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Fri. May 9, 2025 – can I get a witness?

By on May 9th, 2025 in culture, decline and fall, march to war

Raining. We had a nice day yesterday, until dusk, then it started to rain. And it rained for a few hours, with some thunder and lightning too. But, we had two beautiful, unexpected days. If it rains today too, then that’s ok.

I did some work on my hobby website shopping cart in the morning, then did my big loop of pickups in the early afternoon. Stopped in a couple of thrift stores and got some good stuff. That’s in yesterday’s comments. Then it was kid taxi stuff until late.

Today I am doing some more pickups and signing the transfer docs for the wife’s boat in the morning, and some moving stuff and cleaning up in the afternoon. The later depending on rain or no rain. Can’t do much moving stuff in the pickup if it’s pouring down rain.

Later in the day I will load my truck for my hobby quarterly mini-sale. It’ll be nice to finally get back to a meeting, between the March hamfest and cancellations, I haven’t been to a meeting since the first week of February. I know that I value them by the way I miss going regularly. Plus, meatspace baby. And I get to demo my shopping cart for the Board. But that will be Saturday.

Today, I might also get to Costco to add to the stacks. I didn’t yesterday despite good intentions. This is not really the time to get complacent. The elephants are dancing. The world is changing. There will be disruption, but it will all be better if you have food and basic needs covered.

Stack.
nick

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Thur. May 8, 2025 – can I get an amen?

By on May 8th, 2025 in culture, decline and fall, march to war

Well, maybe we’ll get another beautiful day. Yesterday started wet and dreary but ended clear and sunny. From about noon on, it was a fantastic day. Not much evidence of the storm that went through, even on the southeast side of town. Ditches were full, and there were puddles in unusual spots, but the pavement was dry. We were forecast for rain and t-storms today, but who knows?

I spent the morning working on my hobby site shopping cart, mainly interfacing with my fellow enthusiasts on the board trying to get stuff like the actual paypal account and the email addy that gets all the confirmation emails and two factor challenges. Failed. Gave it up as a waste of time and got busy with my day.

Did a huge loop for pickups. Got another solar inverter, some small things for the BOL, some stuff for the next hamfest, and then I did my kid taxi duties… and did more taxi duties… Finally got out of my boots around 9:15pm. Caught up on auctions, and decided on an early bedtime.

Because when the world is burning, use it to light a candle. Or something. Nothing I can do about India and Pakistan. Nor the middle east. Nor even Washington state. I can up my preps a bit, and I will, because conflict disrupts supply chains. I’m doing a costco run today. Haven’t added any buckets lately, so I think I will buy some big bags o stuff. Salt seems like a good choice. I’ve got a bucket, and some pantry containers, but I don’t have enough to use as a preservative. or cleaner. It’s cheap and easy to store. It doesn’t expire. And it’s absolutely vital for life. Yes, I think I’ll add another bucket…

There is always more to stack. Fill your gaps.

nick

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Wed. May 7, 2025 – did WWIII just kick off?

By on May 7th, 2025 in computing, culture, decline and fall, march to war

Wet and cool in Houston today. Supposed to have gotten a bunch of rain overnight, but I haven’t confirmed that yet. It was misty drizzle most of yesterday until evening. Then it came down a bit harder. Nothing like some other parts of the state got though.

I was busy most of the day. Did a couple of pickups, then did my kid taxi stuff. Worked on my hobby website all evening. Didn’t even make or eat dinner until late, as I was immersed in what should have been a pretty straight forward thing to do. I am trying to add a simple store to my hobby site, with about 6 line items for sale. It looks oh so easy in the demos, but little tiny secret gotchas ate hours. And then some of it is fractal. I can’t test the function without a ‘sandbox’ to play in for payments. WP and paypal provide such a thing, but you have to sign up, get some fake credentials, and then install them in the right places. All while working in an offline copy of your site, so you don’t bork your deployed live site, or charge yourself real money while testing.

Every step of the process has a little bit of a learning curve, something that takes a couple of tries, or takes looking up. And when there is a very subtle bug like curly quotes break the module when it’s expecting straight quotes, but in a way that partly works, you can spend even more time looking for the issue or a workaround. In other words, this web mess is a pain in the fundament. 7 or 8 hours to add one page of copy and paste info, and one page of ‘store’ with 6 items for sale. Not my cuppa. No sir.

And at some point I’ll have to either do it all again, or figure out how to migrate the new pages to the live site. I’m sure that will happen without any glitches…

It is a new skill to keep the mind active. Learning is always useful. So I keep telling myself.

Stacking up the new skills. I should be stacking potassium tablets… oh, right, already did. I should find them and make sure the kids have the correct dose. F me, who had “potential nuclear exchange” on the card for 2025?

Stack it high, and stack it deep. Anything can happen, and it usually does.

nick

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Tues. May 6, 2025 – rainy and wet, changes my todo list

By on May 6th, 2025 in culture, decline and fall

Raining and wet, cool, and probably nasty out. It was like that when I went to bed, and the forecast was for worse today. Yesterday was overcast most of the day, with occasional light misty drizzle. Until dinner time, then the rain started in earnest. It would be nice if it wasn’t raining all day.

I did a bunch of running around yesterday. I bored everyone to death with it in comments, so I won’t repeat it. Just that I was busy all day, did a bunch of driving, and wouldn’t have liked to do it in an EV.

Today I have a couple of must do pickups in the afternoon. Then I have the kid taxi stuff, only more, because she’s doing extra stuff for a dance recital, as well as her normal Tuesday stuff. Some of the pickup is bulk medical, some hobby stuff. For some reason there has been a fair amount of medical stuff in the auctions lately. I’m a buyer when it’s cheap.

You can improvise many things, but it’s easy enough to have the right stuff in the stacks.

Make your stacks as comprehensive as you can. No one is coming to save you, you are on your own.

nick

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Mon. May 5, 2025 – back to the grind

By on May 5th, 2025 in culture, decline and fall

National forecast says we might get rain and even thunderstorms for the next couple of days. I’m going with “cool and cloudy” for today at least. Yesterday was so freaking nice I worked outside all afternoon. Got the sunburn on my neck to prove it.

I did get some things done. I bounced around a bit, knowing I needed to be in and out making dinner happen, but I did get things done. Nothing major. But some things have been neglected for a long time. It’s gonna take a while to unscrew this pooch.

So today I’ll be trying to continue that, while also doing some other stuff, like heading to my client’s house to pull some ATT fiber gear. I am going to lose my momentum, whatever I had going, but it does pay cash money. I think I’ve just got too many things going, and I’m not focusing on stuff like I should.

Dunno what to do really, but I’m going to have to make some sort of change to get it done.

Meanwhile, some stuff will continue. Stacking. Learning. Building. Those are good.

nick

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Sun. May 4, 2025 – Star Wars Day…

By on May 4th, 2025 in culture, decline and fall

Clear and nice today. It was simply gorgeous yesterday. What a nice surprise. We got several inches of rain Friday night, but it was gone and done before I got up. Several inches of water in the back of the truck proved that we got a lot of rain. Hopefully today is nice too. National forecast says we’re in the clear.

Did my pickup in the late morning. Took a bit to get started. Still sore. Had a bit of free time so I hit the estate auction from Friday, and I found more stuff to buy. Good sale, lots of good things.

Got home and did a few domestic bliss things. Then I fell asleep in the chair. Wife and D2 got home, D2 went to bed and crashed. So the evening ended up being sleepy time and not work time.

I didn’t get as much done as I wanted, but I’m happy enough.

Today I’ll be doing a bit more home stuff. I’ve got indoor and outdoor stuff piled up.

Stacks of stuff. Still, there are things to get and stack. Figure out which are which.

nick

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Sat. May 3, 2025 – sorta busy Saturday…

By on May 3rd, 2025 in culture, decline and fall

Probably raining when I get up. Definitely still wet. Also probably a bit cool. That’s ok with me. It finally did rain yesterday after dinner time. And then it kept raining, and raining, with short pauses. Dunno what we eventually got, but the bayous will be full today.

Hit an estate sale, and spent $150. Got a LOT of good stuff. Camping cookware, water filter, ham radio stuff, art supplies, pipes, a little of everything. Guy was in my nearby neighborhood. Wish we’d have met. Then I did a couple of pickups. The main was was for two more of the 400 watt panels. I also got stuff from several auctions that had piled up at one of the guys. Then it was a flurry of kid taxi until D1 went to camp and I took D2 to her hobby meeting.

Today I have two pickups and a bunch of stuff to do. Mainly household stuff from the list, but also some other “pop up” stuff. And I need to get a bunch of stuff put away.

But first, a little bit of sleeping in.

Then stacking.

nick

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Fri. May 2, 2025 – 5022025 – lots to do today…

By on May 2nd, 2025 in culture, decline and fall, march to war

I’m expecting low 70sF and overcast. The national map shows weather in our part of Texas, rain and thunderstorms. We’re still a bit on the south side of the system, so we might not get it if stuff blows up from the Gulf. I’ve got stuff to do no matter what happens with the weather.

Yesterday was a nice day. Weather was good, sunny and hot. Some overcast. Maybe some rain some where in Houston, but not for me. Overcast in the evening.

I ended up rescheduling my client visit to next week. He went out of town, so wouldn’t be sending back the gear today anyway. That opened my schedule to watch the kid get “recognized” at school, and later to make some noise and smoke. That lightened my mood. Picked up the kid from school, did the kid taxi routine, and made dinner.

Fit in some other domestic bliss too.

Today I’ll be unloading the scrap I put in the back of the truck, then hitting a couple of estate sales, while doing my pickups. I’ll be making a big loop on the north side of Greater Houston. The main item is the solar panels, but the other things will go on stacks too, or in my “to be sold” pile. I’m buying less, but there are still things popping up that I can use or need.

Keep your eyes open. With the China trade war going on, the supply chains will be disrupted again. It may be the secondary economy is the only place to buy what you need.

Or shop your stacks…

nick

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Thur. May 1, 2025 – drawing a blank here…

By on May 1st, 2025 in culture, decline and fall, solar power

73F and maybe some rain… or not. It’s the Gulf and my little micro climate of a neighborhood, after all. Yesterday there were pockets of light rain all over town, and some pockets of heavier rain too. Your experience of the weather was entirely dependent on your zip code. Just one more example of how ridiculous the idea of recording temperatures and drawing specific conclusions that apply globally from them really is. If you can’t even say it rained in Houston, or it didn’t, how can you claim your temperature numbers really mean anything?

I did a lot of running around Wed. One pickup in Sugar Land led to a visit to the reStore, and a visit to another auctioneer about maybe taking some consignments… then a stop at Goodwill before my pickup in Tomball for my non-prepping hobby. Home to move one kid from her school to the other kid’s school, pickup the other kid, drop her and a friend off, chiropractor visit, get some groceries, make some dinner, and then get both kids home and fed……. and I did some domestic bliss in between. Yeah, I’m exhausted from sitting in the truck most of the day.

Today I have to visit my client. ATT finally figured out that he’s not coming back to them, and they want their very expensive networking gear back. Part of me says they were happy to send out crews to install it, they should be happy to send out crews to remove it, but I know that’s not how it works. Maybe I’ll get some time to myself later in the day, before doing the kid taxi thing again, because it’s Thursday.

At least I don’t have any pickups scheduled today. I’ll be picking up another two solar panels tomorrow though. 10c/ watt is too good to pass up. I got this pair for the same price as the last pair. Now I’ve got 6 big panels, and I better get the project moving forward. It might even be overkill for where I think I might use them. The best part is that the auctioneer still has about 14 panels so I might be getting even more. Or the consignor might find someplace better to sell them…

I’ve adding to the solar stacks, building up toward a project… think about what you need to add to your stacks and what your next project should be.

nick

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Wed. April 30, 2025 – we’re like, old or something…

By on April 30th, 2025 in culture, decline and fall

Damp, overcast, cool to start, then maybe rain later according to the weather liars on the radio. We went all day yesterday without rain, but it looked like it was minutes away all day. Maybe today will be the same. Maybe. At least it’s not crazy hot.

Slept most of the morning. I fell asleep in the chair. Work up to do a pickup and then start all the kid things. I realized, I have been trying to live on 4 hours of sleep a night, for years, and it doesn’t work anymore. My body is telling me to sleep more. I will work on getting to bed earlier over the course of the next couple of weeks. Somehow my bedtime moved to almost 2am most nights, and later some. With a 6am wakeup alarm to get the kids out the door, I’m wiped out for the rest of the day.

Today I’ve got a big pickup in Sugar Land. My opening bid of $5 won me two pallets of spray sanitizer. It’s 75% ethanol. I use a lot of alcohol based cleaners, and I wanted it as a backup fuel for cooking. IDK if it will substitute for isopropanol when cleaning and curing resin prints on the 3D printer, but I’m going to try it, now that I’ve got alcohol to burn. Literally. I know it will burn in my boat stove and in a penny or hobo stove too. I didn’t really expect to win it, let alone both pallets. They had other pallets too, but they were a brand with glycerin in the sanitizer. I don’t want the gel. The stuff I got should be water thin to go through the sprayer.

After that pickup, I’ve got others. And all my home stuff on the list too. At least with this pickup, I’m adding to the stacks a bit.

Something I always like to do- stacking…

nick

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