Cold and damp as is appropriate for December. Warming later if we’re lucky. It was in the 40sF when I went to bed, and I expect to start the day there too. Maybe get into the upper 50sF or low 60sF…
It was cold, damp, and windy at the Renfair yesterday. Overcast and dreary too. I am still glad I went. Broke the rules and carried, including my blowout kit and CAT in my bag. I don’t like being in public gatherings without being prepared. Didn’t need anything more than an appetite though.
Today I’ll be back to normal weekly activity, and the kids will too. Three weeks until Christmas and 4 weeks left in the year. Joy. Feels too soon, although a couple of months dragged by.
The new items on the list include getting the truck checked out by my repair shop, and getting some Christmas decor up. It’s time to decorate, and I understand now why some people went early.
Still need to do all the other stuff, and get out of my last storage unit too. Gah. I just fall farther behind.
Could be I’m not trying hard enough. We’ll see.
For now, work with what you’ve got. No one wants to start trouble at Christmas time except random muzzies, keep an eye open for them. And stack.
nick
Still Monday. The pretty sunrise presaged a sunny, but cold, morning.
As usual, the punishment for having had time off last week was lots of work today. Ah well. It pays the bills, I suppose.
Have a good day and a propitious start to December.
The mind wobbles, trying to put those concepts together. Why would one need a refrigerator with a makeup mirror?Does some makeup need to be refrigerated? Is putting on makeup so stressful and time-consuming that refreshments are needed? And why would such a fridge, with mirror and lights, need to be portable?
Is it possible that the concepts are not well matched and this is why a portable makeup fridge ended up remaindered?
None of my wives, girlfriends, daughters, sisters, or long-term house guests did the hours-in-front-of-the-mirror thing. My sisters probably would have, if there had been a lower people:bathroom ratio. One of my nieces, an otherwise sensible young woman even as a teen, did but there was one bathroom for her and both of my sons, so she was not able to indulge during the short time she stayed with us.
Don’t mince words, Mr Pena. Tell us what you really think.
The off season in Central Texas is really short for “faire” types, basically “meteorological” winter which starts today.
At the tolling company, the Sherwood Forest pinhead had so many blackout dates on the group calendar that it was impossible for him to fulfill the 20% travel requirement he was hired under.
I have no clue, but Nick has his non-prepping hobby, so he will surely know.
“Honestly officer, that’s not a beer fridge, it’s for my makeup…”
Celebrity Impersonation and Stalking is more difficult than you would think. The makeup is the smallest part of it. Getting the walk and the mannerisms down is really hard!
A very thin skim of ice on the birdbath this morning, despite the nearby airport reporting higher temps, 33F vs 30F, than yesterday.
—–
Since there was no sign that Amazon got my complaint via the bot last night I called and talked to a nice Indian lady, and she’s going to resend the order and claims they’re going to look into the disappearance.
Good enough for me.
I don’t know if I mentioned it here but my brother ordered an iPhone via Amazon for his GF and the first two disappeared in transit at a fulfillment center, they have a real shrinkage problem apparently.
The best craft show I ever saw was during Christmas around 1975. A small local mall, about 300′ feet long inside, anchored by a Montgomery Wards on one end and a Century dome theater on the other hosted it.
I’ve never seen so many well hand made crafted items before or since, not sci-fi conventions nor ren-fair type events.
It was all bulldozed and replaced by a modern shopping center the last time I drove past. I wonder if any of the old Century domes still exist somewhere?
The last time I was there I took my dad to go see Titanic, which he found entertaining, with the additional amusement from the lights coming up at the end and finding himself surrounded by hordes of sobbing teenage girls.
Makeup? Oddly, I saw a survey the other day: pics a very attractive young woman, with and without makeup. The survey basically asked which one men prefer. At a rough guess, about 50% said “without”, about 30% said “with”, with the rest saying “only for special occasions”. Of course, the respondents were self-selected, but it tends to confirm the hypothesis that women mostly wear makeup for other women, and/or because marketing has convinced them.
Somewhat related: heading toward Christmas, the number of perfume commercials is skyrocketing. I expect the same hypothesis applies.
Per D1, yes makeup needs or somehow benefits, from refrigeration. Although she quit using the little fridge I gave her.
Using a salvaged peltier cooler, a dead countertop wine fridge, and an arduino or razzpi, one should be able to make a very nice humidor on the cheap. There are commercial humidors that are pretty much that combination already. Some add a humidifying device, some only cool, some heat and cool…
n
Still 44F and still raining.
n
“Women want what other women want.” This directly applies to men, abodes, and careers. Expanding the observation to “Women want what will get the approval of other women”, this applies to attire, makeup, and more.
Dang it, comment eaten. I blame global warming.
Per D1, sure, sure.
We are onto that underground pantomime* dame non-prepping “hobby” of yours.
* I have a colleague/friend who is into amateur dramatics, and his theatre group do an annual pantomime for the kids in the run up to Christmas. It’s usually pretty good, and well attended. One year he had a leading role.
I had to attend a meeting in January thereafter with this chap, and it’s customary here at the start to do a “tour de table” in which everyone introduces themselves. He took his turn, saying “I’m Firstname Lastname”. In unison, the whole room replied “Oh no, you’re not!!”. Priceless.
Feed worms to the chickens, not words!
Try not to laugh.
Stolen from Xitter:
Be careful of Black Friday scams!
I ordered my wife expensive jewelry for Christmas and instead I received a new rifle and 6 boxes of ammo.
Looking for any travel wisdom!
I am looking at flying into Atlanta in early summer 2026 for about two weeks, aiming to do a few nights in Nashville and round trip the Appalachians up to Southern Virginia. I would appreciate guidance on any ‘must sees’ or ‘should avoids’.
Thanks
Bring a tally sheet so you can track the number of people you see and the number of missing teeth that you notice.
SteveF, you just had a sweet summer child moment. Paul the Manc is a Mancunian. They are the prototype of the missing-teeth folks.
Don’t.
The only thing worse than the Atlanta airport is the Atlanta highway system.
I read this to my bride, and she replied that she didn’t see a problem with that! Of course, she’s a pretty practical (both pretty AND practical!) lady.
What are your interests? Scenic vistas? Twisty roads? Battlefields? Food? Alcohol? Crowds? Lack of crowds?
The atlanta airport and surrounding freeway system is horrible.
n
Having flown in and out of Atlanta many times, the traffic is manageable. Yes, there is a lot, especially during rush hour. Avoid those hours and the traffic is no worse than any major city.
When traveling north, take I-285N at the airport and travel to I-75 north. Don’t take I-75 through downtown Atlanta. I-285 is longer but not as congested. At the interchange of I-285N and I-75N you want to be in one of the two right lanes. When you get to Chattanooga you want the two right lanes on I-75N to get to I-24N. Both are counterintuitive but are well marked. Once past that interchange get in the two left lanes to get to I-24N. That will be a lot of traffic and slow moving. It is sometimes worth using the GPS to avoid the I-State.
You may want to consider flying into the Nashville airport instead of Atlanta. The flights are not much more expensive. The Atlanta airport is huge. Getting to the rental car agency may take over an hour after your plane lands. Long walks in the concourses, and the tram between concourses, to get to the baggage. Then a shuttle to the rental car counters. That can be avoided if you fly in and out of Nashville.
Consider spending a day or two in Chattanooga. The aquarium is really well done and worth visiting. Also, Rock City is an interesting place to visit. A combo ticket for Ruby Falls and Rock City is worth considering.
On the way to Nashville stop at Lynchburg to visit the Jack Daniels brewery. It is a nice tasting tour that shows the distillery and the products samples at the end of the tour are interesting, and a couple are tasteful. Visit the Jack Daniel souvenir store in town square in Lynchburg.
In Nashville visiting the Opryland Hotel is interesting. It is close to Opry Mills shopping mall. A stay at the hotel is costly. Find somewhere else to stay. The downtown music center has a lot of music bars and venues.
Name a large city where that statement is not true. Seattle is worse than Atlanta. Los Angeles sucks along with San Francisco. Detroit, yikes. Washington DC, same.
Houston? all new clean sheet construction…
Atlanta airport beats the alternatives, and your choices for international travel are limited.
Just make sure to avoid getting off the freeway in the immediate vicinity of the airport.
We just did an Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville trip, and I would recommend keeping Chattanooga on the list of possible places to see.
Tampa. Dallas-Fort Worth.
Portland, but who wants to go there.
Houston? all new clean sheet construction…
– I agree, the area around the IAH airport is easy to get to and navigate. And the freeways in general are not gridlocked, although there are places that always slow to a crawl at the same time every day.
Hobby airport is in the ghetto, surrounded by surface streets. It’s not too far off the freeways though and is generally easy to get to.
Sky Harbor in Phoenix is easy to get to, although I haven’t been there in years. Vegas too.
n
Hmm, tried ripping various discs today as I was sitting here, and none even read. I think the drive finally died.
Couple thousand CDs and over 800 DVDs is probably past the useful life of an ordinary DVD drive.
If I can clear a path to it, I’ll pull the pc and swap the drive for a bluray. I might put a writer in the other bay, we’ll have to see what’s in the stacks.
n
Shades of “Sneakers”…
Aw, hell naw.
If it’s fake, it’s like laughing at an old Jerry Lewis movie.
If it’s not fake, it’s like laughing at one of the poor bastards that Jerry modeled his characters on.
Nah, you’re mixed up with Brasilia.
@Paul
On our last trip to Tennessee, this was the touristy thing we did in Chattanooga.
https://www.tvrail.com/
If you decide to take one of their trips, pay attention to the departure point. We took one of the trains out of Delano and stayed overnight in Cleveland, TN.
The Nashville thing to see is The Grand Ole Opry, even if you are not a fan of country music.
Austin opened a new airport within the last 20 years, but they built the facility, the Barbara Jordan Terminal, much too small so now the area will be a construction zone for the next 20 years as the city builds an abbreviated version of Atlanta, building identical copies of the original building out the back with an underground train connecting the terminals.
I have a new entry for my hate list. Nest thermostats. I tried to turn on the three heaters at my mother’s house today. None of the thermostats would let me turn them on to heating or heating – cooling mode.
I vaguely remember my father programming the Nest Thermostats with his tablet that is now dead. Or his phone that I am locked out of.
I hate computers. Why do people insist on using them for mundane needs ?
The answer depends on how evil you think the manufacturers are.
reset the nest thermostat; https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9247296?hl=en-GB
My client has three nest thermostats. They each have a couple of IP addresses. I don’t know why.
I’ve got a very basic digital t stat here at the house, it stays locked on “program hold” at 73F. I have to manually switch from cooling to heating.
At the BOL, we have a simple internet connected T stat that we leave in “program hold” at whatever temp we choose. The internet connection lets us monitor temps in the house, and turn the AC on before we get there to cool the house down.
No one needs the adaptive cr@p they used to sell people on the idea of a tattletale and control exposed to others for something as core and basic as comfort in their home.
n
The smart thermostats are about eventually controlling the temperature in everyone’s home so the AI servers have plenty of electricity to run the sex robots.
IPv6? That’s not unusual.
IPv6 didn’t support NAT when I left the Death Star, but some three letter agencies were working on it.
No, it’s like they are both a server and a client.
n
Like they have their own WAP.
n
Nest is Google. Pretty evil.
Nexia is worse. I caught our Trane ComfortLink Nexia thermostat port scanning my home network when I connected the device to our WiFi.
I had the installer out the next day to wipe the thermostat’s memory.
When we replaced our upstairs unit, I had to tell that installer three times not to install the Nexia thermostat within a five hour period.
I think the installer get an incentive from Oncor to push the smart meters here in Texas.
One for connecting to the WiFi router and thus to the internet, one for connection from tablet or phone?
Pure speculation here, based on some IoT devices I know about.
For now, work with what you’ve got. No one wants to start trouble at Christmas time except random muzzies, keep an eye open for them. And stack.
Fort Bend County is now between 5% and 10% muzzies (SWAG). There are mosques all over the place here. The latest trick is that they buy an old bar and convert it to a mosque.
This is one reason why I want to leave FBC and move to central or northwest Texas.
Oh, there are plenty in Central Texas. Austin has several large mosques, and I pass a Harmony Public School every time I go to the Post Office.
The VA district based in Temple is dominated by muslim Colonist women, and, from what my wife has heard, Dallas is even worse.
Chickens are doing fine. They have a windbreak, their coop with plastic panels, which gives them a relatively wind-free area to sit in.
I bought two cooked chickens last night from HEB and stripped them. We will eat from them over the next week.
Try not to laugh.
It would be nice if X had closed captioning.
My beard is now almost as long as that guy’s beard. But my head is shaved.
If I designed a district heating Hansa furnace based on converting a data center using some upper-end redneck engineering, would that be a patentable prep?
@Lynn
Do they have legs when you get them home? Asking for a friend with a greasy chin.
My chickens would look at you in horror, except that they’d be too busy trying to mooch pieces. Cannibalistic little wretches.
Yesterday after I gather eggs, I needed to put them down to take care of something. The hens walked right over and started pecking at them. The birds leave the eggs alone if they’re left where they were laid but if they’re moved and especially if I set them on the ground, they’re food, or at least worth investigating as food. Knuckleheads.
Something I posted on Gab after Thanksgiving, in response to a post about getting away from “enrichment” by going rural:
One of my sisters and her family live in about as rural New York as it’s possible to get — 60 acres of cropland and forest, miles to the nearest city, the works.
She told me at Thanksgiving dinner that a mohammedan compound is being created near them. Armed guards by the road. They described what seems to be automatic fire, though neither of them has any relevant experience.
The mohammedans are attempting to take over the county board. My sister doesn’t know about the school board, as she doesn’t have school-age children.
Moving to a rural, almost entire White community won’t save you. Active measures are going to be needed.
How would you transcribe the sounds she was making?
More importantly, how would you retain the hilarious effect of the sounds she was making?
I’m going to bed early tonight. This time I mean it. Fell asleep in the chair, and I don’t need a stiff neck on top of any other issues.
n
Looking for any travel wisdom!
I am looking at flying into Atlanta in early summer 2026 for about two weeks, aiming to do a few nights in Nashville and round trip the Appalachians up to Southern Virginia. I would appreciate guidance on any ‘must sees’ or ‘should avoids’.
Thanks
“Homicide’s Hidden Stats”
https://areaocho.com/homicides-hidden-stats/
“The eleven counties in the US with the highest number of homicides are (in order from most to least):”
“Those eleven counties had a total of 4,758 of the 21,570 homicides in the US during the year 2020. Those eleven cities saw 22% of all US homicides that year, despite the fact that they contain only 41.7 million people, or about 12% of the US population. Those eleven cities have a homicide rate of 11.4 per 100,000. The only thing that shocked me about this was that St. Louis and New Orleans weren’t in this list.”
Atlanta is not on the Big 11 list to my surprise. Neither is Nashville, not to my surprise. So, good place to wander around.
Do they have legs when you get them home? Asking for a friend with a greasy chin.
I ate all four wings. My dog ate most of the leg meat. She wanted more.
Houston? all new clean sheet construction…
Huh, say what ???? Houston traffic is a freaking nightmare. The pro limo drivers know the ways to go though.
Just try to not get shot in Houston. Stay away from parties on Friday and Saturday nights, the drive bys are common.
Something I posted on Gab after Thanksgiving, in response to a post about getting away from “enrichment” by going rural:
One of my sisters and her family live in about as rural New York as it’s possible to get — 60 acres of cropland and forest, miles to the nearest city, the works.
She told me at Thanksgiving dinner that a mohammedan compound is being created near them. Armed guards by the road. They described what seems to be automatic fire, though neither of them has any relevant experience.
The mohammedans are attempting to take over the county board. My sister doesn’t know about the school board, as she doesn’t have school-age children.
Moving to a rural, almost entire White community won’t save you. Active measures are going to be needed.
Yes, welcome to my world. I thought living in rural Fort Bend County, that we would be clear of Houston’s ills. I was wrong.
Abilene is a lot less crowded though. For now.
Where did all of these people come from ? How is Fort Bend County 40% (SWAG) Asian now ? How many of them are legal ?
Tuesday. Dark. Woke too early. Meh.
Lots to do today. Meetings at work, an office to unpack and install (must bring some pliers and other tools), plus a lunch appointment, plus gub stuff in the evening.
Wishing you all a good day!
How would you transcribe the sounds she was making?
More importantly, how would you retain the hilarious effect of the sounds she was making?
Don’t know, I cannot hear them.
reset the nest thermostat; https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9247296?hl=en-GB
Ah, operator error. I assumed that the Nest Thermostats were touch screens. They are not.
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9247301?sjid=5926423236481476419-NC#zippy=%2Cswitch-to-heat-cool-heat-cool-or-off-mode
Luckily it is going to get warmer in Port Lavaca for a while. I love 230 mile round trips to just reset thermostats.
“A German Court May Have Just Shattered One of the Biden Era’s Biggest Lies”
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/12/01/a-german-court-may-have-just-shattered-one-of-the-biden-eras-biggest-lies/
“This week, a German court issued an arrest warrant for Ukrainian Serhii Kuznietsov, which may finally confirm what was long suspected: that Ukraine was responsible for the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the waters near Denmark and Sweden.”
Cool, I did not think that Ukraine had the ability.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Nord Stream pipelines; there was a long and detailed explanation in The Atlantic magazine a few years back detailing the who and what. The water there isn’t especially deep, and with enough TNT ….
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/12/nord-stream-pipeline-attack-theories-suspects-investigation/676320/
Even X has its limits. Though I wonder if I really crossed them. Post about a 9-year-old girl who was strangled and raped. I suggested that the death penalty is appropriate for such cases. “After all, we put down rabid dogs.” The comment was reported and shadow-banned. At least X is honest about it, and sent me an email stating that this was the case.
Did it really cross a line? What else do you do with such criminals? You should not ever let them on the streets again. Paying to imprison them for life is hugely expensive, and…why? If there is truly zero doubt about guilt, just…eliminate the problem.
I honestly believed the US had done it, given the US had explicitly threatened to do so. Of course, the Ukraine also had a motive. Hard to see it as criminal, though, given that they are at war with Russia.