Category: march to war

Probably raining, cool, and wet.   Yesterday’s weather was rain as predicted but much later in the day than thought.   Then a little clearing, before the heavy rain rolled in later.   We got a bunch, which the grass needed.  Today is supposed to be more rain, but we’ll see.   Might be some other part of Houston’s day in the barrel.

Did auction pickups and drove around.   Mostly stuff for the BOL.   Got some good stuff at the bins.

Spent over an hour talking to an old friend on the phone.  It’s been too long since we spoke.  I don’t want it to be so long again.   I also don’t know if I’ll get a chance to talk with my aunt again.   I was going to call her last week, and got distracted.   Now she’s in the hospital, with rehab and then skilled care in her future.   She might not make it home.   We never know what tomorrow will bring so do what you need to when you need to.   Might not be a ‘later’.

Today should be me at the BOL meeting with the cable internet guy, but — they are liars that lie.  I’m glad I decided not to try going up last night.   The company claims they sent email explaining that they don’t actually service my address, despite insisting that they did.   No such email was received.   The appointment was not canceled.    If I had trusted them, I’d be up there cooling my heels while they never showed.

Instead, I’ll do more stuff here.   There’s no shortage of things that need doin’.   Maybe we’ll decorate eggs tonight.  Kids are off school and wife is off work, so I’m the only one working today.  After last year’s scramble to find egg decorating stuff, I stocked up.  No shortage of stuff this year, either for traditional color, or for more modern systems.   Gnomes are likely.  I really like decorating eggs.

I like to keep the old traditions alive.

Stack some culture, some traditions.   That’s what gets remembered.

nick

Cool, 60-ish, and damp.    Weather was crazy yesterday.   The overcast turned to misty drizzle, then the sky opened late morning.   Then it mostly stopped for a couple of hours.   But in the early evening we had a lot of bump and flash, with actual hail for a brief time.  Big hail.   Ping pong ball sized mostly with a few bigger, and some smaller.   Didn’t last long but it got my attention.

Haven’t looked at the truck yet, but I’m sure there are some dings.   Today has light rain in the forecast.

I used the lull in the rain to do my pickups yesterday.   Stuff for the house, and the BOL mostly.   That late start got me home late too.   Did some more sorting, stacking, and moving stuff around.  Cleaned up and did laundry.   The usual domestic bliss.

Broke down and vac sealed the Costco pork ribs.  Three racks to a pack is more than I want to defrost for one meal, so I cut each rack in half, and bagged them two halves in each bag.   That is more like dinner sized…   The rest of the marinaded pork chops got bagged too.

Don’t know if I’ll head to the BOL today or not.   It’s turning into a challenge to get up there to meet the cable/internet guy, and then mostly turn right around and come home.  I have my non-prepping hobby meeting on Saturday morning, and I have good ‘show and tell’ items and don’t want to miss it.  Plus I’ve been volunteered to be a committee chair for our annual meeting, so I should start getting up to speed on that.   There are other family reasons to not be gone Friday as well.    Maybe I can go up during next week.   Change.  Supposedly it does a body good.

Today is the anniversary of one of my wife’s relatives’ unexpected death.   Having married into the family, he knew what I was facing, and was one of the first to make me feel welcome.  I miss him.  I’ve been thinking about old friends lately, and have started picking up the phone.   Don’t wait if you get the feeling you should reach out.   Twice it’s happened that I talked with a friend shortly before his unexpected death.  I feel better for having had the contacts when I did.

I don’t know why the universe works the way it does.   It might just be innate pattern recognition pulling signals from the noise, or inventing signals where there aren’t any.  Or maybe it’s something quantum, or Taoist synchronicity, or God’s voice.   Happens often enough that I’m convinced something real is going on though.

I don’t have a general sense of dread, nor any specific “feeling”, but I do sort of find myself oddly passive, in a sort of ‘learned helplessness’ sense.  Like it’s all kinda pointless to keep working on the problems.   That’s probably just fatigue, and the fact my calendar has far too many absent friends memorialized on the next couple of pages.  There are good anniversaries coming up too, both daughters have birthdays, and I have a wedding anniversary…   and of course I just had my birthday, which may be a contributing factor.  Memento Mori.  Probably worth considering, and then putting aside- like usual.

And like usual, I want you to stack stuff. I’m giving you permission.   Do it.

nick

Cool and damp.  Overcast, with chance of sun.  Which describes yesterday, and maybe today.

Spent the day messing around.   Had to stay close to home to retrieve D2 from her backpacking trip, so that limited what I could do.  It also interrupted any long tasks.   The upshot was… did some small things around the house.

Spent a few hours working on a coffee maker from the goodwill outlet.   It was worth it as it was a very expensive coffee maker.   Even just for parts it’s worth several hundred bucks.   Often times, they just need to be cleaner or need an inexpensive part.   This one needs the pump replaced.   If I was keeping it, I’d do it as the part is only $50.   But I intended to sell it, and between the pump and a couple of missing trays,  getting it back in order would eat  most of the profit.   So I’ll sell it for parts, and list the troubleshooting I’ve done so far.   I’ve got a couple more in storage to do too.

I did some more sorting, some cleaning, and other small tasks, and that finished my day.

Today I will be doing more of the same unless I can get to my storage unit and pull out stuff to drop off with my auctioneer.  That is high on the list but dependent on good weather.

The sense of urgency is coming back, or maybe it’s a sense of being overwhelmed.  The government has gone mad.   Our institutions are pushing crazy stuff that no one wants, outside of a tiny minority, who are VISIBLY far outside the norm.  The inmates are truly running the asylum, and I want out before the free lobotomies get distributed.

I’m stacking, and moving stacks to somewhere safer.   Think hard about doing the same.   Think hard about the reality of living in a world where the woman of the year has testes and a penis, no ovaries or womb, and a whole industry exists to convince kids to let doctors mutilate them…

Crazy years?  Oh yeah.   Stack it deep.

nick

Warm and damp.  Supposed to be clear though.  Was pretty nice yesterday, and the rain held off, which let me get some stuff done.

Spent the early part of the day on the computer, spent the rest of the day on site for my customer.  Got a bunch of my list done over there.   Still have some stuff to do but it’s less time sensitive.

Today is my non-prepping hobby meeting.  Taking D2 to weaponize teh cute and sell some more GS cookies to the old guys there.   Then we’ll go past my buddy’s gun store and see if he would like some this year.   He’s been a great supporter of their troop.

After that?  Getting stuff moved around and ready for a trip up to the BOL for a week… or maybe doing more stuff around the house that needs doing.    Sunday will probably be Rodeo day.   Kids want to go.  I’m ambivalent.  I could use a ‘small engine’ workshop day before heading to the lake.

In other news, a bank in Cali failed.   Lots of people were caught off guard.   Lots of people are going to rethink their own investments, and where they are as a result.   Could this be the beginning of something like the 2008 problems?   Dunno.   Been expecting something to kick it all off.  Might be this.    It will be SOMETHING when it happens.

Best you can do is live your life, but take the steps to cover yourself and your family for the bad things.  It’s called prepping, and it’s not that hard.   You do have to actually DO it, and not just plan to do it or talk about doing it.

Part of it is stacking up the supplies and other things you see yourself needing.   Easy to do.  Worth doing.  Keep stacking.

nick

Warm and damp.  Maybe the rain holds off another day, maybe not but it would be nice if it did.   Yesterday ended up being quite nice, with a bunch of sun, but a bunch of clouds.  Mostly sunny, but a lot of activity in the sky.   No rain on me though.

Didn’t quite get done what I’d hoped.   Not a big surprise to anyone here, I think, at this point….

I did get the AC diagnosed and fixed.   Saved a service call and some money there.   Knowing how stuff works, and then looking for what changed is a valuable skill.  About $150 valuable to me yesterday.  Thank you for the reminders to check the overflow pan and the float valve.   My old system had that disconnected and flooded the bathroom, so it’s not something I’d have thought to check immediately.   Turned out to be a disconnected wire nut on the control line to the condenser unit.  Easily fixed.

I then left the house to mail my ebay sale, and do pickups.   Since we’ll be at the BOL all next week for Spring Break, I had to get all my pickups done, even the one that normally has up to two weeks leeway.   And because one of the sellers is near the Sugar Land Habitat reStore, I hit that for a quick look ’round before heading back to my neighborhood.

With some time left, I went to Costco.  Which was interesting on a number of levels.

Firstly, several of the things I buy all the time were out of stock.   Ham slices for sandwiches were completely AWOL.   Smoked almonds too.   There were a couple other things as well.   I mentioned last night that they had a cheaper cut of beef in the cooler than I’ve seen there before.  And there were some more changes to the store.   The perimeter aisle had been filled with just a few really bulky items.  Armchairs.   Alternating with the boxed armchairs to create a “look” which filled the racks, but didn’t quite mask the fact that they used to be full with a dozen different articles and now had only a few of one.

There were a couple of other places where they expanded one item to cover for a lack of others.   They took about half the computer/phone/apple area away and just left it empty.  No jewelry case right there either.  Took out half an aisle of pallet rack in the same area too.   I’d guess the TV display had fewer choices than I’ve ever seen as well, maybe even one whole aisle less.

The wine selection has changed quite a bit.   I’d say that about 3/4 of the display area was wines less than $12 a bottle, and there were pallets of wine in the $7-9 range too.   They have definitely shifted downmarket for wine in their stocking mix.

There were a few more choices for rice than my last visit, but they are at least 40-50% higher priced than 2 years ago.  That’s a big jump.

Some prices have been stable though.  Lamb from Down Under is about the same.  Maple syrup from Canada might even be a dollar cheaper than it was.   And smoked salmon is close to the same at $1/oz.   Now that spiral sliced ham is back in stock, it’s actually cheaper (counting inflation) than it was a couple of years ago.     Chicken drums were 1$/pound again too.   That might be people slaughtering early to sell before they get bird flu and have to be destroyed, pushing down the value.

All in all, Costco appears to be reducing SKU count (maybe involuntarily), has gaps in supply for long time staples, has moved product mix down market, offering new and more plentiful cheaper choices and seems to be making changes that DON’T point to a return to prosperity and an expanding economy.

Or I could be reading more into it than is there, but I think what I’m seeing is real.

Stack it up, if only to get through temporary supply issues.

nick

Warm and wet, possibility of rain.   We did get a few sprinkles yesterday, nothing that got stuff really wet though.  It was mostly nice, if humid.  More of the same would be ok too.

Did my pickup.  Did a drop off.   Have more to do today.

Might have found some tile at Habitat reStore for the bathroom floors at the BOL.  I will try to go by later today and buy a sample so that my wife can say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’.    And yes, I spelled that the other weigh but changed my mind… it’s possible she reads occasionally…

Short shrift today, as I had sleeping to do last night, and running around to do today.  We are supposed to get rain on Friday, which means I need to do the work at my storage unit today…

Juggling.   And running in place.   And falling behind.  Still, what did JerryP say?  “It’s a great life if you don’t falter…”.

Stack a few things.   Lots of people are finally waking up to the reality of the next years.   There isn’t a lot of slack in the system and it will get sucked up pretty quick.

nick