Cool and then warm. Hot even. But overall, cooler. Which is fitting for the times. Late yesterday the light got kinda yellow green and the clouds looked like rain… but it never came.
I did my pickups in the late morning. Then I hit up IKEA for my pantry cabinets. They are heavy. Heavy enough that I was ready to open the box and carry the biggest pieces inside one at a time. I got D1 to help me instead.
I spent the afternoon putting mud on the joints, and assembling one of the two cabinets. The second will have to wait until the wall is repaired, and I don’t have to move the cabinets to get to it. Dinner was a heat and eat meal with rice. Tasty, easy, quick. Not cheap, but cheaper than takeout. Just another tool in the box.
There is a crazy amount of work to do here, and I’m picking at it a little at a time, so of course I want to drive up to the BOL and do stuff there. It’s a lot of work keeping two properties in good shape, especially if you have stacks of stuff everywhere and let things get out of hand. It would be easier to just keep up with it but that ship sailed a long time ago.
So I am working to improve my situation, both at home and at the BOL. Physically and metaphorically.
Do something every chance you get. Try to keep up. Stack.
nick
First!!11
72F and damp. Coffee started. Lunch made. Females stirring.
My day is started.
———
@steveF, you are right, today will really suck, especially around 2pm.
n
Up too early and only 51F outside, chilly.
Beautiful fall weather in the California high desert here.
I did two hours of hands & knees work yesterday.
Ibuprofen did its best and I was able to finish, but that is my lower backs limit. Today I am just very stiff.
No more “fixer uppers” for me, should I get the urge to move.
53ºF in the Vegas area. After complaining for three months of 100ºF+ weather, I get to complain it is too cold.
Wait three months…
It was a little above freezing dawning when I opened up the chickens. The heat light’s thermometer probe was showing 38F inside the coop, and that’s with a bunch of fat, fluffy butts providing some warming.
The older hens are molting and have been spending most of their time inside the coop, presumably for protection from wind and what little extra warmth it gets from sun warming. The coop is filled with feathers, possibly more feathers than poop, an unusual occurrence. The molting might also explain why these two are more skittish than usual. They previously pushed their way to the front when I’m handing out raisins or other treats, even after the youngest birds were full-size, but lately they let the younger birds get everything and they even run away from me when I’m holding out a treat just for them. Well, they’ll live, most likely. I’ll make sure that they get high-protein supplements, like the chili I gave them a few hours ago. Their normal food is already high-protein layer pellets, which should be all they need, but scraps of meat stirred in with barley are just so yummy and they’re staaaaaarving, just ask them.
Question: Do beans give chickens gas? That question is at least as deserving of an NSF grant as a thousand others which do get granted. Millions for “gender-affirming hormone therapy for mice”? Seriously?
The younger birds are not quite six months old and shouldn’t molt this Autumn. They probably will in the Spring and then again next Autumn. They’re laying regularly. I’m averaging just over five eggs per day from six birds lately. The two older hens have stopped laying, which is normal during a molt.
I need to start getting their Winter quarters ready, which mostly means moving all the crap that my wife piled on the patio. Five bicycles, a number of chairs, a footstool, and two carpets.
In other chicken news, if they could avoid pooping in their food dish and the cup of their water tank, I’m sure everyone would appreciate it. I rate this as just barely more likely than me winning the lottery, with the note that I don’t buy lottery tickets.
Outside? On a patio? Going into a NY winter?
Sounds a bit… redneckish. Like a sofa in the front yard or a Chevy on blocks.
And I’m guessing grandma and you don’t ride bikes, and The Child is absent, so that’s about four bikes too many. At best.
We are going to take only 10 or 15 boxes to keep the apartment from being overwhelmed.
– I hear you and grieve with you, but have to point out that this will lead to her accusing people of stealing her stuff. It’s gone, and she doesn’t know why…
Also, they make all kinds of aftermarket cushions for wheelchairs to relieve those issues.
The valves in her lower legs and calves have collapsed. She has to elevate her legs 12+ hours per day to get her legs to flow.
Dont get old.
She has blisters on the other leg now. She is close to amputation or sepsis.
‘Louisiana Man’ Accused of Taking Part in October 7 Massacre
Another report puts his cell phone at the center of murder and depravity on Oct 7.
Need two I-teams for this one:
One to interview al-Muhtadi.
The other to trace the process which allowed this pos into the country and expedited giving him permanent legal residence.
I don’t know about beans giving chickens gas. I do know chickens fart. So do emu.
Hey Lynn, try to not get mad at mom. She can’t help being stubborn and mulish. She’s having a rough time lately and she just lost her husband.
Anyway. My mom would drive me nuts and one day I suddenly realized she can’t help it. So yeah, mom, drink all the beer you want. Yer 86 years old, so whatever. I’ll keep plenty in the fridge. Just don’t drink so fast you can’t make it to the bathroom. But, yeah, get buzzed. Be happy. If you don’t like Miller High Life we can go to the grocery store and you can buy the kind of beer you like.
She made a lot of “harumph” noise but she was actually ok with it. I’d have treated my dad the same way (and that would have been a freaking blast).
Big River sends random stuff. Today I learn that stuff I have reviewed has 99341 views and 633 Hearts.
Shrug. I suppose there’s 633 folks that like my reviews. That’s nice I suppose. More shrug.
TRIUMPH: Team Trump Tramples UN Carbon Tax on Shipping
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2025/10/17/triumph-team-trump-tramples-un-carbon-tax-n3807955
Not just no.
Vote postponed for a year, leaving disappointed UN bureaucrats, empire-builders, and grifters scrambling to delay plans for luxury autos and villas.
And why do I suspect that buried in the fine print are exemptions, rebates, credits and other means to exempt China, who is the yellow running dog string-puller behind the curtain of every one of these climate schemes?
This morning at the HEB was sort of strange. Everyone was old, like darn near to moving to the nursing home. Leaning on their carts like it was a walker.
And the ones the were not old, well, all I got to say is having sex with a 300 pound woman does not count as having a threesome.
Jeebus. All the women were fat. Way fat. Roll in flour fat. So fat ya wonder how they can wash themselves. Could be worse. could be covered with tats and nose rings.
Or stuffed in Spandex like a sausage casing.
I have the young nephew of a good friend staying with me while he sorts out more permanent local accommodation. Nice lad, full of the enthusiasm of youth. (Which is good in my mind.)
In one of our conversations I mentioned the term, subsidiarity; he was not familiar with the term. Is this unusual?
Subsidiarity: I had to look it up but I grok it.
Stroll the aisles at our local HEB getting close to closing time. You’ll see ink and nose rings if you’re into that sort of thing.
620 and O’Connor. Austin but unicorporated Williamson. I believe the Corp # is 373. At least, that’s the pharmacy Corp #.
The store is an old Albertsons.
Grew up calling them hog rings…
Watching a work training video today, the announcer (?) reading from an AI-written script used the word “ideation”, as in “Humans are better at ideation than the AI.”
Is that a word?
The Duck says it is, with references to the usual authoritative sources on English words.
More than just Wikipedia.
You grew up? -scoff- Way to be a conformist, dude.
I knew the political definition. When I checked online to make sure I had it right, I saw the religious definition, which I didn’t know. No surprise there, as I’m a) not religious at all* b) not Christian, and c) in particular, not Catholic.
* With the exception that I’m open-minded on the topic of being a deity myself.
Yah, it’s been pretty rough. Too much to do, not only chickens and billable work, to just take a nap.
But I’ve been thinking. Say, hypothetically, everyone else in the house were to be beaten with a mallet**, would that make it more likely that I’d get an uninterrupted night’s sleep?
** Such as the one about two feet from where I’m standing. I guess it’s technically a hand sledge and I’ve used it as such when doing stonework and in persuading crudded car parts to come apart, but it’s shaped more like a short-handled war hammer. And I can throw it 20′ and hit where I want to with a good smack. It doesn’t come to my hand when called and it doesn’t pull down lightning, though.
Yes, usually prefixed by ‘suicidal’ in most conversations that would actually use it.
I’ve watched “operationalize” go from one reference in an Atlanta school district mission statement to fairly common usage among the buzzword bingo crowd.
n
Huh. A thor spot?
SteveF, an engineer’s hammer?
Mallets are usually wood with a wood handle. Kinda redundantly called a “wooden mallet” which implies non-wood mallets, but I’ve never seen one.
n
Rookies. Thar be needing two warshing mucheens, a drier, and wun broked freezur to qualfi.
Although to be
pedanticwrong, a sledgehammer is for hitting sledges, the same way a jack hammer is for hitting a jack.n
A jack hammer is in fact for hitting a jack.
n
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppa__7ZLAU8
Probably that’s the intent, but those are usually straight or tapered where the ends of mine are slightly flared. As I said, a war hammer.
“Jack” is a nickname for “John”, and a john is someone who hires a prostitute. One can speculate on the shape of hammers specialized for hitting johns, but I suspect that the real issue is that the crazy English language has led us astray again.
England has Torpenhow Hill.
It’s name is Hillhillhillhill.
Note that the Wikipedia entry differs on the etymology, which I could quibble with, and also claims that the hill doesn’t actually exist, which I didn’t know and would need to look into.
But not now. I need to stop screwing around and finish some paying work.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/10/todays-feel-good-story.php
Just need to permanently fire another 175,000 federal government employees during the shutdown to make room.
And since many of them will need to be armed, this is a good time to ferret out the locations of all the small arms and ammo that Obama and Biden were reportedly purchasing for traditionally non-armed federal departments.
Currently in Sparta North Carolina for the night. We were wanting to go to Boone NC for the night so we could travel the Blue Ridge Parkway and see the colors. Nope, not happening in Boone. (RBT lived there). The hotels in Boone were running $400 to $500 a night. I guess seasonal pricing or something. We are staying 30 miles away for about $120 a night.
This place is old, but well kept. It violates my desire to not stay in a place with exterior room entrances but sometimes there is no choice. Even this place has no vacancy. I guess the mountain area is popular this time of year.
Across the highway is the high school. It is a home game, homecoming night. Seems like a nice school from Google Maps as they have newer looking buildings, a running track, and artificial turf. From what I can see the place has good lighting, LED stuff. I almost thought about going to watch the game. But it is quite cool and I don’t have a jacket.
Go back about 10-12 years and “paradigm” was popular as well as “synergy” and “provenance”.
I even had a recruiter in Seattle use all three in a single sentence in a response to my question about whether the job offered the flexibility to work from home one day a week.
(Imagine)
“The CEO believes that ‘working’ from home compromises the provenance of synergy of the creative paradigm.”
I’m not kidding about that sentence. I’m still not sure what that means other than ‘no’.
When I walked out of the job without notice in disgust, the recruiter was shown the door after a week. The CEO followed a month later.
JEP talked about subsidiarity often.
“Leaf season” is a thing.
We had a positive experience on the Tennessee Valley Railroad’s Hiwassee Loop trip out of Delano last month. I’m sure that the leaf viewing is spectacular now but the change was just starting in mid September so the scenery was just impressive.
Recommended. We stayed in Cleveland at the Hampton Inn which gets mixed reviews but we were okay with it.
Tennessee Valley Railroad has a nine hour steam locomotive excursion scheduled for several upcoming dates but I believe that departs from Chattanooga.
The Hiwassee Loop trip uses a 50 year old diesel locomotive, and the departure point is … to say “primitive” would be kind.
I’m not sure I’d recommend the splurge for the dome car. The plexiglass in the Canadian Pacific car where we sat had seen better days, and the passengers swap seats to the other side of the train at the midway point.
Hit Jennifer’s Place for dinner after the Hiwassee Loop if you do that trip. The restaurant looks like a mess on the outside, but the interior was nice and fried chicken amazing.
The Hampton Inn is undergoing a complete rennovation which is nearly done. Just ignore the old mattresses piled on the edge of the parking lot.
Cleveland, TN has a surprising amount of industry, including a large Mars plant. Many of the locals seemed to have a full set of teeth when we stopped for dinner the first night and hit Publix.
They’re he – aa—rrr….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15203205/interstellar-visitors-jet-3I-ATLAS.html
Yeah, a full reveal would be almost all the bad things everyone is prepping for.
n
I’ve got youtube running on the other monitor, and the AI voices are pretty good, but still get phrasing and pronunciation wrong. And they have a ‘style’ for lack of a better term, that once you learn to hear it, you can hear right away.
Humans on the other hand, are just crap at reading out loud. Even “pros” doing audiobooks. I listened to the story of the Headless Horseman today in the truck. The actor mispronounced “gigantic” with the Gs as ‘gig’ sounds. It’s not a tough word. He did it twice. He also had trouble with tying phrases together if there was something in the middle. Granted the language was written for your typical reader in the 1800s, so WAY too high level for modern readers…
We’ve fallen so far…
n
He got “coquette” wrong too.
The Child mentioned that just this evening, complaining about grammar and vocabulary and sentence structure of the modern writing she’s reading for class. I pointed out that she read a lot of classics in school, mostly works that were either written in English in the 1800s to early 1900s or translated into English in the early 1900s. The reading level was probably six grades higher than the norm for contemporary fiction and non-fiction, maybe more.
They are all the same. Politics is the left hand, war is the right. Religion is the gripping hand. Instruments of control.
“Trump announces commutation of George Santos’ sentence in federal fraud case”
https://www.oann.com/newsroom/trump-announces-commutation-of-george-santos-sentence-in-federal-fraud-case/
Huh, that is surprising.
Nothing has bugged me more than the rich nerds, the smartest of the smart, trying to use ’functionality’ where function was all that is needed.
Yeah, buzz words.
Comets often have multiple tails, dust, gas, ionized.
At a guess 3i as an interstellar object has NEVER been near anything warmer than nearly absolute zero and we are seeing stuff sublimate from pockets on the “warm” side and forming a ‘jet’.
I believe the longest known period of a comet is something around a quarter million years, which means that it’s been in our inner solar system many, many, many times, as opposed to an interstellar comet which has never been near any sun. Things will be different.
Don’t forget to lean on the horn while passing Barbara’s place.
“Leaf peeping” is definitely a thing. Some communities have leaned into it, and welcome leaf peepers and their money, some feel like their special thing is being ruined by visitors.
I grew up with maples and fall color, but I was still stunned by a residential street in the Toronto area one fall, where everything was gold and yellow and orange in the most picture postcard way. I was far better than anything I’d seen in a long time. Really achingly beautiful.
————
‘In groups’ always develop their own language. We used to play a game, I think it was called Balderdash, where everyone would secretly make up a definition to an obscure word, while the facilitator player would read the real definition. You could win points by fooling people to believe your fake definition was real, or by picking the real definition. It’s a great game for over-educated friends, and you learn that there are a LOT of words out there to describe ordinary things. Just the number of words that describe various parts of a shoe was crazy.
———
Huh, that is surprising.
– trump is a deal maker, there must be something on the table.
———-
Decided to not head up to the BOL today, and maybe not this weekend. I’m making progress on stuff here that I don’t want to lose momentum on.
So I sat out and read with my tiny little fire, but now it’s time for bed.
n
WRT subsidiarity, The fraternal organizations, and civic clubs used to handle a lot of the stuff that now has been pushed up several levels. I can remember when people said “don’t make a Federal case out of it” and meant it. Now everything is a Federal case. Exactly opposite of the founding fathers’ intent.
Our whole system of government was built on what they COULDN’T do.
n
“Follow-up: State Farm Class Action On Lowball Settlements ”
https://www.carpro.com/blog/follow-up-state-farm-class-action-on-lowball-settlements
“A proposed class of North Carolina drivers has accused State Farm of systematically manipulating vehicle valuation data to shortchange policyholders whose cars are declared total losses, alleging the practice violates the state’s total-loss regulation.”
“The federal lawsuit, filed in Raleigh, claims the insurer used third-party valuation software and hidden “adjustments” to reduce the actual cash value paid to customers whose vehicles were totaled after crashes. The plaintiffs argue that these tactics allowed the company to save millions of dollars at the expense of policyholders entitled to full market value under North Carolina law.”
Yup.