08:11 – It was a bit breezy here last night. I’m guessing the winds were gusting close to 60 MPH (100 KPH). One of our our large rolling bins blew over and rolled across the driveway at the back of the house. We have lots of fallen branches in the yard. Power failed only briefly here mid-evening, but as of 11 last night there were about 6,000 homes in Winston-Salem without power. Right now, it’s 14F (-10C) with a stiff breeze.
Forecasts are now calling for a couple inches (5 cm) of snow starting tomorrow afternoon and into tomorrow night, with the dreaded “wintry mix” on Tuesday. Barbara returns to work tomorrow. She’ll drive the Trooper, the back end of which carries an extensive emergency kit, including lots of warm clothing and blankets. It’s difficult to imagine a situation in which she’d be stranded on the way to or from work, but then the thousands of people who ended up stranded for days on Atlanta freeways last winter probably thought the same thing.
RBT, FYI: 23 Household Items That Can Double As (Effective) Camping Gear
Good basic tips there; I’ve seen most of them before and use several all the time here.
Temp right now is 2 below and dropping to 13 below and the wind has started to howl across the lake ice; we have an official wind chill advisory/warning in effect as that factuh will hit 40-50 below tonight.
We are relying solely on the woodstove, a good test.
Looks good. I should say so, as I posted something similar here not so long ago (two posts – main one, and a follow-up, IIRC).
Yes! The search tool here is absolutely useless, but Google works well.
http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2014/09/09/tuesday-9-september-2014/#comment-51882
http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2014/09/09/tuesday-9-september-2014/#comment-51904
Temp right now is 2 below and dropping to 13 below and the wind has started to howl across the lake ice; we have an official wind chill advisory/warning in effect as that factuh will hit 40-50 below tonight. Temp right now is 2 below and dropping to 13 below and the wind has started to howl across the lake ice; we have an official wind chill advisory/warning in effect as that factuh will hit 40-50 below tonight.
It was 64 degrees and sunny in (not so rainy) Portland today. I went sailing on the Columbia. The wind picked up just as we were heading back to the dock. It was a great day to be on the water.
Rick in Portland
“Why We Should All Become Preppers (part one of two)”
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/why-we-should-all-become-preppers/
and “Why We Should All Become Preppers (part two of two)”
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/preppers-part/
I cannot even imagine having to walk home from Norman, OK to the Land of Sugar when I drive there on Saturday. 500 miles is a long way to walk. Plus, one gets a choice of walking through Fort Worth or Dallas. Both would be bad, very bad. Going around them would require another 100 miles or so plus elevated terrain on the western side.
On the other hand, the 10 year old Expy is running great with new plugs and heater doors (it has a heater door for each side with constant flow heaters) that now work without the horrendous banging noises. I’m hoping to get another 50K miles out it (151K miles so far) over the next 2 to 3 years before replacement. The new Expy has the Ford biturbo v6 engine with six speed automatic and supposedly gets 16 / 22 mpg. Mine was rated 12 / 17 mpg but, it is paid for! The new one will be $45K or so which covers a lot of maintenance before replacement.
And the ten year old Expy is way, way, way better than our 1997 Honda Civic coupe car that we keep for a backup and I drove last week. Of course, the wife says that I shift gears like a spastic monkey nowadays. Yes, that is a quote.
Is there much of a gap between Dallas and Fort Worth or are the cities now effectively merged?
Is there much of a gap between Dallas and Fort Worth or are the cities now effectively merged?
The only gap is the DFW airport. There was a solid band of small towns connecting the two cities as far back as the 70s when I lived in the Dallas area. Got out of there as soon as the wife finished her residency.
The San Antonio to Austin freeway is nearly completely built up with businesses and housing. There is an outlet mall that is the size of a small town along the interstate.
Used to live in Dallas, and I still have family in the area. What I find funny is how different Dallas and Fort Worth are. Dallas is business and money, almost indistinguishable from any successful big city in the US. It could as well be in the North or on the East Coast. Fort Worth is still a cow town at heart, and feels like Texas. Granted, I never actually lived there, but that’s the impression I have of it from visiting.
Out north of DFW are a few original towns, like Denton, but also lots of – for lack of a better word – the yuppie settlements. Places for people with plenty of money who don’t mind a crushing commute into DFW or the inner suburbs. I have a cousin who lives out there – basically they took some huge ranch, divied* it up into 5 acre square plots, and sold those for individual homes. Just square lots on a dead flat plain, originally there wasn’t a tree in sight, real imaginative.
*My spellchecker doesn’t like the word “divied”, but it’s perfectly good Texan.
divvy
Ah, two v’s. Suppose I never wrote it before, silly me…
I lived in Dallas from 78 to 85, and I hated it. Most of the “movers and shakers” in town were finance and insurance types, with a leavening of fashion industry mavens. The town had a very, very NYC vibe to it. Women dressed up and put on makeup to go grocery shopping. A friend took a year off from college was offered a job as a receptionist for a law firm downtown when we moved there. I was a programmer and making $13k/yr, about average for the time. She was going to be paid $30k, but she was told to buy all her work clothes from the Neiman-Marcus designer lines.
Whereas in Houston the vibe was oil, aerospace, and trade. Fort Worth had a ranching and transportation (and some aerospace) vibe to it. Neither city gave a doodlydamn what NYC was up to or thought.
When I was getting off of Army active duty in 1987, I had job offers from four defense contractors that I’d worked with on my last assignment.* One was in Dallas, which was an interesting group of people in a location I liked quite a lot. Another was in Sunnyvale, CA, which would have been an excellent job in a location which was starting to really boom, though the screwed-up California politics and sociology were visible even to a young man who wasn’t paying attention. Naturally, I didn’t take either of those (nor the offer from IBM, which didn’t much interest me) and instead took the worst of the offers, with a defense contractor on a job which wasn’t actually making anything, only reviewing others’ work and making sure the paperwork audit trail had no obvious problems. In New Jersey. Because I’m an idiot.**
* I was the test officer for a new-generation surveillance aircraft. I spent most of my time at the contractors’ sites in Dallas, Silicon Valley, or upstate NY, or on special assignments, with only a fraction of my time spent at my nominal duty station, Ft Monmouth, NJ, the headquarters of the Army Electronics Command, or whatever it was called.***
** A good chunk of my reasoning was that I was living on the Jersey Shore, which sucks ass ten months a year but is really good during the high summer. Another chunk was that I had a new girlfriend there in NJ. Naturally, we drifted apart about a month after I took the job.
*** Though I had some adventures even at “home base”. That was where I broke into a SCIF, a Special Controlled Information Facility, because I had work to do and the guard was asleep; I think I’ve mentioned this here before. My immediate boss thought I walked on water and signed an Officer Evaluation Report to that effect, but the higher-ups didn’t much care for my casual approach to hurt feelings, laws, rules, regulations, or orders when I had a job to do.