09:05 – The Greek situation is coming to a head, and we’re starting to hear rumbles from Portugal. Greece is flat out of money. The only way they were able to make a small loan repayment to the IMF last week was by borrowing the money from the IMF to repay the IMF. But their SDR balance is now exhausted and they have nowhere to turn for additional funds to repay the loans that are coming due this month and next. And every month thereafter. That’s what happens when you borrow hundreds of billions of dollars with no prospect of being able to repay it. The next couple of months are going to be very interesting times, in the Chinese proverb sense. If Greeks think they’ve suffered under so-called “austerity” so far, they ain’t seen nothing yet.
Meanwhile, some reports are saying that that shootout between motorcycle gangs in Waco was actually a police shooting. If the reports are true, the 9 dead and 18 wounded were all struck by police bullets rather than by bullets fired by gang members. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.
I fired up the dehumidifier in the basement yesterday, and immediately noticed that I’d forgotten to clean the reservoir at the end of last season. The entire interior was covered with a black coating, presumably fungus. So I added a pint of chlorine bleach, which killed the fungus on contact, and let the dehumidifier run until the reservoir was full. Most of the black scum was gone, but not all, so I just rinsed out the reservoir with Lysol liquid and then stuck it in the dishwasher with the dirty dishes and ran it on pots-and-pans cycle with high temperature wash and “sani-rinse” with heated dry. That ought to kill anything that remains alive.
More kit stuff today. We’re down to three chemistry kits, so I’ll get another couple dozen built today.