Category: personal

Cold and then slightly warmer.   Sure to be damp too.   Ah, Houston as we move into winter….

It never really got warm at the BOL, but the sun heated you right up if you were in it, and sheltered from the wind.  Fishing from the shade – chilly.  Fishing in the sun – shirtsleeves.   (fixed and baited 3 or 4 poles with different styles of lure so I can easily try different strategies… so I had to test them, right?)

I did get a few things done, and one new (or extended) plumbing project started.    It makes sense to do at least one of the hosebibs and convert to pex.  I can get to it from the master bath, which has open walls anyway, so one more won’t make much difference.  I found the stud cavity had a faint mildew/mold smell, so I pulled the insulation and sprayed everything.   There is evidence of previous repairs to that pipe too.   Turns out there was no insulation/caulk/sealant around the hose bib and pipe, so cold air would just come in through the hole in the brick and condense in the wall… or the cold water in the pipe would condense water out of the moist outdoor air… either way, there was too much moisture in that stud cavity.  I’m sure the other hose bibs are similar.  And fwiw, there isn’t a good retrofit pex hose bib, that I’ve found yet anyway.

I had a nice fire Saturday night.   Shortwave had Radio Miami International airing some good music, but the ham bands were very crowded and it was hard to listen to anyone.   The tabletop shortwave radio I’m currently using does a great job on shortwave, but SSB ham listening is a bit harder.   The knob to adjust the beat frequency oscillator is small and the tiniest movements matter A LOT, but once you get it dialed in, you can just move up and down frequency with the push buttons.   You’ll hear a lot of guys though, because the receiver doesn’t have a good narrow filter, and isn’t very discriminating.   I do like two things about it – continuous tuning, and the volume on SSB.   Unlike most smaller shortwave radios, you can start at 2.500 mhz and just spin the dial, all the way to 30.000 mhz.  You don’t have to touch a band switch or skip from band to band, or service to service.  The other thing is that most smaller radios lose half the volume when you tune ham bands upper or lower sideband.   This radio keeps the level the same as when listening to AM.    It’s pretty close to breaking the adage “if you want to listen to shortwave, get a shortwave radio, if you want to listen to hams, get a ham radio.”    After all that, I can’t even give you a model number, but it’s an 80s or 90s Realistic from Radio Shack.   I’ll update later if I can figure it out.

Get a decent (but inexpensive) older shortwave radio and a long piece of wire, and spend some nights spinning the dial.  Like everything, there is a bit of learning curve, and you do need to practice at least a little.   At a minimum it will give you some idea of band conditions and whether it’s worth firing up the ham rig.

Today I’ve got home and auction stuff to do.   Lots of it if the weather stays clear.  So I might be away from the keyboard later in the day.

If you can’t stack, watch some repair videos, or some butchering videos, or organize your downloaded prepper resouces, or sort your stacks.   All that counts as stacking too.  And it’s worth doing.

nick

*gotta love 80s movies, no “Long Duk Dong” in anything today.

Cool-ish.  Damp.  Houston is on the edge of the storm zone in the national forecast, and then in the middle of it later.  I’m not thrilled with the idea, although I acknowledge that we need the rain.

I spent yesterday doing a few things.  Not what I mostly wanted to, but I did move a couple of things to the ‘done’ column.

One was hitting up Costco.   I let the papergoods drop to low levels here at home.  I’ve got more, just not here, so it was well past time to hit the store.

Prices are up, and there are things that are missing.   My favorite microwaveable cheeseburgers were not in the freezer.   There were a couple other things too, but most of my staples were there.   They had reasonable prices on  some beef steaks, but they were higher than they used to be.   They had spiral sliced ham for the first time in one? two? years.  The listed price was more than double what it used to be, but they were doing $10 off each ham.   That brought it down to only about a third more than it was.  I will try to get back and get some more before the promotion ends.

The price for Krusteze Pancake mix has risen from $5.99 to 8.99 for the same size bag.   Oddly, australian lamb and canadian maple syrup have stayed the same price for years with only minor fluctuations.  The selection of rice and the quantity in the store were both reduced, but the price is only up 20-30%.   And lo! they had both M&M candies and M&M Peanut varieties in stock.  They’ve only had one or the other for a long time.

Charmin blue was $25 a bale.  Charmin USED to be $18 on sale.  Bounty paper towel is playing games with sheet size again.   They are now offering “longer” ‘selectasize’.   The “smaller” sheet is almost as big as a normal sheet used to be.  I’ll be back to ripping sheets in half again if this continues.

I was happy to see a lot of my normal items were on sale.   Next month it will be a different set of items, and I’ll stock up on those then.

To put all this food somewhere, I bought another freezer.  This one is an upright and will go to the BOL.  It was an estate buy, and was only $80.  Costco did have one 7cuft chest freezer in stock at $269.  Lowes had a few at a similar price, so they are available again, just not as cheap as they used to be.   Which is the story for a lot of things these days.

I originally titled today’s post “Persistence” and was going to talk about that.   It needs a bit more thought and some more work though.  Maybe later.

Today will be more of the same, some housework, some prep for a weekend at the lake, some messing around.  And in the evening, I’ll go see the hour I missed of the kids’ show.

And I’ll be stacking things.  You should be too.

n