More warmth. It’s supposed to be hot again today. At some point yesterday it was over 101F in my driveway… of course in past years that would be normal for this week. The light overcast cleared late morning and then it was sunny and hot. Today should be more of the same.
I didn’t get much done in the morning yesterday. Took the kid to school because my wife took the other one on her field trip to the beach in Galveston. The school goes every year and it’s a great time for the kids. W enjoyed her time with the other moms, and got to know her new car on the way down. She likes some of the driver assistance stuff, but acknowledges that I would hate it, and that it falls apart in construction zones. The sales guys said the windshield, with the camera glued to it, was less than $900 not thousands, if it needed to be replaced. Still not as cheap as straight glass, and I bet there aren’t any aftermarket choices. Oh well, not my car.
I did a lot of driving in the afternoon and some of it was really a waste. IDK how I got the pickup days wrong for the two auctions in Dickenson (way south, only 20 miles from Galveston) but I didn’t roll two pickups into one trip, and even the pickup I did was on the wrong day, and it would have been cheaper to have the items shipped… I’m going to have to stop bidding in those two auctions, they are just too far away, and I don’t need the stuff that badly.
Took a break in the afternoon to get D1, but she didn’t want to practice driving to my other pickup. So I left her at home and got some camping/cooking supplies. I have a bunch of different ways to cook in a grid down scenario, and they all take different fuels. I picked up some of the butane cans very cheaply yesterday. I like the single burner butane “camp stoves” that so many asians use to cook at the table. Having more fuel for them is a good thing. The cans look like spray paint cans.
As an aside, my strategy is “choices” and “defence in depth” and those apply to all areas of my preps. Instead of having a huge cache of fuel for one type of stove and spares, etc. I have several different stoves, with different fuels, with the idea that I can use whatever fuel might be available… I have reasonable stacks of fuel for each, and combined across all the types I do have quite a substantial cache.
And it’s a little bigger after yesterday. BTW, I picked up a couple of Mr Heater refillable 1 pound propane tanks. I’d refilled the ‘disposable’ ones, but there are issues with that. These are designed to be refilled from a BBQ bottle, and they are DOT approved. Now I’ve got even more flexibility.
Today will be picking up the solar panels and another auction pickup, and doing stuff around the house. I might even get some done this time.
There will surely be stacking too.
nick
The valley we live in is supposed to get a highway up the middle, for the first 35km (so, about 20 miles). They have been working on this highway for…wait for it…35 years. The project is apparently cursed. Among the various problems: They needed to tunnel through a hill. Did so, then the hill shifted. That was one of the first problems, from literally decades ago, and they apparently still don’t know what to do about it. Then they build one section, but it was 50cm (so, about 20 inches) too narrow, so they had to fix that. A couple of overpasses used substandard concrete, and had to be replace – now they’ve discovered another one. Oops, part of the highway is build over an old chemical dump that they “forgot about” and needs to be cleaned up – it’s not clear yet, but they may well rip up that section to clean up the dump. It’s endless. It would be amusing to watch, if the insanity wasn’t being paid for by tax dollars.
And honestly? It’s a highway being build to reach a total of 50,000 people. Completely unnecessary, the existing rural roads are fine. It would be nice to build bypasses for a couple of towns, to spare them the traffic, that’s it.
West. Polk is “South” on I-4 from the Disney exits.
Davenport. Pedo Central in that part of Florida. The Mouse is complicit with their decision making regarding what gets built on the section of the property adjacent to Davenport such as the Western Way development of hotels, restaurants and essentials shopping that mostly caters to families with high school athletes participating in events at the Mouse’s Wide World of Sports complex (or whatever they call it now).
Holy smorgasboard, Batman!
Of course, a large number Disney employees are Pedo, particularly in management, as Grady Judd has proven with repeated arrests in his sting operations.
Now the word is that longtime Florida-based manager Josh D’Amaro may have the inside track on the CEO job at Disney.
No further comment except to say that if you take your child to a sports event on the Disney property and staying in Western Way, you are part of the problem, not the solution.
After staying in Coronado Springs a few years ago for a conference *sans children*, I’d put that place on the potential trouble list too.
I used to watch “This Old House” and the other home imp programs without fail, and taped them on the VCR to rewatch.
I was disgusted when Morash threw Bob Vila under the bus. But I kept watching. I watched less over the years as the projects got more grand and the historical renovations weren’t very relevant. When the did the ludicrous “net zero” project with the 7-layer infinitely long payback a couple years ago, I quit keeping track of the TOH schedule and caught it only in passing.
This morning I tuned in and they announced an upcoming tribute to Roger Cook, the long-time landscaper. Roger left the program due to health issues some years ago. I checked the website and found that he passed in August 2024.
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh-cast-crew/111435/remembering-roger-cook
Rest in Peace, sir. You taught me a lot.
7-layer roof
Didja get one, or three?
The Turkish and Pakistani ones I have seen were not as nicely finished as the real H&Ks, but perfectly acceptable and worked fine. My G3 clone is also a good’un.
Buddy sent me a photo of the new FN Hi-Power from the fun shop. Looks good, but at 1600 bucks used, it will have to wait.
I have two originals that cost less than 200 apiece, a nice one and one that will be a refinishing project one day, if I ever retire. This past work week was interminable. I went to bed at 9pm yesterday and slept till noon. I was knackered.
Mr Ray, enjoy your cruise. Fair winds and calm seas!
Brad, you asked recently for my opinion about German politics, but I didn’t manage to reply. I have just downloaded the leaked “Gutachten” on the AfD. It’s supposed to be 1000 pages, so it’ll take a while to see if there is anything in it that would really justify kicking-off the process to ban a party supported by around one-fifth of voters…
My gut feeling tells me the bigger parties are running scared and clutching at straws, but I got in trouble with W1 for saying that out loud.
Holy bovine, it’s 84F at 9am. That’s a warm start to the day. I’m up, fed, have started my caffeine intake, and have begun my day. I need to shower and dress so I can head out.
First stop on the list is the estate sales with the fun toys, and the hobby item. Then it’s time to do my pickups. I think I”m going to try to close one of my storage units this weekend. It’s the unit with the least stuff, and the easiest to move. That will get all the items out where I can see them and I can sort and dispose of them from there. I also need to get pix and list stuff at my buddy’s old shop. Time is ticking and that stuff has to move.
These things are all intertwined with other stuff on ‘the list’.
First, I need to write something about D1 for a project involving a friend and a birthday present.
84F. and still overcast.
oy.
n
If it makes you feel better, Morash eventually threw Steve Thomas under the bus in favor of Kevin O’Connor, originally an exec at Fleet Bank whom the production team felt would relate better to the increasingly high dollar homeowners after a unspecified issue with the Fall project owner on Thomas’ last season.
Morash died last year. I wasn’t aware until I was channel surfing in Boston last fall and caught some kind of tribute on the local PBS station.
Geesh, Thomas was fired in 2003. Roku (!) owns the show now.
I haven’t watched since Kevin O’Connor took over.
I did watch the Norm-less Norm Abram tribute.
That retirement situation was weird, but whatever really happened, no one is going to talk about until Abram passes.
Like the rest of Dem institutions, PBS lost its mind after Trump was elected.
If you really want to see something ludicrous, find the Rick Steves’ 2017 special on the rise of fascism in Europe and read between the lines of the script.
A piece of the special was another thing I saw channel surfing in Boston a week after the 2024 election.
I have a torrent of the show in my media backlog.
Windy today. Currently 30mph+. Might hit 50mph in gusts.
Here’s the WU page for my little burg near ‘down town’ (not my house, btw, I am not an IOT kind of guy):
https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KCALANCA145
You will note that WU puts the air temperature, +60F, and the dew point, -40F, on the same plot. Which makes the difference 100F and the plots are therefore uselessly straight lines.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/05/trump-administration-lowers-funding-boom-on-harvard-a-bloodbath/
Another Niemöller moment.
The head ignores a little cancer in the left toe, and before it knows what is going on, the gonads are infected.
For years I’ve seen too many indications from too many schools that the hard sciences have become infected. Maybe they’ll learn from absorbing some collateral damage, and get rid of woke stupidity that compromise the integrity of STEM education.
Not holding my breath.
Too few of the Hahvahd “research” projects are worth doing AT ALL, much less doing with tax dollars. Federally funded research projects need to have clear goals, and the “researchers” need to be penalized for false or shoddy “research”.
We’ve yet to see the real damage to science and math education from the grants which started to flow during the first Obama term.
The students who benefited from that largess are just now getting tenure as faculty members.
They are giving KaKafornia a run for the money.
We were in Wales for the last couple of days. Stunningly beautiful.
Today we drove to our next stop, Guiting Power. Except for London, we’ve stayed in only bed and breakfast’s. We stopped at Diddly Squat Farm Shop on the way. It was a little over 30 minute wait, yet the weather was pleasant. I got a bag of crisps, some apple juice, and a hat for me and my son.
Dinner was at Clarkson’s pub, The Farmer’s Dog. The food was really good and the pub itself was very nice. Very busy, but fast service. There is also an outdoor quick service available.
We will be in the Cotswolds for a three nights, then we drive to Heathrow for our last night at the Hilton there. We will spend the day at Oxford before getting to Heathrow.
“Clarkson’s Farm” returns on Friday with the first four episodes of Season Four.
The other day, Jeremy Clarkson posted this to respond to UK media reports that Kaleb left the show under a cloud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK1b-2emDU4
WiFi at at 33,000 feet. How quaint, and slow. We dropped to 28K for a while because of turbulence.
Flight was delayed departing by almost an hour because the plane was late getting out of Chicago. Yeh, Chicago still sucks. We will arrive 30 minutes late which is not really an issue for us.
It still strikes me how clueless and rude people are that are flying. Cutting in line to get two people ahead. Storing huge carry on in the overhead bins, even going so far as to put someone else’s in another location that was there first. People that cannot understand simple directions, such as, wait until your boarding group. Then taking 5 minutes to arrange things in their seat, overhead, and under seat while blocking others.
Now that Delta has crossed the Rubicon and buying Airbus, are you on an A220 instead of a 737?
737-900. Obviously an older plane by paint missing on the front around the windows. The nose cone looks new. They had to bring in something the pilot called a “jump starter” because some power generating system used for starting was not working. I guess it is not critical to the flight operation.
The expected amenities in 1st class did not materialize. The food was served on a plastic tray, larger than what was used in coach. No headphone provided and my headphone jack on in-flight entertainment is very loose indicating a lot of wear.
Several people from coach have wandered through 1st class to use the facilities. The floor is wet. Hopefully water from the sink. Or maybe some male person has poor aim or a female hovering missed the mark entirely. People can be gross. Some dude one row up and across the aisle has two phones and a laptop. I guess he is a really big man on campus, or thinks he is. Next to him is some creature that I would place money on is a lesbo of the first degree.
This 1st class is a level lower than Premium Select on the overseas flights. On premium select you get noise cancelling headphones, slippers, an amenity bag, blanket and pillow. Of course those flights are much longer. These 1st class seats have the same pitch (legroom) as Premium Select. The 1st class seats seem to be a little wider. It is hard to tell as Premium Select is on larger airplanes.
I have filled out my Canadian declaration online. Security at Atlanta took almost 30 minutes. Five stations in the section we used were available, but only one was staffed. Is this a get even tactic against staff cuts? It did not help that people were clueless presenting their documents, (boarding pass and ID, must be a Real ID or other government issued ID). Then the X-Ray scanners were causing more confusion. Laptops no longer have to be removed from bags. But belts and shoes must be X-Rayed. I got one of those scanning machines because the metal detector did not like my knee.
Flying used to be fun, enjoyable. Now it is just an ordeal. Lady standing next to me, in the aisle, from coach, waiting to use the bathroom in 1st class, bathed in perfume I think. The $2.59 a gallon special from Walmart. With the need for so much perfume the alternative may have been more unpleasant.
Ah well, 2.5 hours and 1058 miles to the destination. I may just take a nap.
When I checked the weather forecast at about 0445 (I don’t get up with the chickens, I get up before them, to open their coop), the rain was supposed to start around 1000, so I figured on doing paying work and taking care of a few things inside. But around 0900 the weather still looked good so I checked the forecast and saw that it the rain was pushed off to 1300, so I brought the new chicks out for them to spend more time outside of their cardboard box* and for The Child to get some fresh air and sun, cleaned the chicks’ box and refreshed their food and water, worked on my van (leaking brake line, the next in sequence from the leaking brake line that I just fixed), moved the chicken run**, and mowed the lawn. And the rain forecast was pushed back a couple more hours, so I put together lunch for The Child and took care of a couple other things, then brought my laptop outside to let the chickens run around some more while doing some paying work. That is, the chickens ran around while I did the paying work. The birds are much too flighty to do computer work.*** The rain started, of course, twelve minutes after I sat down to work.
* They need to be kept warm for the first month or so, starting at 95F and gradually decreasing. I keep them in my office with plenty of wood chip bedding, food and water, and the heat lamp on a thermostat. This way I can monitor them and play with them several times a day to keep them acclimated to having people around.
** I move the coop and the 10×20′ run every week or two, to give the chickens fresh grass and to give the fresh grass the opportunity to be fertilized.
*** A year ago, Red Hen sent an email from my laptop. I was outside, working, and she wanted attention so she jumped up on the arm of my Adirondack chair, then jumped onto the keyboard because I still wasn’t paying her any attention. She typed gibberesh and sent the email and broke one of the lesser-used keys.
re working on the van and other practical matters, here’s something I wrote to be posted elsewhere, after I fixed the first leaking line:
I spent a couple hours fixing a brake line on my car. It was leaking where the line went into a fitting, a not-uncommon problem. The Toyota dealership wanted about $2400 to replace the line, a significant fraction of the value of a 13-year-old minivan. (To be clear, I never considered having them do it. They listed this among half a dozen other issues when I brought the van in for unrelated warranty work.) (Also to be clear, I’d known that there was a leak somewhere because the fluid had to be topped off every now and then but it wasn’t leaking enough for me to be able to track it down.) I already had line, fittings, a bender, a cutter, and a flare tool, so all I needed was a female-female connector and an afternoon when it wasn’t raining.
When I was done and cleaning up, my wife told me that all of her friends were *so impressed* that I can do work like this, as well as fix major household appliances, put up drywall to finish a basement, cut down a tree (without dropping it on anything), and replace a worn-out kitchen faucet. None of their husbands can do any of that.
Of course they can’t. That’s because my wife’s friends would marry only men with a PhD and a professorship or a stable government position. Very few of them have any practical skills at all, no matter how bright they are and no matter that they’re highly-paid, tenured Chemistry professors at a well-regarded college. (One of them has a chainsaw but after seeing him use it, I won’t get within eight feet of him when it’s running. I also wonder how he’s never laid open his thigh.)
I don’t have any deep insights here, just another bit of evidence that women (and people generally) can’t see or won’t accept the consequences of their choices.
Note that I have an MS in engineering, am self-employed, am a published author, and usually make pretty good money (though it varies from “really good” to “barely paying the bills” in any given year). None of that matters. I don’t have a PhD and I don’t have a prestigious job that I can’t be fired from. Eww, how lowly.
I am home. The universe was farting in my face all day so I finally threw in the towel and just relaxed. Missed my pickup for the solar. I’ll get it next week. Probably have another two panels by then.
Hit the Goodwill on the trip home. Found a box of pokemon cards. I’ll be going thru that tonight. Another guy had a zeiss stereoscope in his cart. Of all the weird things to show up at Goodwill outlet. it was missing the oculars, but they can be replaced.
I got some printer ink and some other stuff I needed too. thanks universe.
n
HP keeps selling the ink, but they’re slowly phasing out older inkjet models’ replacement print heads laser printer drums since covid.
I couldn’t get a new print head for our 8620 so we replaced it. Unfortunately, the new model’s latest firmware update made the “Scan to Network Folder” configuration menu disappear so it is currently useless for one of the two functions for which I buy the hydras.
We got a ridiculous deal at NFM on a shareholder event, but the return period is brutally short on computers and related accessories.
Well, today was really slow around here…
Time for me to have a tiny little fire by the water feature, serenaded by horny frogs.
n
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJoTiZ0tHYc
Made it to the Hotel in Canada. Vancouver is a really large city. Opted to take a taxi from the airport rather than the train. A couple of reasons. We were an hour late departing Seattle and sat on the tarmac at the end of the runway, for almost an hour. The train schedules are not that good on late Sunday evening. A big storm has just passed through causing the delay and it is quite cool. I did not want to do the two, or three, large city blocks walk, at night, in a strange city. I was tired enough.
The airport is huge. Lots of foreign people from Asian countries. Generally rude and inconsiderate. But that could almost be said of most travelers on flights today. Saw a lot of planes from foreign countries, China, Korea, Hong Kong, and some planes I did not recognize. We toured the airport upon landing and took what seemed to me to be a circuitous route to the gate.
Immigration has a couple hundred self service kiosks. The passport is scanned and a photo taken. But our machine refused to take my picture. It kept stating to remove my glasses and hat, neither of which I was wearing. Finally it said it took the picture and was printing the receipt. Except it didn’t at the machine. I thought maybe it printed at passport control. I walked on through but got stopped. You have to have the receipt. So the person had us do another machine. That seemed to work. Then passport control complained we used the machine twice. I said we did but the first machine did not print a receipt. They said OK and let us through.
No customs that I saw. That was all done on the customs declaration and I guess Canada does not check any further. We did travel through the Canadian and US lines in immigration.
I booked a hotel room with two queen beds. That is what I got, but each bed is in a separate room. Strange, as are most foreign hotels. It sort of reminds me of European hotels.
The three hour time change means I will be awake at 4:00 AM. I am trying to stay awake until 11:00, which it is now. So good night.
@ray, glad you arrived safely. Good night and have a great trip.
———-
I’m off to shower and bed. I could only see two frogs in the pond, but they are making enough racket for a dozen or more…
n
>>I booked a hotel room with two queen beds. That is what I got, but each bed is in a separate room. Strange, as are most foreign hotels. It sort of reminds me of European hotels.
Stumped I am…is this hotel part of a US / international chain? E.g. Marriott or Hilton?