Month: September 2017

08:56 – It was 48.4 (9C) when I took Colin out at 0645, mostly clear. Barbara is off this morning to volunteer at the friends bookstore, filling in for someone who had people coming in from out of town.

Yesterday, we got the second shelving unit set up in the lab/work area downstairs, and a lot of stuff moved from stacks on the floor onto the first shelving unit. The second one will remain empty until I decide what I want to go where.

As we arrange and reorganize down there, I’ve been thinking about installing a couple more LED shop lights as grow lights. We have a couple of worktables that we use only for binning chemicals when we’re making up chemical bags. They’re empty 99% of the time, and we could use one or both of those to hold herbs and vegetables in containers. The environment is climate-controlled, and free of the animal and insect pests that often attack our outside plants.

The big question is how much light they’d need. The LED shop lights we have consume only about 40W per fixture and provide about 4,000 lumens. I could put them on a timer and let them run 12 or 14 hours a day. They’re bright in terms of indoor lighting, but nothing close to actual sunlight. More like daylight in open shade.

When I read about home grow light setups, the articles were talking about very large lighting units like 1,600W metal halide lamps. That’s a lot more than I want to get into.

08:56 – It was 63.1F (17.5C) when I took Colin out at 0700, mostly clear. Barbara is off this morning to volunteer at the historical society museum. I need to get my application to be an amateur radio volunteer examiner filled out and submitted today.

I finally ordered a shock collar for Colin yesterday. It allows a gradually escalating stimulus, from audio/visual to start with, up through an adjustable level of electric shock. One way or another, we are going to get him trained to come when he’s called, no matter how interested he is in something else.

I forgot to mention that we’d had our first real deep pantry fail. At least I think we did. We were running out of mayonnaise upstairs, so I brought up another jar. It was reasonably fresh. The best-by date on it was January, 2016. I just put it on the kitchen counter and didn’t think any more about it.

When Barbara was making sandwiches for lunch, she opened it. She called me into the kitchen and pointed out that the PET jar had dented in and that when she opened the jar that cardboard/foil seal over the mouth of the jar just came loose freely. The contents didn’t smell bad, exactly, but there was a moderate odor. So we pitched the jar.

That’s the first time we’ve ever encountered a problem with food that was packaged in a way that I’d consider LTS-grade.

Yesterday, we assembled the first set of steel shelves I’d ordered from Walmart. The only shipping damage was a minor dent to the corner of one of the fiberboard shelves. It’s a 2X4-foot shelf unit that’s six feet tall and has five shelves. It’s rated to support 4,000 pounds total, 800 pounds per shelf, but I have my doubts. The 2X4 fiberboard shelves are supported only along the four edges, with no cross-bracing. I’d be surprised if they didn’t sag, especially since the fiberboard is only about a quarter inch thick. If it becomes a problem, I’ll just replace the shelves with 3/8″ plywood.

We started watching a documentary about stone-age humans last night. The clan had a dog running around their huts, which again made me think of Neanderthals.

H. sapiens neanderthalensis was apparently superior in just about every way to us gracile H. sapiens sapiens. They were bigger than us, much stronger, and, given their much larger cranial capacities, almost certainly smarter than us as well. So the mystery is why they faded away while modern humans became the dominant primates on the planet.

I’ve always suspected it was because modern humans domesticated Canis lupus familiaris while Neanderthals did not. One on one, a sapiens was no match for a neanderthalensis, but one modern man with a dog easily overmatched a Neanderthal.

So, gradually, neanderthalensis faded out as a distinct sub-species and was incorporated into the muttly line of modern humans.

Or so I strongly suspect. And DNA testing on various modern human lines bears that out, I think.

09:02 – It was 60.9F (16C) and still dark when I took Colin out at 0645. He just trotted off down the road, which is becoming a usual thing. I’m going to have start taking him out on leash, particularly when it’s still dark out.

Barbara is off to the gym, after which she’ll be building kit sub-assemblies. I’m not sure if she has any outside stuff to do today. The only thing in the garden is turnips, which are starting to come up nicely. A lot of turnips, which will need to be thinned. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a turnip, so I’m looking forward to trying them.

Work on the house next door continues to progress. Yesterday, Billings Heating and Air was installing a heat pump. They left the oil furnace in place, and will use the heat pump only for air conditioning. The deck looks to be complete, all the new windows are installed, and the outside looks good. Barbara mentioned that they’re spending as much on renovations as they did to buy the house. I’m sure Grace is champing at the bit to get in there.

I have a bunch of stuff coming from Amazon today, including six rolls of packing tape. Since we started the business, I’ve been buying U-Line packing tape by the case of 36 rolls. We’re down to eight rolls or so, so it was time to re-order.

But before I order another case of U-Line tape, I decided to try a different brand. The U-Line tape works, but it can be very aggravating. It often doesn’t stick to the tape dispenser cutter bar, and the end flops loose and sticks itself to the plate below the cutting bar, which is a pain to free up.

The U-Line tape is 2.0 mil. Amazon has another brand that’s 3.2 mil, and I thought maybe the thicker tape would work better. The U-Line stuff by the case costs $1.60 per 110-yard roll, plus shipping, or about $0.015/yard. The new stuff is just over $2.00 for a 60-yard roll if I buy a six-pack, or about $0.036/yard. But we don’t use THAT much packing tape, so if the new stuff works better it’ll be worth paying twice as much for it, just to avoid the aggravation. Of course, it may turn out to be even worse. We’ll see.

The morning paper reports another cluster of shootings down in Winston. Six people shot in 24 hours, in four separate incidents. There was a similar cluster there a couple weeks ago. I remember when shootings in Winston were extremely rare. They’re starting to become commonplace. Winston isn’t Chicongo, yet, but like most cities it’s heading in that direction.

08:52 – It was 57.4F (13C) and mostly clear when I took Colin out at 0645. We’re having warmish weather, with highs in the 70’s and lows in the 50’s, but it won’t be long before things start cooling down again.

I just realized that in two months we’ll have been living in Sparta for two years. Tempus fugit. Barbara still makes frequent trips down to Winston to visit family and friends and run errands, but it’s been months since I’ve been outside the county and I’d be just as happy never to leave the county again. For me, even a trip into Sparta is a major occasion.

Puerto Rico was bankrupt before the hurricanes, and now it seems they’re expecting US taxpayers to pay off their $70 billion in worthless bonds AND buy them a new country. We, the US taxpayers, have already done more than enough for Puerto Rico. Let them rebuild their own country, and pay for it themselves.

It’s bad enough that US taxpayers will end up shelling out billions to rebuild in Texas and Florida. At least they’re US states. Puerto Rico is not, and we shouldn’t be paying to repair their misfortune.

08:16 – It was 60.8F (6C) and partly cloudy when I took Colin out at 0645.

Barbara left about 1515 yesterday to head down to Winston. She had dinner with a friend yesterday evening, stayed with Frances and Al, and is running various errands today and Sunday morning before heading back. Colin and I are bereft. Barbara’s gone, and neither of us has been able to locate any wild women.

I see some religious nutcase says the world is ending, starting today. He formerly said it was ending today, period, but recently modified his prediction to say that today was the beginning of the end. Which is kind of like predicting that the sun will rise in the morning, but followers of idiots like this never seem to notice.

I remember the last time the world ended, back in 2011. We’d planned to have dinner with Paul and Mary at our house. We decided that it’d be safe for Mary, Barbara, and me to have dinner indoors, but we were going to make Paul eat out on the deck. All four of us are atheists, so we figured everything would be okay, but because Paul had been “saved” as a small child meant that he might be transported to heaven, we decided to take no chance of ending up with a hole in our roof

As I was packing up science kits last night and affixing postage labels, it occurred to me how strongly our customer base skews rural/small-town. Sure, we sell a lot of kits into the Clinton Archipelago, but a large percentage go to red states or red areas of blue states. Our customer base is much more likely than average to live in small towns in exurban/rural areas in all 50 states. Now, every time we get an order with a ship-to town I don’t recognize the name of, I look it up on Wikipedia. More often than not, it has a population of 1,237 or 4,158 or something like that, and is located in a rural/agricultural county with a population of 30,000 or fewer.

There’s been a lot of speculation by commenters here about what might happen if things really go to hell. The consensus seems to be that the progs from the blue areas would be in deep shit because (a) they can’t do anything important for themselves, (b) we Deplorables own most of the firearms, and (c) on average, we’re much, much better shots. And I think all of that is true. But it may not be the most important differentiator.

Home-schooled students are far, far ahead of public school students. On average, they’re probably two to three grade levels ahead. Even more important, they actually learn to think, which is a rarity among public-school students. Even disregarding demographic differences, which substantially favor the rural kids, those kids are smarter, better-educated, and harder working than urban kids in public schools. And the rural kids also tend to learn hands-on skills, much more than urban kids do.

So if push ever really comes to shove, the rural population has every advantage over the urban population. If the latter decides to come to take what we have, they’re going to run into a buzzsaw. Or perhaps more accurately, a meat grinder.