Hot and humid. Stifling by mid afternoon. It was over 100F yesterday. It probably will be again today. The heat isn’t the issue though, it’s the heat plus the humidity. Body can’t cool itself and that’s when you get into trouble.
I did stuff at home in the morning, then did some pickups, then took the kid to have her retainer replaced. Then it was home, dinner, and domestic bliss.
Today I’ve got about the same, minus the orthodontia. I’ve got pickups to do. And Dr appointments to make, and earthmoving to coordinate. The rental company finally got back to me, they are having trouble sourcing my skid steer and mini excavator. The whole plan might have to shift around. Which is really just par for the course.
I’m trying to be flexible.
And if I can’t be working to improve, I’ll just stack.
nick
@paul: I had a weed whacker with that kind of attachment. My experience: it was utterly useless. It’s basically a saw blade, but so far away from your body that you cannot apply any pressure, so it doesn’t actually saw anything.
What works a lot better for me is the metal attachment with three blades. That takes down anything that’s under about 1/2-inch thick. For thicker stuff, well, you need a real saw.
I have an EgoPower+ that has both the usual week-whacker thread and the three-bladed attachment. Models have changed, but it is similar to this one.
Regardless, if you’re using a metal blade, wear solid boots for protection. You only have two feet, and it’s nice to keep both of them.
People will pay if the product is decent enough. We were in a full theater for “F1” a week after release, and Apple’s take for the flick is $500 million so far.
“F1” isn’t high art, but the film is extremely well made.
Among other choices, someone remembered mixing in the big room at Skywalker Ranch instead of on headphones in their a bedroom.
Kerry Condon’s accent comes off as hot instead of unintelligible, which it easily could have been mixed on headphones.
The film also doesn’t set out to offend half of the audience. Like “Twisters” last year, the boys and girls play nice together without the women being Girl Boss.
Kosinski also made it obvious that he used a body double for Condon at one point, and you see most of the obligatory Jerry Bruckheimer flick sex scene in the trailer.
And eye protection. I have been smacked in the face with small debris from weed whacking and knocking down the crawdad nests in the ditch. When I do yard work with powered devices, I wear eye protection, gloves, and hearing protection. I may ditch the hearing protection when using hand tools, but I still have the gloves and eye protection.
You only have two eyes, and it’s nice to keep both of them.
Of course, deliberately unintelligible can be fun in the hands of the right director.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw
A rip of my *legally purchased* copy of “Hot Fuzz” is on the Kindle Fire in my travel backpack.
It was 65F this morning. Clear skies. No breeze, not a breath. I opened the house. Sliding door in the living room. The upper half of the dining room windows. Convection air flow is real. The t-stat now says 76F, down from 78F.
Pretty nice for the end of July.
You would think the Dumbo’s would learn. They roll out Butto in Tejas. What is his message: tRump is Hitler!
The Redumblicans may shuck history and win the mid-terms with the disastrous Dumbo message. “Rules For Radicals” isn’t working anymore.
“You can walk on a wooden leg. You can hold things with a wooden hand. You can’t see with a wooden eye.”
Not that I particularly want to lose a leg or a hand, mind you.
I had a near-mishap with a chainsaw a few months ago. First, sawdust and chips got into the clutch while I was using it so the chain moved slowly even when the engine was idling. Second, I didn’t notice because I was getting hot and tired (physically tired, though I was also somewhat groggy because I’ve slept very little since the middle of last Summer) and was focusing on what to cut next rather than the saw. Third, whatever I stepped on, when I moved to the next spot, gave way and the chain brushed my leg. Cut through the coveralls and the canvas cargo shorts I was wearing but left just a scratch on my thigh. Pure luck – I’m tough, but not “skin tougher than an oak branch” tough. In theory The Child was there and helping with moving the cuttings and could have at least run for help if I’d laid my leg open. In practice, she was sulking because I had made her get up and do something instead of playing games all day and had wandered off.
Ambitious Dems like Robert Francis are going to the waters in the US Senate race with Paxton challenging Cornyn.. I don’t think anyone has filed to run on that side outside of Colin Zachary.
Filing deadline for Texas primaries is December.
I use a chainsaw a lot, and am always paranoid. But it is hard to be careful when tired…
89F atm. Sunny. Some clouds. Breakfast done been had. Tea in the mug.
Definitely a cooler spring and summer, despite expecting it to be over 100F this afternoon.
——–
Rental place got my machines for me. That’s one worry taken care of.
n
I did almost the same thing in the ‘60’s on the farm. Except the chain was running full speed and actually sliced my upper thigh. Shallow but long cut. I was able to stop the bleeding by wrapping a a strip from a t-shirt I tore into strips. If the cut had been more serious I would have died. I was 5 miles up in the woods, with the tractor and a trailer. There was no help. It might have taken days to find my body as no one knew my exact location.
This chainsaw had a 28” (or maybe 26”) blade, heavy, powerful, no safety stops. I was wearing zero safety gear.
My uncle’s sympathetic response was to chew me out for not getting enough firewood.
One day, 40 or 45 years ago, I was hiking in the mountains and came across an old woman pressing a flannel shirt to an old man’s leg, doing more wailing than anything useful. (Note that I was in my teens, so the “old man” and “old woman” might have been in their mid-30s, heh.) Chainsaw accident, thigh laid open, bleeding pretty good. I had some emergency gear, including tourniquet stuff. We (I) didn’t put it on as a tourniquet but used the long straps to hold down my gauze pads and the flannel shirt and slow the bleeding enough that he’d probably survive a fast drive to the hospital, probably 30 minutes or more. Assuming the woman didn’t drive into something or collapse into a blubbering mess, not a safe bet.
re “happening to be” carrying a tourniquet and stuff, I’ve never understood people who load backpacks with rocks and go for a hike. I understand carrying extra weight to get a better workout but you’d be better off loading in a tarp and rope and food and water and an axe and so on. You might need that stuff, whereas if you get in trouble with a load of rocks, you can … count them? Make a circle around the small fire that you can’t make because you don’t have a lighter?
”We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere, and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.”
The little WD drive for Time Machine backup, 5GB spinning rust, arrived (poorly packaged in a bubble envelope).
After a bad experience years (decades?) ago with the s/w included I usually just re-partition and reformat the whole drive before using, but is the included software any good now?
I really don’t see any need for anti-malware and anti-encryption software, this isn’t facing the Internet and won’t usually be connected anyway.
Truck testing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_EJ3DyiiA
Somewhat informative.
I just found a picture of my dad and his chief sales guy hanging in a hot tub in Kiev in 1987. Lots of memories here in Mom and Dads house.
“Armored Republic Body Armor”
https://www.ar500armor.com/
Expensive and they sell the plates also.
My backup of dad’s six hard drives failed last night because I could not count. Turns out that he has about 6 TB or 7 TB of precious stuff which overflowed the 4 TB drive I used yesterday. I reformatted a 10 TB external and have had that going since 2 am, 4 TB so far.
I have to be back at work tomorrow so I I may be driving home in the dark. Again.
My wife drove home from here in the dark last week. She won’t do that again with her remaining cataract. She has now scheduled to replace the lens in two weeks. August is going to be incredibly busy, even more so than July.
I am having a slow argument with Mom about here coming back here to clean out the house after she moves into the assisted living. She wants to come back here immediately and finish cleaning the house out. No matter if it take six months or 12 months. My guess is about 3 years.
I have been grabbing boxes of 20 year old catalogs and taking them out to the trash. I let mom look but no browsing. You would not believe…
I am fascinated how much precious stuff that you can store in a 4,800 ft2 five bedroom five bathroom house. There are boxes of stuff all over the place that I open and find trash in them.
Last trip up to Dad’s I tossed a lot of 3 ring binders full of various magazine articles about all sorts of crafts/design ideas. All meticulously organized, but I doubt were never looked at a second time. Same for cookbooks (I kept the special recopies, all hand written on index cards).
Mom and Dad’s house is 1600ft2, and it isn’t jam packed. But there is still a lot of stuff. It is definitely daunting.
Be grateful for those; they are quick to deal with, and they were taking up space that could have held something that required a decision.
I am having a problem on my Apple TV where many of the movie icons are blank. Web solutions were worthless. I contacted Apple support. Who knew that Apple support could share the camera on the phone? 22 minutes with support, switching accounts and the icons appear, back to my account, restarting the box, same issue. The problem is on Apple’s servers.
Looks like the TV is out of storage space for silly things like an icon cache.
Nope. The icons show if I switch to my wife’s account and select family sharing. Something is borked on my account. I updated to TVOS 26 to see if that helped. Apple will not do any more until TVOS 26 is officially released.
Cleaning out my father-in-law’s place north of Orlando 25 years ago before he moved to Dallas for his heart transplant, my wife’s family completely filled a 20 yd dumpster from ~ 2600 sq ft of house, attached garage, and shed.
The man had a serious problem.
We stopped helping when we caught him on the phone crying to one of his girlfriends, looking for a sympathy bl*w job.
Everything in his life was something to exploit for sex.
Expensive
– cheap if you need it.
I’ve got their plates and carrier. Sh!te is heavy. Bought it mainly because at some point, it’ll be illegal.
Worn once, and the result is my recommendation that you have some clothes and outerwear a couple of sizes too big.
n
Lands End returns now accepted at all Sears stores!
I saw merchandise in the clearance section at the outlet in Wisconsin with 90s Lands End logo tags, including a parka which looked like it was half buried in mud for a couple of decades before someone dug it out, found the receipt, and sent it in for a refund.
As long as you have the receipt or packing slip, Lands End will still honor the guarantee on anything sold before the cutoff date.
You must have the paper, however.
We had a local artist in our community. She was the best portrait artist I have met in person. She worked only from photos, but had an uncanny ability to capture the essence of a person, even from a poor picture. She was especially good at changing the age of children, and their parents were astonished at her ability to assemble a family portrait from assorted individual photos of the kids taken at various earlier ages. When I asked her how she did that, she talked about adjusting scale, pose, and lighting, seemingly oblivious to her other ability.
She died in assisted living, having abandoned her house because it was unlivable. She had filled her house with art, supplies, and related stuff. Filled, so most rooms were impassible. Rooms filled, starting at the far corner and working back to the door. No way to access anything but the stuff closest to the door. There was a path from the front door to the kitchen, and on to the rear door. The attached garage and its open attic was full. There was stuff under tarps in the driveway. There were five sheds in the back yard… filled, of course.
A few sympathetic volunteers started with her apartment in the rest home. As they suspected, they found cash stuffed in odd places, meaning that everything had to be carefully searched. It amounted to over $40k.
Because of that experience, about a dozen volunteers tackled her house. They contacted the local museums, thrift shops, and clubs. We are a small, close-knot community, with few strangers, so getting trustworthy volunteers was pretty easy.
Many engineers are good at estimating. You will have to take my word for that for the following.
As examples of what we found, there were picture frames. I don’t remember how many, but at least several hundred, possibly approaching a thousand. So many that the art club, galleries, and thrift shops started refusing donations.
There were canvases, paints, brushes, and related stuff. There were finished paintings, several hundred. She also painted beautiful landscapes, street scenes, and whatever else was in her mind. I volunteered to photograph the paintings. It took me a while.
She had subscribed to fine art magazines, and there were stacks of old editions. She had meticulously cut out art from other magazines. She had filed those clippings in plastic shoe boxes, which were neatly organized on shelves. I had to go through all of those to look for cash. While I was doing that, I estimated that there were more than a million clippings.
Estimating. As we worked for about a month, I wondered how much time she had spent just bringing stuff home and putting it in some kind of order, known only to her. She had lived in that house for probably 20 years. I don’t know.
Why? She had lived through WWII in the Black Forest of Germany. Her family could barely eat. As a result, she apparently decided to eat well and rarely part with stuff. It started out neat, clean, and orderly, but eventually fell to neglect. She had become known as someone who would accept almost anything from coworkers. If that stuff was unrelated to painting, it was stored separately. She also bought various supplies to ensure she would not run out. She had probably 10 years’ worth of laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies.
In the end, we had filled three 60 yard roll-off containers, two to above their 8’ high sides. We piled the precious memorabilia almost as lovingly as it had been piled in the house. The contract hauler drove it to the dump, where it joined other precious stuff no longer loved.
I still occasionally look at the photos I took of her art, and marvel at her talent.
It made it to 102F today. Sunny with no breeze. Not many birds, a couple of cardinals flew by. I head a few dove out in the trees. Lots of crickets / cicadas screaming for sex. The a/c first cycled at 5:15 PM.
The hummingbirds suddenly mostly vanished a week ago. There’s still about a dozen males squabbling at the feeder. I saw a few little ones and I guess most of the flock has headed to their Winter home. They did this last year, too. But it happened about August 10th.
I expect the last rooster will pass through from further north mid-October.
Come to think about it, they first showed up mid-March this year and not the usual April 1st.
>>Truck testing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_EJ3DyiiA
Somewhat informative.
“Somewhat”? Hmm… I’ll admit a few snorts of my tea out my nose.
Filed under ‘Time Sync’ for future reference.
Fire is your friend. “I have no idea how the house burned down. Could it have been because of all the garbage in boxes?”
The problem is when the junk masks the treasures. I’ve found boxes of silver dollars in a cubby under a desk in a house you wouldn’t want to kneel down on the floor, and that was after several days of people pulling stuff away in the sale. In one of my storage units all the long gubs were in a cardboard wardrobe box, marked “G”… and every box had a letter on it. My dad used to hide money in the encyclopedia under “M”.
I’ve got a friend from high school that is almost pure back woods hillbilly stock, one generation away from having an outhouse, and his mom had original Picasso pencil sketches hanging on the knotty pine paneled wall.
Almost everyone has at least one treasure, one nice thing.
n
BTW, lotta violence in the last week. Things might be gathering steam. Stay away from obviously bad situations, and be ready for your ‘good’ place to turn bad anytime.
n
headed to bed to read and fall asleep
My Dad had dozens of Sees candy boxes. A third of them had many dollars, totaling over $20,000. My mother had no idea…
I still have not found the deeds, surveys, purchases documents, etc. Mom swears that there was not a safety deposit box. One wonders if he buried all those items.
The church ladies came by Moms today and sang church songs to / with her while I worked on dads pc. It was nice.
The ladies coming by to see Mom is unreal. Both church and community. Bringing food and good cheer. Most are widows or divorced and been friends for 50 to 75 years.
I had a good friend who had 20+ cars and at least two sea containers filled with “treasures.” Some of the treasures were immediately salable, and could have been sold for good money. The rest would have had to be sold to people who valued them for their special interest. Fortunately, he had two sons who wanted most of the stuff, and several friends who were willing to pay the sons cash on the spot for the rest. All was taken care of in short order, without a public sale.
It made me feel good to see nothing wasted, unlike the artist I described earlier. Our close friends still miss the guy. He was a Korea vet, who survived with a story. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of cars and other fun items.
Lynn, good to see church friends are helping your mother. I sympathize with you sorting through your father’s lifelong treasures.
When my father passed, it was overnight at home, so a surprise and no opportunity to prepare. It took me more than a year to go through his stuff, and he had done a major thinning when he moved from Michigan to California. Something that helped me was to “suspense” some things. I put items in boxes, and labeled the boxes with the contents and a discard date. When that date came, I could just discard the whole contents. Could. I still went through some boxes a last time. I also had to destroy paper records, so it wasn’t perfect, but I got the job done efficiently.
Time has a way of telling us that something is finally able to be discarded. I look back, and wish I could have decided immediately, but sometimes it is more effective to just wait a while.