Category: Random Stuff

81F and 94%RH this morning. With light and occasional sprinkles yesterday, the humidity was miserable.

Later this morning I’m hitting the road for Chi-town. Well, near to it anyway. Nearer than I like.

Two days there, work on stuff for mom, two days home. Posting will probably be light. I will post as I travel as I found that to be helpful on the last trip.

I sure hope the world holds together while I’m away from home. I really don’t want to live out a ‘road movie.’

Talk amongst yourselves…

n

Based on weather, it looks like I’m going N59 thru Texarkana, to 30 thru Little Rock, 40 to memphis, then 55 to 57 the rest of the way home. (That avoids St louis)…Don’t know yet when or where I’ll stop for the night. T storms are sweeping across the upper part of that trip, but I should get to Memphis before they do.

85F at midnight, so I expect it is hot this am. [added – 83F and 93%RH, so not horrible at 7:30am]

I’m trying to sleep in today, I want to be fully rested for my trip. Still have a lot to do to get ready though. [freaking backup noisemakers on big trucks, woke me up. Neighbors are getting a new roof today. They can’t start with the nail guns until 8 but they can get deliveries and shout at each other.]

One thing I’d like to do is get a couple of audio books transferred onto an ipod so I can get them into the truck with me. Long drives are perfect for audio books, and I’ve got Guns Germs and Steel, and ALL of the Chronicles of Narnia waiting for a listen.

I guess I’ll have my wife do it since she has the i- management stuff on her pc. I did find a free way to get stuff onto a pod, but not off, so I guess I’ll just have to do it the apple way.

Good thing I picked up 3 or 4 ipods… [or just take the CDs with]

n

79F and saturated this morning. Hot and humid yesterday, with the sun baking down. Today should be the same. Summer in Houston. Whoda thunkit?

Nothing in the news catches my eye. I didn’t watch, listen to, or even become aware of Trump’s announcement rally until this morning. Not gonna spend any time on it at all. I don’t believe him on the economy, he’s getting soft on 2nd Amendment issues, and his opponents live in a parallel universe and don’t or can’t see the world the way I do. Not much to talk about with someone who looks up and insist the sky is green. They clearly feel the same way. We’ll see what actions reveal about the opposition during the next few months.

Funny what’s not in the news, while some tattooed freak and his girlfriend begging for money online is front page…

What are we being told?
Why now?
What AREN’T we being told.

Teaching my kids to ask those 3 questions about every bit of news they see.

Who’s telling us, and what do they gain are good follow ups.

n

74F and 99%RH.  Finally got cooler after dusk yesterday.  Until then it was plenty hot and humid, if not as much as the day before.  openweathermap has a tiny bit of rain and mid nineties in our forecast.  Yuck.

“Facebook Introduces New “Libra” Digital Currency With Landmark White Paper“

What in the world are people thinking? Bitcoin is bad enough, letting Facebook have the power to create money? Insanity.

Speaking of insanity, the march to war continues with another 1000 headed to the middle east. Iran is ramping up…

People are in the streets in Hong Kong.

No news out of France for a while, wonder if the yellow vests will be in the news this weekend?

Stack it high…

n

I’m sleeping in but I’m sure it’s hot.  We did get a brief shower yesterday so maybe FEMA was right to put us in the Tstorm zone.  Still, the openweathermap prediction was much closer to an accurate portrayal of the day.

I know it’s a “Hallmark Holiday” but I like Fathers Day.  The dads out there get little enough recognition, and I like the pause to do so.  I love being a dad, no matter that it changed my life or my outlook.  I consider it to be my most important job.  I understand my own father better because of it too.  I had the chance to tell him so, and was glad I did.  I miss him terribly.

I’m very grateful for the childhood he and my mom provided for us, and I’m mindful that not everyone had that experience.  A lot of people find themselves estranged from their kids or their parents for one reason or another.  If that’s you, and over time the reasons aren’t really that serious, consider reaching out.  No one knows what the future holds.

nick

(somehow I screwed up the autopost.  It’s 91F and 72%RH.)

80F and 93%RH this morning.  Clear and hot yesterday but a great night.  FEMA has us in the edge of a storm system, while openweathermap.org has us partly cloudy to clear later.  At this point, I’m believing openweathermap.  They have been incredibly accurate for my area.  Thanks for the tip.

The march to war continues in the middle east.

Disease pestilence and famine are following their natural course throughout the world.

What cannot continue WON’T.

We are in the bending and stretching part of the destruction.  When the strain becomes more than the material can withstand, it will fail dramatically, and for most people it will look like it happened ‘all at once.’  And once changed, a deformed material cannot just be put back to its previous state.  It must be recreated, or heated and reshaped- reforged.

Bob wanted us to prepare for that change.  Sarah Hoyt wants us to prepare for the re-forging and re-building stage without talking much about surviving the failure.  I find myself alternating between the different focuses, thinking that prepping for Sarah’s view is extreme, while Bob’s view is my new normal.

Putting food in storage is Bob, putting medical text books in storage is Sarah. The idea of having to save the knowledge seems both hubris and paranoia, even to me.  BUT.  It’s cheap insurance.

Since you can’t get to rebuilding if you don’t make it through the collapse, I’m putting most of my effort into Bob’s plan.

I am occasionally working Sarah’s though too; the most important part of which is my kids.  We have to transmit our values and culture to our kids (and societies kids) to come through on the other side.

I’ll argue that Europe didn’t do this successfully with the disaster of the two world wars.  Their children went progressive and that leads directly to where we are today.

Go beyond getting through whatever is coming and start working on supporting the rebuilding.

nick

75F and 93%RH. Forecast for sunny and clear, high in low 90s, which would be really nice.

I’ve got a mixed bag of tasks moved to the top of the list today, and I’ve got the kids at home.

Headlines were relatively quiet this morning. I guess everyone wants to slide into the weekend.

Not much prepping got done.

The garden is still growing. I need to spray the grapevines again, as something is eating them. The same raised bed that had the beans last year, the one that all the plants slowly bleached out to white and died looks like it is killing the zukes planted there. They are slowly bleaching to white this year too. No idea what’s going on there.

The cukes in the side bed are growing. The Meyer Lemon is heavy with fruit, and I found the one fruit on the orange tree. I guess it didn’t get eaten after all. Peach is finally fully leafed in, no flowers or fruit this year. Apple trees had flowers, and seem to be leafed in. I think I should pinch off any fruit this year but I’ll have to check the book. Small child picks a dozen blueberries every other day and loves them.

I got one tomato, smaller than a tennis ball, and I think that’s it for that plant. There are a couple of tiny Roma’s ready on the other plant, but they are cherry sized. That will probably be the crop for that plant too. It gets too hot for tomatoes is what I’m told.

If I was counting on the garden for food, I’d be hungry. LONG steep learning curve if you aren’t blessed with great conditions. In other news, food is cheap, widely available, and packaged for storage- stock up now!

n

70F and 90%RH. I suppose it doesn’t have to get hot today, but I bet it will….

Inventor camp for the kids is even less inventive than last year. The kids really like it, but they are not inventing, or even really ‘making’. They mostly use junk to decorate other junk. No electronic tear downs at all this year, and no electronic or electro-mechanical work at all.

Some discussion about teaching the last couple of days. My feeling is that for kids from traditional western culture (basically white middle class kids with parents) we know very well what works. We put a man on the moon with slide rules and skull sweat (as the old SF writers would say.) Repetition to learn facts. Algorithms to apply a problem solving method using those facts. For the kids with an interest and aptitude, teach the theory that powers the algorithms. This results in some small but not insignificant fraction of kids who can ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ and develop NEW theory, applications, and new facts.

The issue in modern schools is that liberalism won’t let them believe those traditional methods will work with brown people (see Jaime Escalante’s story for example), and they don’t work without the social and cultural foundation of middle class western civ.

Kids from chaotic cultures need MORE structure in school, not less. But almost all of the ‘new’ methods reject structure (because the liberal hippies rejected it *as adults*). The ‘noble savage’ mythos and the ‘natural man’ mythos feed into the problem too. Since so many of the children of the 60s culture think of themselves as unacknowledged geniuses, and have been told they are full of potential just waiting to be unlocked, they believe that all they have to do is remove “barriers” to learning and the kids will express their inner Einsteins without teachers having to teach them- they just guide them on their ‘learner’s journey’…

This flies in the face of everything we know about humans. Half are below average. Few are geniuses. Chaos breeds chaos. Entropy increases without localized energy expenditure. Most humans will do “just enough” to get by (and this might be an inherited survival trait in a resource constrained world.)

We as a society need to figure out what to do about it. Never mind the 2/3 that don’t speak english, or the ones who are already criminals, or the ferals who are only there because they are forced by law… the kids who can learn and want to learn are the ones we need to find and encourage because those are the ones who build the world.

But I’m late getting the kids up for their camp, perhaps more later.

n

75F and mostly saturated. Yesterday cooled down a bit at the end, when some storm cells blew through. The lower temps and the breeze were much appreciated by the swimmers and their families.

It made for a long day, a short night,, and me sitting here, barely awake and zoning out. The inescapable truth is “I’m not young anymore.” Sucks.

Arrgg. Zoned out again.

Coffee, need coffee.

n

78F and pretty well saturated. Heck of a way to start the day. Yesterday stayed hot, and I stayed inside. It was legitimately over 100F in the shade and was still over 90F at midnight.

Swim meet tonight, so I’ll be busy all day getting ready for that, and most of the evening with the meet. Meatspace. Yeah. Meh. 🙂

I did find time to open a spigot on the rainwater barrel for the side garden yesterday. Didn’t find the time to CLOSE it…. I suppose the cukes and zukes will appreciate the 50 gallons of water…. and I can raise the barrel another half concrete block, as long as it’s empty. Most of my barrels are one one block high foundations, but going a bit higher will make it easier to water the raised beds. As it is, the spigot is a little lower than the beds.

We’ve had some drama in the neighborhood with a car on the street being burglarized early Saturday morning. A backpack full of ID documents was stolen. I spent some time reviewing footage, and discovered more weakness in my camera setup. I made some adjustments and hopefully I’ll be capturing more useful images. The cam with the best view of the car was triggered constantly by motion of the water in my wife’s water feature (fountain.) That meant too much recording, and the internal card had already recycled over the relevant times. The other cam wasn’t capturing movement in the street, and was triggering infrequently without enough pre-roll to get whatever caused the trigger. I also couldn’t D/L the footage from the cam. I ended up updating camera firmware to fix that problem (the cams have the best image recorded internally on SD card.) My iSpy NVR software needs tweeks too. That deserves a whole post as the latest update has been a POS. Long story short, check your preps. In the case of your security cams, review what’s getting recorded, and try to get it off for a police investigation or archiving.

An aside – HPD didn’t care at all that these folks lost all of their travel docs for their whole family. The Constable sent two units to investigate. That’s why we have a contract with the Constable’s office, and why I like them. The Deputy also said several other people had reported thefts from motor vehicles in our neighborhood the same night. Someone will have good video of the perps. In general, with school out for the summer, we are all seeing a seasonal rise in property crimes.

Now to wake the kraken and get them off to Invention Camp, so I can get some work done.

n