09:08 – It was 46.4F (8C) when I took Colin out at 0645, clear and calm.
Happy Anniversary to us! Barbara and I have been married 34 years today.
The latest Irma forecasts have it tracking further left, aimed at Memphis, which should limit the effects here. The local forecast now calls for 1 to 4 inches (2.5 to 10 cm) of rain and sustained winds of 20 to 30 MPH (30 to 50 KPH). Barbara has already brought in most of the outdoor items that are subject to blowing away, and will get the rest indoor this afternoon.
The leftward shift is also good news for several of the Prepper Girls, most of whom are located in extreme western North Carolina and Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. I haven’t heard from any of them recently, so presumably they’re busy preparing for Irma. Of course, my email generally has been extremely light. I’m not even getting much spam. I think between Harvey and Irma, people have had better things to do with their time.
We’re working around the house today. First up is installing more shelving in the food room downstairs. That’ll be adjustable track shelving, so we don’t need to worry about vertical spacing. I plan to use these shelves mostly for #10 cans, which are relatively light, so I’ll probably install tracks only every other stud. We should end up with enough additional shelf space for maybe 200 more #10 cans.
At Barbara’s suggestion, we’re leaving the wall space under the chair rail free of shelves. We’ll stack stuff like 5-gallon buckets, plastic bins, and so on there.
My pal in West Palm Beach is now safely ensconced in a hotel in St Petersburg. He loves Florida, says it never gets cold. I’m not sure I’d like to live there…
My pal in West Palm Beach is now safely ensconced in a hotel in St Petersburg. He loves Florida, says it never gets cold. I’m not sure I’d like to live there…
I grew up in Florida and left about seven years ago. I never say never about moving back, but, as things currently stand, we aren’t contemplating a return.
The reason has nothing to do with hurricanes and is mostly about a disgust with the stupidity that has crept into the state from up north over the last 30 years and gone exponential in the last 7-8. The vast majority of the clueless people you are seeing on the news reports from FL this weekend are *not* natives or even near natives.
We like the general Austin area, but the stupid is beginning to leak out of Travis County and contaminate the countryside. We’ll have to think about finding someplace else to live when our kids are out of high school
The various media out of Tampa are currently showing the phenomenon of the water being sucked out of the bay. Ruh-roh. That water will be back in a big way later tonight.
Sun came out finally up here today and is projected to stay out most of this coming week; and the neighbor kid is now doing our yard, front and back, hallellujah! Saves me 90 minutes of pain and fatigue. Now I can work on other chit this week outside.
Got class tomorrow night; Planning Commission Tuesday night; get wife to the Burlap airport on Wednesday; vets group Thursday, and I believe Friday and next weekend are WIDE OPEN! Holy crap! Depending on weather, I’ll work outside or get cracking again on inside projects as best as I can, taking about three times as long to do stuff as before, when I didn’t have this mobility and pain situation. The key is not to overdue anything and to take frequent breaks and stretch a lot.
We are hoping Kunstler is wrong and that these two big storms aren’t the Black Swans to kick off a chain reaction of more black swans.
And THIS JUST IN: Wife agrees with me and RBT and several others here about people CHOOSING to live and work in giant flood plains, earthquake zones, etc. These storms don’t just come rolling by every half-century; it’s a regular thing. You can prep until the cows come home and still be hosed if your whole neighborhood or town is gone and/or the region is utterly devastated. At least one person here was “islanded,” which notwithstanding his dubious use of a noun as a verb is a very unsettling experience. To have escaped by a hair’s breadth is great at the time but in retrospect maybe one might look at alternatives. Which that person is doing, given other circumstances.
We’re lucky, I guess, in that we don’t mind the snow and ice and cold and grew up with it and know how to deal with it, as did our parents, grandparents, etc., back to medieval England, Ireland and Scotland. Furthermore, we don’t like heat and humidity, bugs, venomous reptiles, and masses and masses of human beans, traffic, noise, etc. YM may mos dev V.
We are hoping Kunstler is wrong and that these two big storms aren’t the Black Swans to kick off a chain reaction of more black swans.
Again, Kunstler has TEOTWAWKI books to sell. Anymore, he reimds me of the commenter Andrew Hac on the old housing bubble sites in the mid 2000s. As an example:
“Man, Dude. Americano is a strange place of all the places in the Universe. Darn, I did not Fast Food Joint also sells loans and refinancing and sh*ts like that. But hey, this is Americano, the land of the turkey, the beer belly, the buck teeth, the hummer, and the snapper turtle, so what do you expect any way ???”
On second thought, maybe Kunstler *is* Andrew Hac.
For the most part, Orlando and Miami have been spared the worst effects, and Kunstler’s dream of Florida being scraped clean of unsustainable sprawl (I don’t remember the exact wording) isn’t happening.
West Florida will get a hard lesson about actually enforcing building codes (imagine!) and not zoning swamps for houses.
/. has links to the stuff about Jerry Pournelle:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/09/09/0159209/scifi-author-and-byte-columnist-jerry-pournelle-has-died
I didn’t expect Florida to be scraped “clean” but the sprawl there and elsewhere in this nay-shun is in fact unsustainable and in the event of a real SHTF, will become mass deathtraps.
Indeed. Whatever his other crimes and sins in this life, verbing a noun stands above the rest.
Not just a red-letter day, not just a once-in-a-lifetime experience, that’s a veritable once-in-five-hundred-years event!
Peeps who verb nouns should be flogged with HILLARY’S wet bra straps and then made to personally adjust them back on her.
Wife agrees with me on certain things sometimes, but that one was a real shocker. Usually she’s all soft on people like Princess but having worked in the mental health trenches herself and as a Bellevue admitting nurse a million years ago, she’s also been known to advocate “AK47 therapy” for some classes of people.
Otherwise, yeah, I plan to celebrate tonight with Dr Pepper on the rocks, pretzels, reading military history and listening to the radio!
And from the Armory Department:
https://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/ar15-ak-magazine-loader-podavach/
https://podavach.com/
From the Home Security Department:
https://secure.logitech.com/en-us/product/circle-2-home-security-camera
Anyone seen or bought one of these yet?
At least one person here was “islanded,” which notwithstanding his dubious use of a noun as a verb is a very unsettling experience.
Hey, I resemble that ! What word or phrase would you use ?
Wait, are you defending English ? Well, according to the great James Nicoll, “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#.22The_Purity_of_the_English_Language.22
And, the free dictionary, who knows where that comes from, has a definition for the word islanded: “tr.v. is·land·ed, is·land·ing, is·lands
To make into or as if into an island; insulate: a secluded mansion, islanded by shrubbery and fences.”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/islanded
The Free Dictionary can be edited by anyone. For all we know, you typed in that usage two minutes before putting in your comment. You can protest your innocence as much as you like, but you can’t prove to criminal standards that you did not make that change.
(Unless “to criminal standards” means those applied to Hillary Bitch Clinton, Lois Lerner, or Debbie Weimaraner Schultz, in which case no formal accusation will be made and thus no defense need be made.)
“Farewell To A Friend: Jerry Pournelle 1933-2017” by Sarah Hoyt
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2017/09/09/farewell-friend-jerry-pournelle-1933-2017/
“Two weeks ago, while getting ready for two weeks in the South of France (probably a once in a lifetime thing) I had an email from a friend. The email said “Hey, I’m going to Dragon Con. May I look forward to seeing you there? We could discuss the story.””
Wow, Sarah Hoyt can write an awesome eulogy to a good friend.
At least one person here was “islanded,” which notwithstanding his dubious use of a noun as a verb is a very unsettling experience. To have escaped by a hair’s breadth is great at the time but in retrospect maybe one might look at alternatives. Which that person is doing, given other circumstances.
BTW, we could have walked out. The water was just to my waist. And one of my neighbors was taking people out in his lifted six wheel drive F550. Just no returns and no vehicle. It was easier to stay here and watch the river crest forecast drop four ft over two days. That gave us 5 ft of levee freeboard which is easy peasy.
The alternatives are expensive. But, we are blessed in that there are alternatives. We have two locations to build a new home nearby above all reasonable flood levels without a levee. The problem is the expense, $100K to raise the land 3 to 4 ft plus $125/ft2 to build the house. Both figures are SWAGs and may be low with all of the home rebuilding to come in the Houston metro area and in addition to the current new 30,000+ (SWAG !) homes built in the Houston area each year.
BTW, I am guessing that somewhere around 5% of the two+ million homes in the Houston area were flooded. Many are still flooded. My cousin who lives off Buffalo Bayou got two ft of water in their house. Her fellow engineers at Shell helped to strip her house but many of the houses down her street are still flooded. Total write offs after a week according to her husband.
I suspect that we are going to see a rapid price increase in the Houston area for fixing flooded homes. And a rapid price increase of homes for sale that were not flooded. I doubt that many people will leave but, I could be wrong.
Both figures are SWAGs and may be low with all of the home rebuilding to come in the Houston metro area and in addition to the current new 30,000+ (SWAG !) homes built in the Houston area each year.
Gotta wonder how much Chinese drywall is sneaking into those new mass built subdivisions. If it isn’t coming into Houston now, it will be when the Harvey rebuilding gets rolling.
If you build in the next few years, use a contractor you can trust and who has a decent Rolodex of subs.
“Wait, are you defending English ? Well, according to the great James Nicoll, …..”
Unfortunately, the name is misspelled. What’s up with the redundant “l”?
CowboySlimm
My mother-in-law is already bored with the hurricane. She keeps trying to sneak off to the Seminole casino in Tampa. It doesn’t surprise me that they are open … but not accepting promotions (comps).
https://www.seminolehardrocktampa.com/hurricane-irma.htm
In that vein, here is another mistake that I frequently hear and this one on Weather Channel watching the hurricane descriptions: “….plan of action…”
What a totally useless adjective in that context! I have never heard anyone, nor will I ever hear of anyone claiming a “…plan of inaction..”.
OK, if there is no such thing as an inaction plan, the adjective “action” distinguishes the misnamed “action plan” from nothing.
For a correct example of using adjectives, consider sending someone to the store red apples instead of green apples.
CowboySlim who is an amateur lexicologist
She keeps trying to sneak off to the Seminole casino in Tampa.
We’d love to have her. Or she can just send her money.
“Unfortunately, the name is misspelled. What’s up with the redundant “l”?”
He did, in fact, have two “l”s on his surname.
And you don’t “riffle” someone’s pockets; you “rifle” them.
From the Department of Phony Celebs::
http://freedomoutpost.com/linda-sarsour-want-say-im-black-im-black/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Sarsour
She looks white/Mediterranean and “Palestinian” means about as much as “Ukrainian.” i.e., not much.
It’s like Algonqian Indian bands here in Nova Anglia; the top activists all look whiter than me; I’m pretty effin’ white with a 17th-C dash of Wampanoag so maybe I can be a big Chief Wampum, too. I am given to understand that the Mohawk bands to our west use RHEL for their casinos IT infrastructure, so maybe I’ll take a hike over there in the meantime until my bonafides are established.
I’m either for or against Simplified English Spelling, whichever is more contentious at the time. In this case, I think Mr Nicoll should not only have two Ls, there should be an extraneous “ough” in there somewhere.
Well, they don’t admit it, but the usual plan presented by a politician, bureaucrat, or corporate manager is in fact a plan of inaction. Or at least, inaction insofar as solving the stated problem goes. There’s often a lot of action in terms of steering money and power toward themselves.
Yup, dat’s where the action is, actually; robbery and theft, chiseling and embezzlement. Any so-called plans to solve a problem, if attempted, will almost always be a messy failure.
Like, forex, the Pont Champlain Bridge fiasco up in Moh-ree-all. The old one that I just drove 80 MPH across this afternoon, once gloriously free of that fucking place, is falling apart. So they’re building a new bridge right next to it; you can see the giant cranes sitting there quiet on a Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately…wait for it…you won’t believe this shit….they got the measurements wrong somehow. It had to be taken apart and it’s now being built from scratch.
I told wife; you know, folks got measurements right and built bridges and other stuff back in Rome, Greece and Egypt and the Babylonians did it best of all! She told me it was a huge corruption scandal, too, with top officials now serving jail terms, which is more than what happens down here, I guess.
And in that vein…from the Empire of Idiocracy Department:
“…That seems to be very common these days—that whole thing about agreeing with people but being terrorized into silence. Someone should really do something about that. The situation has become so tyrannical that some would suggest a violent overthrow is the only possible solution; many would agree but would, of course, be terrified to admit it publicly.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_week_that_perished_september_10_2017/print#axzz4sK1oCQcV
“… I think Mr Nicoll should not only have two Ls, there should be an extraneous “ough” in there somewhere.”
Or an “ington.”
My favorite is the silent Scottish “alz” whereby Dalziel is pronounced “Dee-ell”. Even better than the Brits pronouncing Chelmondsley as “Chum-lee” or Featherstonehaugh as “Fan-shaw”.
Ghislaine is “Gah-len” or even “Glenn”.
My surname is actually MacTamhais, but I pronounce it Thompson.
pcb_duffer cares not one whit about Ms. Sarsour’s complexion. It’s her advocacy of terrorism that gets my dander up. If Bruce Jenner wants to pretend to be a woman, despite the XY nature of his genetic structure, I see it as a symptom of some form of mental illness, no less than if he self-identified as an artichoke. Pretend all you want, it just ain’t so.
Maybe Lynn architected that solution to describing his problem?
Soon he’ll operationalize his prepping upgrade plan.
n
“My surname is actually MacTamhais, but I pronounce it Thompson.”
Mine is actually Nicol, not using the double ll. Furthermore, I pronounce it as the 5¢ coin is pronounced. Yes, my paternal grandfather was a legal immigrant from Scotland.
OTOH, with the prolific occurrence nowadays of the French female name Nicole, I do get a lot of random, sales calls for Mr. Nicole, then I know that the mispronunciation means that they do not know me and they are scam, robo calls.
Alligators in the streets in FL!
Well, alligator … singular … and a catfish.
Tampa may luck out. The storm is falling apart. No black swans in FL today.
http://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2017/09/10/alligator-wanders-into-downtown-melbourne/651848001/
Lotsa looting though, including trying to steal guns.
And kicks.
n
Let’s hope Florida and the other states get off wicked easy. It’s been too much already.
Looting seems to be the common denominator between the two locations. (TX and FL).
Leo LaPorte did a nice piece on Jerry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfKcWkR6i2I&feature=em-subs_digest
Looting seems to be the common denominator between the two locations. (TX and FL).
Looting … at Academy!
http://www.wesh.com/article/burglary-reported-at-academy-sports-in-orlando-as-irma-bears-down-on-central-florida/12213865
The first FL Buc-ee’s opens near the Daytona Speedway next year.
Mm-hmm. I’ve seen some pictures from surveillance cameras and reports of arrests. And, just as with so-called looters in Houston, most of the perps are photographed in specially-crafted shadow so that they appear to have dark skin.
Lotta gubs being grabbed out there in both states and not by the uniformed thugs, either. Unless you count saggy-baggies, hi-tops and dreadlocks uniforms.
“… most of the perps are photographed in specially-crafted shadow so that they appear to have dark skin.”
Obviously a trick by the Trump White House and its neo-Nazi minions.