPS Ground on the 2nd. From Illinois to Burnet. Installed it yesterday after the usual two trips to the hardware store. It was a nice and toasty 97F or so in the pump house but I had a fan and beer.
The kitchen water this morning by taste said “flush the system MORE”. I turned on an outside faucet full blast for half an hour. That made the water taste good. Then I ran a regeneration cycle…. on the theory that if the salt pellets are still bubbling air when I ran the first cycle yesterday there isn’t much of a saline solution yet.
The water feels different. Slicker. I have a cheap $14 TDS meter but maybe it’s too cheap. Kitchen faucet still says ~360 or so, about 20 grains hardness. The RO still says 35 but I know it hasn’t flushed out the old water.
Distilled water, I buy it for car batteries, says 12. I guess distilled water from HEB isn’t as pure as I thought.
I think the system is working as it should. Maybe the pipes need to de-lime a few days? I really don’t remember how it all worked with the first softener eight years ago. And maybe my TDS gizmo is junk.
“Thomas Sowell sounds alarm to Mark Levin about the left’s efforts to cripple charter schools”
https://www.foxnews.com/media/thomas-sowell-mark-levin-lefts-efforts-cripple-charter-schools
“Sowell said that there is legislation in California set to cripple charter schools by restricting their ability to suspend or expel students who disrupt the classroom.”
Hat tip to:
https://www.garynorth.com/public/21054.cfm
Not a fan of the swearing in newer movies. I like the old movies where it was all implied. They didn’t say f**k but they did. You could watch the movie as a little kid and it was cool. When you got older, oh, “that’s what that means!”.
Several of my neighbors had fireworks preshows for us last night. Tonight’s shows are promising to be a real blast.
The country club show we were planning to watch got cancelled. Heard only a few weak efforts last night.
I think we’ll have brats on the grill, maybe a dip in the pool, and watch Star Wars. The ~1977 version.
n
Oh, cooling down again. assembled 2 four foot firewood racks out of the one 8ft that I bought, and the other 8 ft that I picked from my neighbor’s heavy trash. I ended up with horizontal pieces left over, but I had room for 2 at four ft, and didn’t have room for an 8 footer. Soon as I cool down, I’ll do some electric chainsawing and then that will be done.
Did some cleaning of the pool. Moved some ebay stuff around. It’s 103F in my driveway and the humidity is so high my cool vest doesn’t work.
The window I broke is in my back entry door. New window is ~$350. New steel door in the same style is $300 and in stock at lowes. New fiberglas door is $350 at Home Depot. I think I’ll be hanging a new steel door Monday. Like I needed a new project.
n
@paul, that sounds like a lot of messing around. I’ve never lived anywhere with a water softener, but I have stayed with friends that had them. I didn’t like the soapy feeling I got from the water when showering.
n
In “The Sarah Connor Chronicles”, Sarah Connor is picking up John and Cameron at their school. John says, “I’ve got shotgun !”. Cameron says “I’ve got 9mm !”.
whew, it’s hot. The shade is not too bad if the breeze cools your sweat soaked shirt.
All the females are repainting 11yo’s room a dark purple color. House smells like paint. I’m hoping it’s just the two walls so far and there’ll be a lighter color on the rest. Hoping, but not confident.
n
Truth. I went for a 2.5 mile run this afternoon. 91 with a feels like temp of around 100. I just sit on the front porch afterwards until I stop dripping. It takes a little bit…
Flag rolled up and back in the garage.
Looks like the Austin, TX site is not a done deal.
$68 Million is a lot of money for the Del Valle ISD to give up.
The last story I saw indicated that they were still soliciting public input. Imagine.
Not a fan of the swearing in newer movies. I like the old movies where it was all implied. They didn’t say f**k but they did. You could watch the movie as a little kid and it was cool. When you got older, oh, “that’s what that means!”.
I saw an uncensored print of “Smokey and the Bandit” for the first time in ~30 years last night on IFC. I always knew Jackie Gleason wasn’t saying “scum bum”, even when it aired regularly on network TV when I was a kid.
Here’s hoping that the 50th anniversary print restores Gleason’s performance to its uncut glory now that Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham have both passed. “Smokey and the Bandit” is not a PG film.
congrats (late) to all you
Ah, there are some many spanish as so many english around, maybe more, as you may know, is the second languaje, so, my friends, you are wirting here nada, etc etc.
since my mother stongue is catalan, yeap, we, latin languaje heirs (Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Rumanian etc) look at contaminated languajes, hoy to say, boa…….
Basque is not uderstandable, period
Solo bromeaba
PS Grammar and ort corrector lost?
Just took the kids out front and introduced them to the joys of bottle rockets and fire crackers. Briefed them how to act if the po po came by. My act of civil disobedience for the week.
Stuff was from my dad’s basement and at least 20 years old. VERY uneven performance.
I used the leaf blower to clean up the
evidencemess.n
Ordered my new door from Lowes, for curbside pickup. It was showing in stock for my local store. Update says no pickup until the 12th. Lying bags of excrement.
n
Just took the kids out front and introduced them to the joys of bottle rockets and fire crackers. Briefed them how to act if the po po came by. My act of civil disobedience for the week.
Excellent.
We had six mortars running from 200 ft to a half mile away form the house for a half hour. All volunteer.
We ended up eating pizza. It was very late and they were still painting, so I decided to do the grilling tomorrow. Still be a fun day.
n
Kanye West just declared for the Presidency. He does meet the requirements.
https://deadline.com/2020/07/kanye-west-presidential-bid-july-4th-donald-trump-elon-musk-joe-biden-kim-kardashian-1202977608/
Why not join the circus ? Shoot, lets have a hundred more jump in.
Indeed, all the distraction you could want.
n
@Paul, a water softener will not lower the TDS much, if any. It is replacing calcium and magnesium with sodium, so it is just different solids instead of a reduction. In fact, it takes two sodium atoms to replace each calcium. If you don’t like the slick feel, which comes from the sodium turning some of your skin oils into soap, you can jigger up your plumbing so that you blend a little unsoftened water into the mix. If you do this, it is better to blend it into only the cold water line, so that you aren’t reducing the benefit of preventing calcium buildup in your water heater. Sometimes softeners are installed only in the feed to the water heater.
Even sparklers are illegal here. Many, nearly all, of the metro municipalities canceled their fireworks shows. However, sitting on the roof of the apartment house, more than a dozen quite elaborate displays were visible. Long gaps between runs but continuous high quality runs for more than an hour visible near and far.
Articles online cry crocodile tears for PTSD afflicted individuals, small children and pets. OTOH, every other year, massive displays are the rule every other weekend throughout the summer for various ethnic festivals and particularly the 4th. All those displays are sanctioned by TPTB.
@nick
I used the leaf blower to clean up the evidence mess.
As a kid, I’d get up early* July 5th and ride thru the neighborhood. I’d pick thru the piles of fireworks junk. I’d cart home anything that looked like it might have a bit of zip leftover. It would go into a pile in front of our house and I’d light it up. Usually it kind of smoldered and stank, however just often enough to reinforce the behavior it would go BANG or something similarly exciting.
Great fun.
*because if you waited too long the adults woke up and took away the matches.
He will draw more libturds than consturds. It will only help tRump. Maybe Ye is jockeying for Director of Black Wokeness.
Por cierto.
Duh. I knew that. Ok, forget the TDS meter if it’s going to measure 20 grains hardness with or without the softener.
As long as it works and the dishes come clean, the water heater stops making noise, and I don’t have to scrape the waterline in the toilet bowls. I’m not a fan of faucet aerators plugging up, either.
Added: After some reading, I bought “Hach 145300 Total Hardness Test Kit, Model 5-B” from Amazon. Knowing the Total Dissolved Solids is all fine and dandy, what I want to know is “Is the water softener actually softening?”. Almost $25 with Prime, should be here tomorrow.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008FM7WLU/