Cold and clear. Winter. Some places are getting a lot more of it than they are used to. Hmm. We’ll see how cold it will get in Houston. There were reports last night of snow in the Dallas area. They get snow more often than we do, but even Houston gets snow occasionally.
Yesterday I slept very late, and then did my pickup in Kingwood, which is an area north and east of Houston. Still pretty rural, although there are a lot of mega-developments up there, think giant planned communities… The prices I got on the stuff I bought made it worth the drive. And really it’s only about 40 minutes without traffic.
On my way home, I hit the goodwill bins, with a bunch of resale stuff and stuff for the house and BOL finding it’s way into my cart. I also hit the HEB grocery on my way by. The pharmacy has been nagging me to get my prescriptions, but I was 12 minutes too late. Slackers. The store was pretty wiped out. Don’t know if that is typical for Sunday evening, or if it was storm related, but there were HUGE gaps. 20ft of shelving empty in the ramen noodles section. Cream down to a couple scattered containers. Frozen food picked over. The on sale meat was almost gone, but I did grab another tube of pork loin at $2/pound and a brisket at $2.50. I’ll figure out how to cook it, without spending three days smoking it. There was a whole display front cooler in dairy that was empty, and most of the eggs were gone, except for the organic at twice the price.
I only stopped in for the ‘scrip, but figured I’d grab some meat if there was any. I did notice more downsizing of sale units. The ribeye (lowest quality) was marked “thick” but was only 1/2 inch. That gets the total price down for that unit, and I saw the same thing on other cuts of meat- less meat in the package. Coffee is straight up shrinkflation with smaller packages. 12oz in a bag now, not 16, and cereal boxes are so skinny they barely stand on the shelf, but the thin sliced meat is killing me. You can’t shrink the animal, or the iconic cuts, so you have to slice thinner…
Which brings me to some unpleasant thoughts. Even if you are ok, if most of the people around you aren’t, it’s going to affect you by limiting you too. If no one can afford a ribeye, even sliced to half thickness, there won’t be any for sale, even if YOU can afford one.
It extends more generally too. You’re in a blue city, but have kept your head down, and think you are going to be ok. Then things get sporty, some insurgent spikes your electric substation, drops the water main that crosses over the highway, or does something else in the battle between rural and urban, and lo! suddenly YOU have no water or power either. If one side or the other starts shooting cops, there won’t be any cops for you, no matter what you personally think about cops.
The rule about not standing next to stupid people doing stupid things, is going to be applied in spades, whether you chose to stand next to them or not. Where you are is going to determine about 90% of what your experience of the coming troubles will be like.
Think about that, and plan for it.
Stacks will surely help.
nick
Consider getting to know a butcher (better yet, some ranchers and a butcher) as a prepping item.
My butcher pal gets me the cuts I like, at a steep discount versus retail, and he slices and vac-packs them as I wish. He also processes my game animals, which saves me a lot of bother.
Home from the sub-tropics, and now domestic bliss to do in the freezing temperatures outside.
One courtesy lightbulb at the front door to replace from the stacks, and two headlight bulbs to replace on one of the vehicles (only one failed, but I always replace them in pairs, as when one goes, the other is about to…)
Hopefully I don’t catch my death. If I do, it was nice knowing yez.
Outside temperature has dropped below “low teens”. Presumably will come up once the sun comes up. I’d normally be opening the chicken coop about now but I’ll leave them inside a little longer. I don’t trust them to have the sense to go inside to warm up if their wattles or feet get cold, they refuse to use the heated roosting perch that I bought, and they’re a pain in the butt to catch so I can put vaseline on the wattles.
Other than care for the doofuses, I need to make sure The Brat doesn’t screw around all day, do a few maintenance tasks and other things that need to be taken care of, see if I can find some time and quiet to work on a book I’m writing, and possibly take care of a few things that my wife wants done but which don’t benefit me in any way. She’s finally stopped nagging about them, so maybe I’ll do some of them. Good thing I don’t need to work; no way to get even half of that done if I needed to be working.
Temperature has dropped again. I now hesitate to say that it’ll come up in a while because every such prediction has resulted in the opposite. I opened the coop shortly after my previous comment. The chickens had started making noise and most dashed down and started eating as soon as the door was open. They’re now sitting on the non-heated roosting bars, all floofed out with their necks pulled in and bellies down on their feet, so I guess they’re ok for now. But I’ll bet their feet would be warmer if they’d just use the heated rail.
Still getting something over 2 ½ eggs per day from six hens. I don’t know if that will go up because the days are getting longer or down because the days will be colder. -shrug- In practice, they’re pets, not livestock, so I’ll keep feeding them, even the one who barely lays.
The Child is resisting doing anything useful, like her Calculus problems. Hands up, everyone who’s shocked.
Well, I am not yet deep-frozen, no thanks to whatever genius at Philips lighting designed the light fixture at my front door. What should have been a two-minute job turned into three quarters of an hour, punctuated by swearing.
The light fixture body is die-cast pot metal, the pretty cover is glass and bent stainless steel sheet, secured with a single M4*.75 stainless steel countersunk Philips head (not pozidrive) machine screw.
Of course, the stainless screw was corroded into a unit with the female thread in the pot metal. Of course, applying torque to the screw stripped the Philips indentation. (I have nice screwdrivers, with a hex shoulder to accept a spanner for giving it some grunt. Recommended.) Of course, all this was above my head, so done while reaching up with both arms.
Anyhow, some fine stuff called Re-Grip from Recoil (the off-brand “Helicoil” people) saved me from having to get out the left-hand drills and the Makita.
That is finely divided tungsten carbide shavings in a paste carrier medium. Anoint the tip of the best-fitting screwdriver with this stuff and it allows the tool to get a grip once more on the ruined screw head, sufficient to get the head proud of the surface and amenable to vise-grips. Did I mention this was all at arms’ length above my head?
Re-Grip. Not cheap, but good. Get some.
https://www.recoiltools.com.au/product/accessories-re-grip/
The rest was simple. Replace two G10 lights with the LED equivalents from the stacks, run an M4*.75 tap through the hole to get out the corrosion, apply copper paste seize deterrent to the replacement screw (from the stainless screws parts drawer) and close.
The universe took pity on me with replacing the car headlight bulb. I could just get a hand into the right spot in the engine bay to do the swap with my fingertips. I didn’t push my luck, though, and left the still-functioning side well enough alone, putting the spare bulb in the car, so it will be to hand when needed.
We had a good time playing tourist in Wisconsin in November, but I quickly picked up on the vibe that the locals were expecting “bad” weather to start at any minute.
Except for tours scheduled on Thanksgiving weekend, Taliesin closed for the season the day after we visited.
What? Californians? They aren’t going anywhere.
I doubt that many illegal immigrants crossing the border remain in South Texas. The Rio Grande Valley is pretty depressing just below the surface, even in places like McAllen.
The good and bad about this freeze is that it happened on a holiday.
Frank Lloyd Wright expected Taliesin to be abandoned to decay back into the hilltop after he passed and the last Fellowship student he taught died.
Wright didn’t count on Ken Burns and PBS.
Snow here, about 2″ so far, snowing again, predicted to get 5″ more. Good thing I don’t have to go anywhere. Currently 28F, low on Wednesday with be 0F. The garage has an electric heater set to 45F and that will protect the pipes in the garage. Only exterior wall piping we have is in the kitchen and that section of the cabinets has a heater vent underneath.
The local news stations are absolutely giddy over the weather. Teams on the road, same stupid reporting as usual. Comments from the weather people telling people how to drive. The usual reporter at the state office where the salt is kept doing the same reporting as usual. Same dumb comments of “if you don’t have to go, don’t”, yes the road crews are working, yes they have enough supplies. Then the reporter at a warming center showing 2 people and one of them is a worker. All the reporters with visions of CNN dancing in their “left of the bell curve” brains.
Yes, and because of the weather there is no politically correct parade.
RIP Gonzalo Lira, American/Chilean expatriate in Kiev, PO’d the regime and has died in Ukrainian custody. Survived apparently by wife and 2 children
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/journalist-gonzalo-lira-reported-dead-ukrainian-custody-according-father
Previously known on Youtube as “Coach Red Pill”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X27rQDg9At8
A good summary of the lawfare against Trump and the lawlessness of the left:
https://victorhanson.com/lawfare-against-trump-is-running-out-of-gas/
We don’t need to deport the aluen invaders, just put them in camps in NM. They will chose to leave.
I’d prefer to make DE and MA locations for camps, since they want to be sanctuaries, but geography trumps. There must be some other way to punish the simps in DE for Biden, but that’s not it.
I learned long ago to not mess with exterior house lights in the cold. Or when I didn’t have a couple hours to spare. I swear, every single one is just a small breeze away from collapsing into a singularity. It doesn’t matter the price, they are all made badly.
Currently 19ºF here, in SA by the airport. I ran the shower when I got up to make sure water is flowing. Apple weather now says the hi Thursday could hit 69ºF, down a degree.
I was raised in Rhinelander, WI, up north in the State. We always had long, bitter cold, Winters. MrsAtoz once asked me if I would like to move there. Frack, no!
In other news, MrsAtoz wants to buy a home in the Vegas area as a “forever” home. I told her I have one more move in me, so pick wisely, Grasshopper. We’d sell the condo and get a single story house, hopefully a little south or east of Vegas with a bigger lot.
I’m close to 70 and figure if the SHTF, it won’t matter anymore where we live. D1 already lives there and The Twins (D4&D5) now want to move there. D3 is a mile from me in SA and D2 lives close to Philly.
We could even use PODS to move our stuff from TX to NV and store it. Make the company pay for it while we live in the condo and house hunt. Ugh, another residency change: DL, Medicare ticker started, etc.
Dang, I’ve got the sads:
The fake alien twins that sparked an out-of-this-world search for the truth: How ‘UFO experts’ led the world to believe ‘alien corpses’ found in Peru were real
LOL! What nitwits believed this at all. Obviously fake from the beginning.
I STILL want to believe.
As an aside in Vegas:
During the holidays, a sign went up on the open land between the Strip and I15 “location for the future bullet train between Vegas and Los Angeles.” LOL, who’s paying for that? Even if it happens, based on other bullet train projects, I won’t be alive to ride it.
Tweaking a new antenna in the attic on Saturday, I caught the pilot episode of the “X Files” on one of the fringe network channels. Geesh, everyone was young.
We now get 83 broadcast channels stretching from Waco to the antenna farm south of Austin.
That is, until The Real Life Tony Stark sells Congress on taking whats left of the broadcast TV spectrum to fulfill the Pizza Box Dream.
It will happen this time. Just like the Jesus Trucks powering your house.
My wife made new friends at the convention in The Dells, proving medicine hasn’t gone totally PLT outside of the cities in Wisconsin, but I have no interest in moving up there.
The hotel where we stayed in Spring Green is shuttered from January through March along with its parent attraction, The House on the Rock, just outside of town. I told my wife, “Think ‘The Shining’”.
I believe only one other room had guests that weekend.
“FAA’s DEI webpage does make clear that they are actively recruiting severely mentally ill people because they are underrepresented.”
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/01/15/the-faas-dei-push-is-scarier-than-you-think-n605007
Now do the WH medical staff.
Sounds to me like urbanites. No idea about infrastructure, no idea how things work, no idea who keeps things working, no plans for backup systems. Probably Democrats.
Surprised when reality intrudes and makes them think.
Or elected state and local government officials in Texas.
Abbott is putting on a pretty good show this morning.
Well it is chilly willy here in spacious Flandrey manor….
29F just outside the kitchen window. Probably cooler than that further from the house. I suppose I should see if the on demand water heater is frozen. I wrapped the heck out of it after last time, but didn’t do anything in particular this time. And I never got around to building the enclosure for it.
I’m so prepped up I am getting complacent about things. Not good.
n
It is 26 F at my house at noon and a very light mist is falling. Heading into work.
ERCOT has done a great job getting everything that can run. Including all of the 1950s and 1960s steam units that should have been retired ages ago but are grandfathered and needed for voltage support in times of ultra high loads like today. The current demand is a constant 75,000 MW.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-12953605/Return-fraud-online-sales-refund-shopping.html
Finally getting some wider traction. This can not continue in a down economy.
Cali continues to crumble
Hmm, spicy.
n
Refund fraud, etc. It requires companies to grow a spine. No, the customer is not always right. No, you can’ t walk into the store, grab a product, and “return” it. Or return the spoiled meat you bought and forgot about. Or whatever.
@Denis, that Re-Grip is a silicon (the site says silicone, a common error) carbide mixture, not tungsten carbide. I was curious, because I do various finishing operations using abrasive compounds, but have not seen tungsten carbide compounds. It might work very well, and be cheaper than diamond paste, which is overkill for everything I do. A quick search did not show such compounds, confused by many results for abrasives that can polish tungsten carbide.
If you want something inexpensive for removing stubborn screws, ordinary valve grinding (or lapping, or seating, whichever term is in vogue) compound would probably work as well as Re-Grip. I have used it for this trick a long time ago. It is available in most auto parts stores for a few dollars. Don’t overspend, as the cheapest stuff is probably as good as more expensive kinds. A small container I inherited from my father will outlast me. It is intended for use with steel and cast iron, and “contains silicon carbide.”
Your choice of attack was probably the best for this light fixture, because the fixture probably can’t stand much force, such as would be applied by a hammer-hit impact driver. These little toys can be magic on Phillips screws that are stuck in a more massive object, such as a motorcycle engine case. Hmm… thinking… I wonder if one of those newfangled battery powered impact drivers would work. I have some little air powered ones, and they can drive a #10 screw into a small piece of wood held in my hand; IOW, they are close to reactionless.
Impact tools, including air hammers, are items everyone should have. They remind me of an old saying: “Don’t force it, get a bigger hammer.” A small hammer used a few hundred times is sometimes even better. I have used an air hammer dialed waaay down to a buzz to sculpt concrete blocks without breakage. One with a blunt tool (!) can shake auto suspension joints apart with no sweat. Vibration and impact can be useful as well as a nuisance.
As for headlight bulbs, I noticed that one of my newer cars is spec’d for headlight bulbs with an “LL” suffix. This stands for Long Life. I have researched other types of halogen bulbs, and the light output for a LL bulb is almost as much as a standard bulb, probably not noticeable. Something to consider in the future. Many aftermarket bulbs, especially those claiming to be brighter than stock, have very short life. Not good for cars whose bulbs are hard to access and change.
If you think your stock headlights could be better, you are not alone. Headlights and specs in the US are a mess. I can’t address other countries. I have done several headlight upgrades in the dark ages, but that was to replace stock sealed beam bulbs with either Cibié or Hella conversions. These are better in all ways than what comes on even most current cars, especially low glare to oncoming drivers, important because I drive on two lane roads. Now that cars come with aero lights, replacing the whole unit can be expensive, and the aftermarket unit probably won’t perform much better than stock. There are exceptions, but I have found the specs to be useless. Sometimes OEM units will fit an older car, and might perform better. This is risky and can be a lot of work. Sometimes bulb changes in the OEM fixture can help. Often not. I haven’t tried any yet. Do not install LED conversion bulbs. Until very recently, these larger light sources messed up the optics and resulted in terrible performance, especially glare. There have been some recent developments, but I haven’t tried any.
Stay warm.
The media push continues.
This time, they really mean it.
Again, like yesterday’s video, the office spaces aren’t that inviting.
Who cares about “Michelin star” restaurants outside the C-suite?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfUhykd1Ifc
@jimb, I have a bunch of syringes of diamond paste for sale… the rubber on the plunger is perished, and the paste may be thicker than it was, but I’d imagine whatever the carrier medium is could be refreshed…
I can send info if you are interested.
n
The media tongue bath for NYFC sounds pretty desperate to me. Takes an hour to say what could be run down in 10 minutes.
n
BC: Speed Hump
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2024/01/15
Yes ! I want one of these in front of my house on our 10 foot wide lanes on a country road with no shoulders and deep ditches. No sidewalks or streetlights either. The speed limit is 30 mph, I have seen people driving 70 mph, erratically bouncing from pothole to pothole.
We had an almost head on wreck the other day. The cross road by my house has stop signs but the main road does not. Both vehicles had to be towed away since they were so damaged. I suspect that the large pickup was really moving as one of his front wheels was 45 degrees to the road but I did not see it happen.
The C-suites want the White and Asian males back in the office where they can be available and monitored, preferably in the asinine “open” floor plan which allows further cutbacks in real estate costs.
They don’t care if everyone else stays home, but that will generate lawsuits … for now.
Personally, I would rather be above a 99 cent store than in a building with fancy restaurants.
The developers who paid half price for that building must have one of those Corn Pop grants to convert the space into housing.
Biden has been berry, berry good for DE for a long time. Rehoboth Beach boardwalk, Montchanin stuff, some of the unmarked govt buildings, etc…
In other news, I had to wear long sleeves and a jacket here in the big swamp. It may break the wrong side of 40 this week. I don’t miss the weather in the midwest.
What? Californians? They aren’t going anywhere.
I doubt that many illegal immigrants crossing the border remain in South Texas. The Rio Grande Valley is pretty depressing just below the surface, even in places like McAllen.
The good and bad about this freeze is that it happened on a holiday.
I doubt half of the 31+ million people living in Texas were born here in this state. I have met people here from almost every state in the Union and every country on the planet. I was born here in Freeport, Texas, a fifth generation Texan. We moved to New Jersey when I was six weeks old and then to Oklahoma when I was three. We came back to Texas in 1970 when I was ten.
The Texas population was under ten million when I was born. So the population has more than tripled since 1960.
Dang, I’ve got the sads:
The fake alien twins that sparked an out-of-this-world search for the truth: How ‘UFO experts’ led the world to believe ‘alien corpses’ found in Peru were real
LOL! What nitwits believed this at all. Obviously fake from the beginning.
I STILL want to believe.
That is a fake article from the Men in Black.
I still believe.
They just closed our schools for Tuesday due to the ice. We are getting a slow and very wet sleet even though it is 26 F. Everything is slowly getting ice on it. Our Tuesday morning forecast is 18 F now. Pretty cold for 30 miles away from the biggest hot tub in the world, the Gulf of Mexico.
https://spacecityweather.com/sub-freezing-temperatures-on-monday-create-road-hazards/
I have seen it 6 F here back in 1989 so we are nowhere even close to that.
“Is NASA really prepared for an ‘internet apocalypse’?”
https://www.chron.com/news/space/article/nasa-internet-apocalypse-18169102.php
“Some researchers say there is a chance that a solar superstorm could cause a large-scale internet failure within the next decade.”
I’ll bet that the chance of NOT getting a nasty solar storm is much higher.
Keep up th’ skeer.
Schools here are closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Too much snow. About 6″ so far and still coming down. I went out to use the leaf blower to blow off the truck before the snow freezes and becomes a giant block of difficult to remove ice.
23f at 3:30 Central Time. It was 14f this morning with light snow. If it hadn’t been snow I’d call it a light mist. Pretty to look at.
Dog potty time doesn’t take long. They want to take time to sniff the world but they get cold and then it’s trot quickly back to the house. The wind isn’t much but it sure is cold.
But it is the middle of January.
Oh. Some researchers. A chance.
Yeah. Name names and shut up with the fear mongering. We could just as likely get hit with a big meteor in the next decade, too.
n
Don’t the Egyptians have a fairly large and capable military which could address the problems in the Red Sea? They collect tolls on the Suez Canal and it is in their best interest to avoid having shipping disrupted.
The upside of the severe drought in Austin is that we don’t have any ice on the trees right now, and I doubt we will have any downed limbs breaking power lines.
The White male City Manager whom the Austin City Council scapegoated for last winter’s power outages due to downed tree limbs still hasn’t been replaced. The interim City Manager is a White Hispanic in Benny Crump-speak but that still isn’t suitable enough for the Israelites to gather around and commence the laying on of hands if another mass outage event results from this week’s weather.
JimB, thanks for clarifying about the silicon vs tungsten carbide. I always thought Re-Grip was particles of tungsten carbide in a silicone medium, but I never investigated it.
Valve grinding paste. Indeed. I probably have a two-lifetimes supply. I don’t grind ICE valves, but I do lap scope rings for long gubs, and it is also used for “jewelling” bolts.
Impact drivers. I have one of the old school smack-with-a-hammer type. I decided against it for the same reason you discerned- the fragility of the pot metal fixture.
ITGuy1998 – your “singularity” got a thumbs up from me!
I have happy memories of merrily whacking impact drivers to open engine casing screws on Japanese motorcycles. For that, nothing else will do.
I don’t own a battery powered impact driver, but perhaps I should have one. I will watch out for a sale on Makitas. I am very happy with my collection of Makita cordless drills, which have given stellar service.
Ugh, it is time to check my various financial institutions:
A Very Disarming Story! Georgia United Credit Union Bans Guns and Ammo Purchases From Bank Accounts
This is just DEI dumb, but I bet more banks/etc will do the same. I haven’t bought a gub in a while. Can you imagine your card is turned down because you have an account at a woke bank? I hope account cancellations crush this credit union, or better yet, get the CEO fired and change the policy.
No tobacco purchase either, geesh.
‘I plead for mercy’: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker begs for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to stop sending migrants – as new census figures show 4,500 more asylum seekers arrived in Chicago than previously reported
– um, let’s see….. NO. F you. 2nd largest city in the US? Suck it up. Don’t want illegals? Don’t give them anything and pressure your party chief.
Which is the whole point of sharing the pain.
n
Ugh, it is time to check my various financial institutions:
A Very Disarming Story! Georgia United Credit Union Bans Guns and Ammo Purchases From Bank Accounts
This is just DEI dumb, but I bet more banks/etc will do the same. I haven’t bought a gub in a while. Can you imagine your card is turned down because you have an account at a woke bank? I hope account cancellations crush this credit union, or better yet, get the CEO fired and change the policy.
No tobacco purchase either, geesh.
This is discrimination. Didn’t SCOTUS rule on this with making payments to the NRA ?
I use USAA and Navy Federal credit cards, and have not had a problem with either of them.
I disagree with the pumping of illegal aliens into the heart of the country. It makes it harder to get rid of them.
But, hey , ya wanna do Sanctuary Cities and States? While poo-pooing on Texas and all the wetbacks here and saying Open Borders Is A Human Right ????
Oh. I guess it’s different when you have to divert the welfare from the dark coloreds to the brown coloreds. And the dark colored seem to tend to go to “burn everything down”. Uh, Africa… Wankanda!!
Have fun with your Diversity crap when they get to your neighborhood.
Seems to me that, in disallowing some purchases but allowing others, they are making themselves partially responsible for the purchases. For that matter, they’re partially responsible for the denied purchases. If the CU doesn’t allow otherwise legal firearm purchases and a cardholder is killed because she was unable to purchase a gun to defend herself from her ex, I’d think they’d be vulnerable to a lawsuit. If the CU doesn’t allow tobacco purchases but does allow alcohol purchases, then they can be to some extent liable for drunk driving fatalities.
“Common carrier” and related concepts protect the carrier at least as much as they protect the consumers. Too bad the wokesters were too busy learning grievance politics to study up on a bit of practical law.
The migrants aren’t forced onto the buses.
>> There’s no way that a bogus ATTEMPT to repeal the 2nd would be generally accepted as legal, and it would almost certainly ignite Civil War II.
And along that same topic, there’s no chance that ANY Constitutional amendment, on ANY topic, will be adopted given the current political climate being so sharply split between the populated cities and the less-populous STATES.
Repeal the 2A, not likely…but how about a scenario where a “changed” SCOTUS overturns Bruen?
Go caucus/vote in your primary like your life depends on it…it very well might.
Packing the court is a slippery slope.
Plus, the Liberals can’t write. Breyer had to stick around to write the dissent when Roe was overturned, and Kagan’s defense of the student loan scheme was pathetic.
Six more Liberal votes are just going to establish pathetic precedents which will be overturned when the Conservatives get a chance to pack the Court.
Kagan is going to need a lot more smoke breaks.
Watched E1 of S4 of HBO’s True Detective: Night Country. Set in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, 150 miles north of the Artic Circle. Was actually filmed in Iceland. Stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. Looks promising. Seasons 1 – 3 were good, available on Max if you haven’t seen them.
Two months of ‘polar night’ would be enough to get me out of there immediately.
Just had the light on my desk flicker a couple of times. Hope that’s not prophetic…
n
The flip side of that are the continual daylight and the “white nights” when the Sun barely sneaks below the northern horizon an hour or two.
For a while in my misspent youth, I used to enjoy alcoholic beverages. When our squadron was deployed to Keflavik, Iceland, I once staggered out of the darkened NCO club at 2AM only to walk straight into the rising Sun, low on the northern horizon.
One of the estate sales this week has a GeOptic Astro observing chair. Didn’t even know there was such a thing.
n
@Nick
Does not look comfortable. No reviews and seems to be unavailable. Similar to a lot of others here”
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/top-astronomy-kit/best-chairs-astronomy-stargazing
The newer(?) Nadira model is wood ply, looks more attractive and comfortable.
But none in the link above have heated seats, and I think that would be a game changer.
That’s just Houston. You have some seriously archaic infrastructure there.
The boss’s wife at The Death Star thought she could game the system in the 2009 strike year and had a doctor sign off that she was unable to climb telephone poles due to vertigo. Instead of call center duty like my medical exemption, however, Mrs. Boss was assigned to crawl under houses in Houston.
Funny things about the Iowa caucuses:
HotAir was selling an “Upset in Iowa?” story behind their paywall this afternoon, probably on the strength of Trump voters being undermotivated to come out in sub-zero weather after a last week/weekend with nearly two feet of snow across the state. Looks like they put it in the memory hole at some point this evening.
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2024/01/15/establishment-rallying-to-trump-live-results-from-iowa-n605132
Results as of 10:20PM:
Trump 51% (52,962)
DeSantis 21% (22,1680
Haley 19% (19,790)
Ed Morrisey says:”Update: With 98% of precincts reporting, it looks as though DeSantis has secured second place … but not by a lot.”
Ed, you should know two things:
–Second has the sterling quality of being NOT THIRD.
–2000 votes is 10% more than Nikki got this evening.
–Iowa has more than two cities
Ed and a lot of others with purple tinge are pushing hard for VP Nikki to “expand the ticket”, but:
“supporters of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, with nearly half of them — 43% — saying they’d vote for Democratic President Joe Biden over Trump.”
makes me wonder if her supporters are a feckless bunch or a bunch of Biden voters/Hamass supporters crossing over.
It’s interesting that the HA map only shows two cities in Iowa. Have to wait for tomorrow’s breakdown, but I think I could put pins in the counties where Haley’s support is concentrated, and one is Bolshevik City just south of CR.
Last week I sent friends in Iowa a few links on Nikki:
–the Civil War flub
–the Iowans is yokels schtick for the sooper-phisticated NH voters
She flubbed another one this afternoon:
“Can a man become a woman?”
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/01/15/whats-wrong-with-nikki-haley-on-trans-issues-n605162
making it again obvious that’s she’s totally unprepared with answers to what should be top-20 questions.
Still, she got $300,000 for a year as director of Boeing, so she must have some smarts…somewhere…Bueller?
My neighborhood was built out in 1968. We are about a block from the three phase branch that feeds our section. That branch is fed about 8 blocks from our street. Beyond that it’s all high voltage grid.
In our neighborhood, they replaced all the poles, and are working thru transformers, up stream of me. The power co. replaced my drop when I reported the issues with the insulation coming off.
It’s all newer than what feeds the house I grew up in south of Chicago. Until Harvey, our power was rock solid, so much so that I didn’t really feel the need for a whole house gennie. The stuff that was flooded had a long term lasting impact on the whole network.
The power co. is spending money and upgrading things. They just did a MASSIVE add to the main distribution line that passes near me, and then on to the northwest where all the new housing is going in. They replaced all the high tension towers and pulled new lines. They’ve been doing huge amounts of infrastructure upgrades to deal with all the growth.
I think that is the issue though, they are concentrating on the new build and not any old maintenance issues.
n
Add customers and income ahead of reliability.
Climate Fraud In New Zealand
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/15/climate-fraud-in-new-zealand/
Government green weinies fudged the numbers and inflated warming by 168% (see graph caption).
Another way of saying this would be that government claimed warming was THREE TIMES higher than the actual temperatures showed.
Tag the liars, then when the food gets short don’t feed ‘em, or better yet, feed them what they’ve been shoveling.
>> It’s interesting that the HA map only shows two cities in Iowa. Have to wait for tomorrow’s breakdown, but I think I could put pins in the counties where Haley’s support is concentrated, and one is Bolshevik City just south of CR.
So far, Trump has won 98 of 99 counties. The 99th hadn’t reported yet.
>> Second has the sterling quality of being NOT THIRD.
Ricky Bobby: “Second is the first last.”
>> During the holidays, a sign went up on the open land between the Strip and I15 “location for the future bullet train between Vegas and Los Angeles.” LOL, who’s paying for that? Even if it happens, based on other bullet train projects, I won’t be alive to ride it.
Let ‘Tony’ build it…his Boring Company already has a bit of a head start in LV.
Vivek pulls out, endorses the Donald.
Wow.
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I just got in from putting a wind shield around the pipes for my instant hot water heater. I also plugged in the 100w incan bulb I put there last time we froze. Ceramic heater was still laying on the ground under the heater too, but it’s had 2 years exposure to the elements, and while the heat came right on, the fan seemed a bit weak. Didn’t want to take a chance the fan would die, the elements would overheat, and there’d be a fire three feet from the gas line… so light bulb will have to do.
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26F currently with some wind. It certainly feels cold.
n
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Must have misplaced my invite…
n
Really DM? 6 is enormous?
If that attitude is common, then the west is doomed.
n
Oof. I’ve got to stop working with our masters program, at all. I let myself get talked into being an examiner for three thesis defenses this year. I failed two of the three, and really should have failed the third one. Pathetic efforts. Of course, the program dean will “rescue” all of the failing students somehow, because you literally cannot fail out of his program.
Why? Because the school earns good money with it. He is a hero to the school admin for running such a successful program.
It’s not the students’ fault, not really. Sure, they put zero effort into their thesis projects, but that’s the level of expectations the program has prepared them for. When they lose the lottery and get someone like me for an examiner, well…
Good for you, Brad! Rigorous is right. Diluting degrees does nothing but a disservice to those who toiled for them.
22F at 435am. Decided to run the hot water to the furthest outlet, since I was up. Was reading, and didn’t realize the time.
Now it’s back to bed.
IDK what I’d do these days. I wouldn’t last in an office with the thought police and snowflakes. I wouldn’t last on campus with the lack of competence being rewarded, and the utter certainty that I’m the source of everyone’s problems being shouted from every rooftop.
Field service, where you have to be competent, or you don’t get sent back out, where I was in charge of my own job, saved me for a while. but even that had a constant conflict with the dead weight back in the office, and fostered an Us vs Them attitude that isn’t healthy for a company.
I’m glad I don’t have to do it right now. And when I look around to see what is there for me to do, I don’t see much.
This can’t really continue. The Sons of Martha labor long and hard, but eventually, they’ll only labor for themselves.
n