Still hot. Still humid. Still summer in Houston. And boy was I feeling it yesterday. Officially, IDK if we hit 100F but at my house we did. The official humidity was <40%RH too, but I was dripping. Sweated through my pants just sitting still. Pretty gross to be out in it. Still, it won't last forever and I'll be b!tching about the cold while sitting with my not so tiny fire in just a couple of months. I did get a bunch of stuff done yesterday. Picked up auction items including preps. Trimmed the bushes and trees. (something ate my apple off the tree when it was golf ball sized) Rescued a possum the dog was trying to kill. Sorted some stuff at the shop. Even made W and D2 some ribs for dinner. I'm still on strike but I wasn't going to waste the ribs that had defrosted. Oh, and I fixed the fence at the rent house. EVEN scored a bunch of 12ft long 2x lumber off the curb, and some 1x12 boards too. Saw a little bit of the end of the eclipse. All in all, a pretty good day. So today, I'll see what happens. I'll either continue getting stuff done, or I'll be so sore I have to recover all day. It's about 60/40 in favor of 'too sore'. One of the things I might do is go see my client and try diagnosing some of his recent issues. I think it's just aging gear. Time for some part swapping. Money is a prep too. As is stacking... nick
Fri. Aug. 28, 2026 – we’ll just see what happens
58 Comments and discussion on "Fri. Aug. 28, 2026 – we’ll just see what happens"
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The intelligent man, worthy of being a member of H. sapiens sapiens, would take a lesson from this and stop wearing underwear.
Commando handyman Elvis!
Stayed cloudy all day yesterday and only reached 86F. Smelled like rain but never more than trace drops – enough to make the windshield dirty but never need wipers. Predicted today 96F with decreasing clouds. Missed the eclipse – just the wrong timing with the unseasonal day.
Pool dropped to to 88F so I placed the bubble covers back on. Summer is still here just took a one day break.
Drive through the carwash sometime today.
Up. Snack packed. Still a little behind on hydration. And going back to bed shortly.
Up too late, up too early.
n
Friday. Last day of holidays. Taxi service day. Took W1’s mother to the doctor this morning, and went to the optician for W1.
A NOS Denis Wick No. 1 tuba mouthpiece arrived. I will give it a go in my new-to-me travel tuba later.
Choosing tuba mouthpieces can be a bit of a gamble, as there is no standard for the leadpipe diameter, so any given unit might sit too deep into the pipe, or not deep enough. American style instruments tend to have a smaller end to the tapered shank of the mouthpiece (around .530″ to .537″) while European-style tubas usually need a mouthpiece with a slightly thicker shank diameter (about .520″ to .524″).
My instrument is not well enough known for the correct dimensions to be available online, and the company the logo of which is on the instrument (which is not the manufacturer) didn’t reply to a request for information, so trial and error is the only way. At +/- 100 bucks a shot, that is an expensive game. I hope my guess was inspired!
Replacing all three toilet seats. The old ones started having movement. Then one of the hinges broke on one seat where the hinge attaches to the seat. The new ones fit tight. It is a bit of a struggle getting down to do the easy replacement because of soreness from my recent fall. The new seats have fasteners to the toilet that are done with a wrench, seat spacer in the toilet base opening, then one part breaks off when it is tight. There is a piece left that fits a wrench to undo the seat if needed.
Of course we are taking the time to do a deep clean around the toilet. It is amazing the amount of, ahem, “crud” that gets under the hinges. A good scrubbing of the hands is also in order.
Surprising that a toilet seat can be $45.00. The ones we had before were cheap, plastic hinges, as they were purchased probably 25 years ago when money was really tight. Economizing was a priority. The new ones have chromed metal hinges.
And why the hell that is of interest to anyone is beyond my comprehension. I guess it ranks right up there (down there) with a tuba mouthpiece. 🙂
You should remove all toilet seats. People should work their quadriceps by squatting over the toilet. #FollowMeForMoreFitnessTips
Fear of falling in is real.
Some of the pictures that SpaceX posted show engineers and techs crawling around the starship while it was floating in the water. They seem to be concentrating on places where there might have been some burn through, judging from the iron stains on the heat shield. That hands-on knowledge is something they never could’ve gotten from telemetry.
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I was clouded out for the moonrise eclipse, but I did see a glimpse of about an apparent half moon through the clouds about 10:30 PM when I went to bed.
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Mama barn cat is now waiting to be fed each morning. She gobbles some food down, then brings the kittens out to gorge.
Mr Ray manages to bring the tuba down to his niveau!
First bet on the mouthpiece was a loser – the shank is too small. I will have to order a large-shank mouthpiece and/or an adapter.
I think the thing with loose toilet seat hinge bolts depends on the proportion of standing to sitting wipers in the household. Too many sitters makes the bolts loose. In other words, sitting wipers have a screw loose!
Or go full Asian and just have a hole in the floor. They say squatting to poop is better for your bowels anyway.
Sad, but still true in some places.
Go full Indian and use the street, the back yard, or any room in a building if no one is looking and you don’t see any cameras.
One of my lesser known talents.
The university building I was working in outside of Shanghai had squatties and potties. One euro toilet to about 6 recessed floor basins. I guess they were either teaching their students in order to prepare them for deployment to the West, or were expecting some Western students.
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90F in the shade. I’m moving again. Still need some stretching but feel ok at the moment. Need food and caffeine first.
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D1 got her phone confiscated AGAIN. I had to make a trip to school to get it back the first time. I’d leave it if it didn’t mean not having a phone for the weekend while she has work and other things to drive to .
Our district was pretty reasonable about phones, but the state passed a law that isn’t reasonable so they are enforcing it.
I’ll get the d@mn phone this afternoon but I’m not happy. W doesn’t seem bothered.
Grrrr.
n
I had reason to review some of my camera footage the other day and even with 30fps and at least 2K resolution and one of my new cams, I still had someone drive on the street so fast the camera only caught a blur. They went slow to the end of the cul du sac, then FLEW back up the street.
I’d never have caught any of that if I wasn’t recording all the time and at full frame rate.
Something to think about with cheaper cams.
n
@Denis
From your description it seems the difficulty is measuring the interior diameter of a tapered tube that is a bit over 0.5” ID.
If this is correct then a solution might be to make a casting of the tube using silicone rubber or a microcrystalline wax. You’d want to mark the depth of immersion with a wrap of masking tape, then apply a light coat of dimethicone or paste wax to act as a mold release. The best part will be finding a way to securely support the tuba in a mouthpiece-down position.
Does your caliper read right to left, or am I missing a convention on the measurements? I would assume .530 was thicker than .520.
Site was down for a while. Main site stayed up, so the hosting was fine, just the wordpress “blog” part was down. Didn’t even have access to the wp recovery tool.
Finally got a tech on chat and the very second he said he’d check, it was back up…
Nothing in the server logs according to him.
Just weird.
n
Global warming, of course. There is no mischief that it cannot perpetrate.
A couple of times this morning the site was slow to respond. When I made a post at 07:30 my time. Didn’t seem worth mentioning then but maybe now.
New word for me. Thanks!
Today is one of those weird wp days when the post is a wall-o-text despite looking fine in the editor.
I even just went back and added LF-CR to try increasing the breaks between paragraphs. No luck.
Oh well, it isn’t important. Just a glitch in the matrix.
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Getting some thunder rumbles…
n
Added – doing some other minor site cleanup since I have the files and host open. Nothing you should notice here though.
n
Wife and I are going to a couple of plays in the next couple of months at an almost local small theatre. We are going to see “Heartbreak Hotel” (Elvis Presley Life Story) and “The Addams Family” at the Cumberland County Playhouse in Crossville, TN. It is about an hour drive from my house. We have seen multiple shows, “South Pacific”, “The Music Man”, “Oklahoma”, “The Sound of Music”, “Grease”, “Beauty and the Beast”, and probably a few I don’t remember. The productions are always excellent and really enjoyable. I do enjoy musicals.
Saw the “site down” graphic. Wow!
dcp, you’re welcome!
Gavin, maybe I was confused by the measurements in furlongs and hogsheads.
Dr Williams, thanks…
Great minds, etc. I was thinking of casting the leadpipe receiver with Cerrosafe, just like a gub chamber. Might yet resort to that. Some mouthpiece manufacturers publish exact dimensions for their offerings, and there are also some online comparative dimensions listings available.
First resort will be a phone call to the Wessex Tubas folks, who seem to not answer email. This is the instrument.
To add to my low brass joy today, I just got a notification that local customs are charging me fifty bucks to process the arrival of a different mouthpiece from the US, value about 120 USD. I bet they won’t even have opened the parcel…
Saw the “site down” graphic. Wow!
yeah, so much drama.
I added a message to that page to make it more clear what had blown up, and fixed the email link (although it’s a rarely checked email) but for now I’ll leave the graphic. Took me a while to figure out where it is, and where it’s called from and I don’t have much energy left to find something to swap it to.
n
@denis:
I hope you don’t have any near neighbours, or else you may suffer the fate described by Michael Flanders in “Ill Wind”.
Although he was describing events relating to a French Horn.
G.
We got a registered letter from the IRS today…”You haven’t paid your 2025 Corporate taxes. Pay immediately, or we will seize all your property…”
When I paid the taxes at EFTPS (goobermint tax site), I accidentally marked for “2026”. No take-backs. I called the next week and was told: “Our system automatically corrects mistakes like that; you are good.”
Obviously, not. I called today: “We are experiencing an extremely high call volume on corporate taxes. Please call back the next business day…” Not even a callback queue or a listing of what their business days are.
You can’t hate the IRS enough.
Oh, yeah, “Here is the additional amount you owe for penalties and interest.”
FIFY
Nor their dingleberries: the public employee unions, the not-for-profits 100% funded by government agencies, the consulting companies who get 90% of their income from government agencies, …
Well, your boy Trump did cause the reduction of a large number of IRS employees starting last year (2025) … with this result
I’m jealous, and I live near the 4th largest city in the US. There’s no community theater around me that I know of. I’ve heard there’s a company North of Houston, but I haven’t found them.
It’s an hour’s drive for me to get to the Houston theater district, and I hate hate hate going “inside the loop” for anything. I do it for plays and musicals and concerts, but it’s getting harder and harder to psych myself up for it.
I try to attend high school and college plays in my area , but it really requires sleuthing to find out what they’re doing and when. The last local thing I saw was “Once Upon a Mattress” about 10 minutes from my house. We mostly watch the livestream of the Houston Shakespeare festival plays at home now.
It looks like a decent facility, a full schedule, reasonable prices, and an interesting repertory rotation.
I did Summer Repertory at a local university in 1972, working spotlight, in a 4 show rotation. Celebration, Hotel Paridiso, The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch, and some boring Black play whose name I can’t remember. The last 2 didn’t use spotlight so I was off duty.
I learned a few things about harp and harpists during Celebration. We used blue gels for all the music lights since the orchestra was onstage and the white lights didn’t suit the cool blue atmosphere the lighting director wanted. During rehearsals, I had to go replace the harpist’s blue gel a few times; it kept disappearing.
Turns out, she was taking it off. Harpists need white light to see the color-coded strings. We adapted, once we knew.
I need to look at what is at the Ryman the week we are stuck in Downtown Nashville for another medical conference. I want to see something in the building.
The doctor groups are fixated on Nashville for the time being. Or, at least, the booking people scheduling the conferences were fixated while making arrangements 3-4 years ago.
“with this result” is you pulling a brown number out of your azz. The IRS has always been this inefficient. Ask anybody here, especially business owners.
You are so predictable. Get tRump! Get him!
Data from the IRS Data Book:
Since OldGuy deleted his recent post, I’ll post this:
It’s Official: We Secured a Massive Oil Deal With Venezuela
More winning!
Well, your boy Trump did cause the reduction of a large number of IRS employees
– and supposed to be followed by a reduction in the NEED for more employees at the IRS.
The whole income tax was supposed to be temporary and started small only to grow and grow as the lifelong leaches grew fat on the body politic. There’s a reason tic is in there…
n
and let’s not forget that the IRS allowed itself to be politicized and used as a weapon to suppress conservatives.
But but but the food pyramid! Science!
Yeah, welcome to obviousland where common sense is finally arriving. People from Dr Atkins (widely reviled for his idea that fats were ok and people should reduce carb intake) to me and anyone in between who actually tried a low carb diet have known this for decades.
If your body has a problem with sugar you should reduce or avoid eating sugar.
I blame sports medicine and the sound bite attention spam for the idea that carb loading is something people should do.
And the lying bastages who developed the food pyramid.
n
https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16087359/nasa-astronaut-butcht-wilmore-space-stranded-starliner.html
Lucky to be alive. Has some grit, but compared to the giants he comes off as a little short.
n
Go full
IndianSan Francisco and use the street, the back yard, or any room in a buildingif no one is looking and you don’t see any cameras.BTO 1975:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTPoeeFfIt4
BT 2010:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S13DozOsAu8&list=RDjfE2gSAgIZI&index=27
I don’t like to see squabbling about the number of .gov employees in any branch.
If you play guitar, or shoot handguns, there’s a joke for you:
“How many guitars (or gubs or golf clubs) do you really need?”
“Just one more”
So I say “How many .gov employees do we need to lay off?”
“Just one more”
I have dealt with the IRS and the SSA, and they’re both a PITA. But you know what? They were the same 10 years ago and they’ll be the same in 10 more years. It has less to do with how many there are as it does to who they are and how entitled they are.
I’ll go further. Include teachers, school administrators, HR people, and healthcare CEOs in that number. And all H1Bs. And judges. And Senate parliamentarians.
Late this afternoon, when the clouds came out and the temp dropped to 87F, I decided to drag all the branches from the back to the street for heavy trash. I’d do it, or they’d sit there like last time for a couple of months until the pile was better described as ‘habitat.’.. I was only going to do some of it, but it stayed cool and even occasionally some moisture would fall from the sky and it would be even cooler.
Now I have a huge pile of branches out by the street. But at least I barely broke a sweat doing it.
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D1 is at a concert with a friend. D2 is at a school activity. W1 and I ate warmed up leftover pizza. Kinda quiet around here.
n
Yes. I started tell a story and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. They are what they are.
Fare Gates Can Stop Transit Crime
https://www.city-journal.org/article/transit-crime-fare-gates
This suggests a way to stop even more crime: shunt the gate hoppers into a side tunnel that leads to a large hole in the earth, then push them in.
The FedGov paychecks are significantly higher than 20 years ago.
The VA nurses have unbelievably high living standards and corresponding sense of entitlement.
Strictly enforcing the laws we have would suffice, though I think public caning would certainly help.
Austin. The middle of any crosswalk across Sixth Street.
For ancient Romans, pooping was a group activity
https://www.popsci.com/science/ancient-roman-toilets/
Popular Scince has found a new niche.
Or go full Asian and just have a hole in the floor. They say squatting to poop is better for your bowels anyway.
I used the hole in the floor in a Tokyo train station. I had to buy tissues first. My aim was very good back then, now, I doubt it.
My agent was yelling, we gotta go as the conductor was closing up. I was going…
This is certainly a “no shit, Sherlock” insight. I am surprised some university sociology department isn’t getting extensive public funding for the “groundbreaking research”.
Thanks, Geoff. Ah, yes, the French horn; the îll wind that nobody blows good…
Getting some thunder rumbles…
It was pouring on my son and I from my house at 4pm, north on the Grand Tollway, and north west on 290 in my truck. It took us over an hour to go 20 miles.
One idiot was sitting in a suv on the Grand Tollway with a traffic cone behind him as we came up behind him at 2 mph.
îll wind
I’m jealous, and I live near the 4th largest city in the US. There’s no community theater around me that I know of. I’ve heard there’s a company North of Houston, but I haven’t found them.
There is a community theatre in Richmond. They just started a new play.
https://casttheatrical.com/
Nope, they just finished their 2026 season.
“Microsoft celebrates major progress with Windows 11 on Arm PCs, confirms Windows on Arm is now “a first-class platform for any workload” and that “customer demand is growing””
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-celebrates-major-progress-with-windows-11-on-arm-pcs-confirms-windows-on-arm-is-now-a-first-class-platform-for-any-workload-and-that-customer-demand-is-growing
This is why I am converting my software to C++. The changes are coming.
>>First bet on the mouthpiece was a loser – the shank is too small. I will have to order a large-shank mouthpiece and/or an adapter.
Hmm, must have missed the Kalshi opportunity here…
It stayed cool and I had a nice tiny little fire while waiting to pick up youngest. Oldest got home from her concert while I was doing the pickup. Since it was so nice, I stayed out for a while reading.
And of course,no celestial event tonight so the moon was bright in a clear sky.
Time for shower and bed. I will sleep in tomorrow.
And then find some work to do.
n
Shanking a mouthpiece sounds like a prison thing to do…
n