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Category: lakehouse

Wed. Jul. 27, 2022 – no love for the classics?

Humid, and hot.   Still and again.   Yesterday did get into the 100s, at least in the sun.   And we had sun here, all day, in between some threatening clouds, but we never did get rain.

I did my chauffeur duties.  And did some auction stuff.   Did some cleaning in my office too.   So much more to do…

Didn’t win the solar panels.   There will be others at some point, and these went for about double what I wanted to pay without seeing them in person.  There weren’t a lot of bidders, but it only takes two who want the lot to run up the price.

I spent some time on the phone and emailing to see if there was a way to move my septic install along, and I got lucky.   I might have found a company to do the foundation and retaining walls, and their technology doesn’t require a bunch of heavy machinery or digging.   That helps me sequence the work and maybe get the septic in first.  I’ll also probably be responsible for more of the site prep and demo but that is the breaks.  I wasn’t finding anyone else to do it anyway.

Speaking of infrastructure.  I do need to get at least a UPS up there for the freezers, and it would be nice to move a battery and the charge controller for the portable solar panels too.  I’ve got to get some networking and a cam or two running too, even without an internet connection.   I’ll only work on that if I hit roadblocks with the more important work though.

For today though, I’ve got kid duties, some auction pickups, and more work to do on my site plan and model of the house and lot.  I might have cleaned all of my office that will be cleaned this time… there just isn’t enough time.

So stack up some labor saving devices, and some skillz to use them.   And make the most of your time.

nick

 

(and no one commented that I worked TWO classic poems into my post?  Uncouth.)

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Tues. Jul. 26, 2022 – Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!

Humid and hot, with a small chance of rain.   So someone will be getting rain.   Yesterday, when I was coming home from my pickup down south, there was a huge storm cell west of me.   I outran it north and then cut across west, and only got a bit of very light drizzle.  A bunch of people got a good soaking though.  Nothing at my house at all.

I’ve been watering the grass and the raised beds.  Little to show for it in the garden but the grass is growing.

Did my errands, have more to do today.   Got some stuff for the house, for my non-prepping hobby, and for the BOL. Today will be a lot like yesterday, maybe with a bit less driving.   I did score another of the 7cuft chest freezers.   I’ll have to find a spot for it.  It may sit empty until I catch some meat on sale, or I may give it to a buddy.  $75, new in box, but probably scratch and dent under the foam.

I’m bidding on some solar panels.  They look like 200w panels.  Used of course, but 20 in a lot.  4 lots, but I only want one.   They were installed for some sort of traffic or camera control, and come with the big aluminum roadside enclosure boxes.  Last time I got one panel, and the box brought enough when I scrapped it to pay for the panel.   No batteries, inverters, or charge controllers though.  Wish me luck.  I’d love 4000w of solar at the BOL or here.

Infrastructure.   It’s critical, and is usually only noticed in its absence.  Plan to provide for your own needs.  And plan to reduce those needs to something that you can provide.

To smooth everything out, you should have some stuff stacked.  Lots of stuff 🙂

n

 

 

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Sat. Jul. 23, 2022 – in the park, I think it was the ….

Hot eventually, but much cooler up here than in Houston.   Only 77F when I went to bed, and everything covered with dew.  Still gonna get hot later, I’m pretty sure.

Funny old weather liars, said no rain yesterday and yet I got soaked near Hobby Airport in the afternoon yesterday.   Nothing at home though.   P!ssing down in South Houston.   I made my pickup anyway, mostly building supplies.  Plumbing and electrical odds and ends with some romex and spools of wire.  And three spools of pex.  Now if I could just find some buckets of Sharkbite(tm) fittings and some liquidtight conduit….

I should have bid more for the sharkbite fittings in an auction last month.

Of course last month they were a “would be nice to have” and this month they are a “jeez those things are expensive but I have to fix this leak” thing.   If you think you might need it, buy it when you see it.

And I think that I’ve put off pulling the toilets about as long as I can, so that is on the list for today.  Find out what’s wrong with the flanges, solve it if possible, and see what’s needed to get a sink back in the hall bath.   I might have to venture into town later.

I don’t like doing plumbing.   I much prefer carpentry and electrical.  But ‘needs must’ and all that…

Stacking up the skillz…  hot skillz.

 

nick

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Fri. Jul. 22, 2022 – finally Friday… or what the heck did I do this whole week?

Hot and humid again, without any rain in sight.  Like yesterday.  Like all week in fact.  So I’m gonna bug out.  Should be cooler at the lake.

That is the plan.  Do my pickups.  Do my shopping for stuff to do at the BOL.   Then head up there.

I’ll be there with D1 while mom and D2 finish out the Girl Scout sailing thing.   I will probably be buying a sail boat in the near future.   Just a tiny little Sunfish style boat, but with two daughters that can sail, and a place on a lake, it seems like a no brainer.  Especially when one  of my auction guys has one for sale cheap (couple hundred bucks cheap).  Networking.  Meatspace.  Secondary market.  It’s not what you know it’s who you know…. all that and more, and it’s the future in a collapsing economy.   Get some practice.

Didn’t get much done.  It’s really disruptive to my whole day to have to be home at 3, and stay home for the rest of the afternoon.  I spent far too much time learning about the scanner I picked up yesterday.   It’s a Uniden, similar to the Home Patrol, but not as intuitive.    Later I got to the grocery store.   LOTS of gaps in the shelves.  Checker said it was warehouse and staff issues.   I got the last heavy cream, the last of the soda I like, and there were several things I didn’t find.   I didn’t buy any meat, as it was all too nasty or too expensive.   Chicken legs finally broke the resistance at 99c/ pound.  They were on “super special, limit two” at $1.09 / pound and thighs were $1.39.   Oddly, the house brand frozen turkey was still the same price it’s been for years, without any fluctuation.   There weren’t many items on sale either.

Pharmacy was busier than I’ve ever seen it.  Don’t know why, but there was a line, and more techs working than I’ve seen in a while.

I don’t make the news, I just report it.

And I encourage you to stack it up.  Pork is still cheap.  Chicken, even with the price increases is cheap.   Beef might be cheap for a short period coming up.   Rice, flour, sugar, salt, peanut oil.  Don’t forget yeast.  Canned veg, some canned fruit, and a big bottle of multivitamin…

Stacks, lots of them.

nick

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Mon. Jul. 18, 2022 – home again, home again…. blah blah

I’ve got too many posts with the same title…

And to many days that start with HOT HOT HOT,  and yet it IS hot.  And humid.  It was hot at the lake too, hitting 99F a few feet from the water, and much higher further away.   Sunny too.

I did a bunch of small stuff this weekend, mainly because for one reason or another it is stuff I can safely do, or have all the stuff present to do.   Bigger more important things languish… but I can make the place look better and function a little better.

SO ..

I installed the new freezers, and moved stuff out of the kitchen to one of them.  I installed a handrail on the steps I built for the dock.  One of our neighbors who we would like to see more often will be much more comfortable with a solid handrail.  I back filled a bit of a hole at the edge of the same steps.   With the lake down, this would be an excellent time to backfill all of my bulkhead to fill the gaps where water gets UNDER the concrete wall.  Too bad I’m not ready and don’t have the time.  I could start with less but to do the whole thing would take about a dozen cubic yards of material.  I suppose there will be a period of low water next year too.

I did normal visit things, cutting the grass, cleaning up debris, making the place look loved and lived in.

And I tried out my new crawdad traps.   Overnighted two traps, baited with dog food and freshwater mussel… and one had a whole mussel that died before I could cook it.   That trap had 7 or 8 small ‘bait fish’ in it, including one inside the mussel shell.  All the bait was gone.   The other trap in deeper water (3 ft vs 1 ft) had bait left, and nothing inside.  Too small a sample size to draw any conclusions.   The bait fish would have been handy for a morning session trying to catch bigger fish.

Collected and cooked some mussels.   Not horrible, but not New Zealand Green Lips in garlic butter and white wine either.   I should try some smaller ones next time, and cook them in something besides water.  The coons harvested and ate at least one other large mussel, I’m finding one big shell a night on the steps of the dock.

Turns out one of the trees in the back is a peach tree.   Local wildlife has left ONE peach intact so far, but it’s still small and green.  I did find a well gnawed peach pit on the patio, so there was at least one other fruit.  It’s too small a tree to have much fruit anyway, but a nice discovery.

I’m trying to figure out what we actually have in terms of plantings and beds.   The previous owner’s wife was an avid flower gardener, and there are several neglected beds.   One is full of bulbs and flowered earlier.   One is wildflower and rose bushes- the butterflies love that one, but I’m going to take at least half for a ‘salad’ and herb garden.  There is a rock garden with what looks like blue agave… there were several flowering trees, and now I found the peach.   I have done a bunch of weeding and cleaning because “hey, free landscaping!  hey, free trees!  hey, free flowers!”

Speaking of the garden, I’m abandoning my  veg garden at the lake for the rest of the year.  I’ll try again in fall.   I pulled up 4ft of each row, didn’t find a single veg, so it looks like nothing sprouted.  I took the ‘deer guards’ off and cut the watering time to 5 minutes daily.  I can still experiment with how fast the grass grows back, and how little water I can put on the plot.   The most useful thing to do might be to cover the whole thing with black plastic, and let the summer sun  bake the heII out of it.   That is supposed to kill  a lot of the stuff in the soil, including the nutgrass.  Don’t know if there is enough time to try it this year, before the fall garden needs to start.

At home the cukes or zukes are still growing vines.   The grape vine is climbing the trellis.   The collards are thriving.   Peas and beans died.  So I stack cans of veg.

Plenty of the same stuff to do this week as last, with the added complication of picking up D1 from a local ‘leadership’ class at 3pm every day.   Kinda cuts short my workday.  Oh well.  If I can’t drive all over town, I can play chess with D2.

Stack some memories as well as canned goods, they will be there to get you through when the going gets tough.

 

nick

 

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Fri. Jul. 15, 2022 – another week gone, 4 weeks ’til school starts…

Hot, but less so, humid like a fat guy’s butt crack.  Yeah, I went there.   Apparently the local pharma-purveyors are hiding crack in their cracks… so that’s where my brain went.  According to the scanner anyway.

We did get some rain yesterday.  Cats and dogs for a short while at home, but not 2 miles away.  Only a sprinkle there.  Some places didn’t get any.  I’m hoping for sunny and drier today.

I’ve got a bunch of pickups to do, if I do them. And a shopping list of stuff to take to the lake.  I’ve got a pile of stuff already, and most of my pickups are headed that way too.   PLUS I’ve got to leave room for a passenger, as I’m taking D1 with me.  D2 is getting her chance to learn small boat sailing this weekend and mom is going with her.  Since I’ll have a child with me, I will have to make a better menu plan than usual.

Sadly my latest referral for a guy to do the foundation work decided that the project was too big for him.   That puts me back where  I was.   I am going to start pulling stuff off the schedule and doing it myself or finding someone locally to do it.    Just looking at conduit for the new underground electrical service, and materials will be $750 or more, plus the trencher.   The electrician and mounting stuff will be more than that…  If I can move things along at this point, I think I have to.

Oy.

Meanwhile, I can run pex to everywhere it’s needed.  Through the attic.   In July.  ‘Cuz that’s fun.

Oy.

I’ll be stacking up a whole lotta knowledge and experience on this one.

Figure out what you’ll need and start stacking it.

nick

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Tues. Jul. 12, 2022 – I like fixing things.

Hot and humid.   Record hot? Maybe.  Maybe not.   Pretty dang hot though.   Yesterday was well into the 100s, even in the shade.

I got part way through cutting the grass in the back yard, ran out of battery.  That is the downside to electrics, not being able to refuel and continue with minimal interruption.   You either need to wait, or exchange the battery.   On the other hand, if I’d paid attention, I’d have pulled the battery and put it on the charger at the end of the last use.  It’s more than enough to do the back and the front  most weeks.

While waiting for the battery to charge or some sense to break into my skull, I fixed a couple of the gas string trimmers I’ve had sitting around.   I usually use the electric one, but that is broken at the moment, and I wanted to finally take a good look at some that I’d gotten cheap, but just put to the side for later.   Well, at 100F, later decided to come.   Air, spark, fuel.   Which aren’t you getting?  Solve that and the thing will run.   On the small gas yard tool engines, it is usually the air filter is so clogged the thing can’t get air, or the gas lines have fallen off or rotted in the tank, or the primer bulb has failed.   I had one with a bad primer bulb AND rotted  hoses.  I had one with rotted hoses. And I have one with a bad spark plug wire.   I replaced hoses and filters, and swapped stuff around until I had two that ran.  Popped on the trimmer head, and… it was fubar’d.    So I didn’t get the yard trimmed.   Oh well, maybe today.  I did feel pretty good about getting two of them running.  Even if the attachment was broken.

I took a break from working in the heat and did pickups.

Picked up a bunch of building materials for the BOL and the attic here.   Chatted with the auctioneer, mentioned I was looking to make some crawdad traps, and he said he had one on the shelf I could have.  Sweet!  Now I’ve got a real one to use as a model for my DIY effort, and I think I’ll buy a couple more as they are only ~$10 with free delivery.   I’ll let you know if I successfully sample nature’s bounty…

Scored another chest freezer (actually two) in last night’s auction.  Half off isn’t bad.  New in box too.  They are only 7 cu ft, but that is a good size for the BOL, to run on battery backup or solar, and I’m unlikely to lose both at the same time, so I wouldn’t lose all my frozen food to a mechanical issue, like I might with one big freezer.

Still didn’t get to lowes or Costco.   Today for sure.  I need PEX and fittings and a variety of hardware for the BOL, and I need to do my normal Costco buys.  I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time getting to the store.

In the wider world, political violence seems to be increasing.  Our own situation is getting more precarious.   Groups are now soliciting the murder of Supreme Court justices.  No other way to look at the offer of “bounties” for real time location info on them.  They’ll claim it was just to harass them and ‘protest’ but it will get someone killed.  They’ve already tried once.

Food insecurity and price inflation is on everyone’s lips this week.   There are people saying it will get better later this year, and better after that.   But there are plenty saying it will be longer than that and far worse.   I’m stacking food. But then you all know that by now.

I’m looking at supply chain for construction and maintenance stuff and I’m stacking that too.

I am even buying new underwear.   I bought a lot of it at the same time, and so I have a lot of it that is all wearing out at the same time too.  Time to do something about that.    That is one risk with one-time, or bulk purchases.   The stuff will either expire, or wear out at about the same time, and you have a bigger whack to replace it.   Better to spread purchases out in time and replace them on a staggered schedule too.   Real Life ™ doesn’t always work out that way though, and better to have it than not.

Clothing is not something that has been hard to get, since our current run of prosperity started decades ago.   But specific items might be out of stock or unavailable in the future.  If it’s been a while since you bought basics, you might want to evaluate the condition of your drawers. 😉

And if called for, stack it up.

nick

 

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Sun. Jul. 10, 2022 – well, it certainly was hot

And will probably be hot again today.   101F in the shade meant “no outdoor work for me”.   If it takes a while to get there today, I can maybe get the grass cut before the universe tries to boil my brains in my skull….

Did my pickups yesterday.   Learned that a new auction company is not trustworthy.  It only cost me about $20 and an hour of my life, so it was a cheap lesson.   The items were not broken in the pictures, nor were they described as broken.  Never the less, they were broken.  Liars. They seemed ashamed but still insisted I take the item.  I’ll fix it by using parts from another, but it’s a project, a small project, and I don’t need any more projects.

On the other hand, one of the guys at my hobby meeting gave me the name of another foundation repair guy who might be able to help me at the BOL.   I’ll call him on Monday and try to get something set up.  I also watched a bunch of videos last night, and now I want to be sure an engineer is involved in the hill retaining design.   Past experiences and guidance from solution providers can probably provide a workable solution, but having an engineer look at it can’t hurt.   We are looking for a 50 year or more solution to the problem.  And I’ve got a better idea of the failure modes of retaining walls than I had.

Two steps forward, one and a half steps back.

It’s always something.

So, now I’m stacking up knowledge.  As my own infrastructure provider, I guess I better.

Stack something, lots of it.

nick

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Thur. Jul. 7, 2022 – getting my fangs cleaned today…

Hot and humid.  No surprises there.   It did rain in various parts of town yesterday.   I got hit with quick showers in a couple of different places while I was out and about.  I’m thinking more of the same today.

I really didn’t get as much done as I needed to yesterday.  I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more info on catching crawdads/crayfish/mudbugs and learned a lot.   I’ll make a couple of cheap traps and see if I get anything next time I head up to the lake.  I also watched a few foraging videos that were focused on Texas.  I did get some pickups done, and got a couple of things in auctions yesterday evening, that I’ll pick up today or tomorrow.

Besides auction stuff, I’ve got an appointment with the dentist today, along with the rest of the family.   Gotta get the fangs polished… and keep the tradition alive.  I’m hoping I don’t have any issues, but I’ve had some sensitive teeth lately.  Might have some imaging done this visit to be sure there isn’t a problem lurking.

The propane conversion kit for the Honda gennie is supposed to arrive today too.   Along with getting that installed,  I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do here, including my non-prepping hobby meeting on Saturday, so I probably won’t go to the BOL this weekend.   Making that decision early helps me plan out stuff I won’t get done later.  🙂

I also didn’t get my Costco run in yet, although I did get gas.  Costco 87 octane was $4.09.   All the other stations were advertising $4.29, .39, and even .49.   And while that is a nice discount from last week, I’d still prefer $2/gal.

Speaking of Costco and groceries, I took a little time this last trip to the BOL and stopped at the HEB grocery nearest to the house.   It was small, kinda unkempt, but had about the same selection as my neighborhood store, albeit fewer of  everything.  Prices were the same too, as far as I could tell.   What was different, they had a lot more hispanic food on the “normal” shelves (ie, not just in the “ethnic” aisle) and more #10 cans on the shelves.   There were even a few things my store doesn’t carry that looked interesting.    The meat cooler was horrible though.  Very limited choices, and very low quality meat.  There is a specialist butcher shop in town, and one on the way, so there are other places to get meat, but it’s looking like a trend, at least at HEB.  Smaller cuts, and lower quality, with drastically reduced selection.

We are definitely well into the “if you see it, you need to buy it” phase of the decline.   Buy it and stack it up.  You may not see it again for a while.

nick

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Wed. Jul. 6, 2022 – home and busy

Hot and humid in Houston, as it should be.   Keeps the weak-willed away.  And boils your brains in your skull…  hats, very important down here.   It was 109F in the sun at my home weather station when I got back at about 530pm.  It cooled down pretty quickly after that, but it was still pretty dang hot at 83F when I went to bed.  And today should be similar.

Started the day at the lake, wrapped up the stuff I had in process, and headed home.  Wife and kids were still laying flooring when I left.   They didn’t quite get the bedroom done.    Progress is being made, just not on the big structural things.

So today I’ll be catching up.  I’ve got a bunch of pickups I put off when I had the koof.  I’ve got home stuff that needs doin’.   And I’ve got business stuff to arrange too.  Seems like twice as much work is waiting after a vacation than before.

Oh well.  If I wasn’t already busy, I’d invent some more stuff to do.

And I need a Costco run.  Several of my staple items are on sale this period, and I’m running lower than I’d like, so I need to restock.

I’ll probably get another bag of rice, or flour, or salt…  and some canned goods.   Gotta stack.

Kids like to eat, and so do I.   So I’m stacking food.   I need to look at tires and oil changes too, and a brake job.  And I have a dentist appointment coming up.   Gotta get me into the body shop as well as the vehicles…

Use the time wisely.  Or foolishly.  But use it.  Don’t just let it slip by.   (stack stuff)

n

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