Cold in the morning, warming throughout the day. Sunny and clear. We all hope. 52F and breezy at midnight.
Saturday was a bit of a mixed bag, wrt to getting stuff done. I had a guy I was supposed to meet to sell a 3d printer, but he stood me up. Flakes. Had to reschedule for Tuesday. So I did some other small stuff around the house. I took the package I couldn’t ship on the 24th to UPS. I took a small item I sold on ebay to the USPS and dropped it in the box at the station. That’s two sales in 3 days. I hope things are picking up.
I did a little bit more yard work. Poked around in the garage a bit, trying to fix a couple of minor things. Put one of the new batteries on the smart charger to top it up.
After dinner played “Pit” with the kids. The new hearing protectors came in handy for that…
Took two bins of pool stuff to storage. Still need to take the pool itself out of the house, but won’t have anywhere to put it until I get rid of more stuff.
That is the plan for today. Head over to the secondary location and get rid of stuff. More cutting and trashing is in order. I have to make room for my forklift before January. And get stuff out of the house to keep my promise to my wife. So I will be AFK for most of the afternoon.
In the course of my travels, I drove past our local mall. Not particularly busy. No lines of cars waiting to turn into the parking lot. Not much going on at the strip/cluster development around our ‘big’ HEB, or the Lowes/BestBuy/costco development across the street. Traffic was light too. I don’t think there was much ‘day after Christmas’ shopping going on. That doesn’t bode well for the economy.
The explosion in Nashville is very strange. Disgruntled employee? Proof of concept? Opening shot? We may never know, but we did learn that some of the infrastructure is a lot more vulnerable than one might expect. You can work that info from at least two different perspectives….. Several people have taken first pass looks at the event with what’s currently known. If you can’t find them on your own, I’ll post some links later in the comments.
And you need to think about second and third order effects. You might want some ham radio. You might want a sat phone. You might want to join with some local hams and get a mesh network up in your area. You might want a cell that uses a different carrier’s network than your primary phone. (I carried sprint and att when I was traveling for work both before and after 9-11, and my Skytel satellite pager. On 9-11 in NYMetro area only Skytel worked. I don’t have that level of redundancy anymore. Might need to order the sim for my satphone. We’ll see if this happens again.) You might want something like goTenna to keep your family cells working as more than flashlights.
Alternate comms and a disaster comms contact list should already be part of your plan. Time to check through the plan again.
Been a while since the muzzies attacked something too…
And winter is happening in the north and northeast.
Lots of reasons to keep stacking.
nick