Raining wet and flooded. I’m making assumptions as I’m writing this much earlier than I normally do. Yesterday alternated heavy rain, light rain, rain, and small periods of not rain. Lake came up a good 8 inches over the course of the day.
So I watched the slowmo flood yesterday, unloaded my truck, and decided I’d better stay up here and manage the aftermath. And there will be some, as the dockhouse started to get wet around 830pm. Tile floor, and plywood paneling instead of drywall should help with the eventual drying out. Dunno if that will start today, or if I’m here at the lake for this week.
I didn’t want to take a chance on a power outage keeping me from posting, with all the lightning we started to get last night, so this isn’t as timely as normal. If I don’t update in the morning, there’s probably a power issue up here, unless the Ruskies EMP’d us, in which case I’m talking to myself anyway…
Either more rain and flooding today, or I start cleanup.
Fun times. Didn’t have 100 yr flood on my card for this year. And didn’t have it for the BOL at all. I got that wrong.
So I deal with it, because that’s what I do.
Fortunately I already have a big dehumidifier here, and fans, and portable heat. And as a Houstonian, this won’t be my first flood.
Prepping. It’s not just what’s for breakfast.
Stack the stuff you need.
nick
Ugh.
Best wishes to you and your neighbors.
AAPL also doesn’t have an AI play.
Who knows if that is a smart move on Tim’s part. The monkey trick will eventually run out of gas, but the C-suites still want to believe that AI will let them fire a lot of people.
In the meantime, dealing with the key hardware vendors is a gigantic pain in the a**.
I also believe that The Gecko and Abel will make another run at Oncor should the opportunity present itself, having lost the bidding at the last moment when the operator previously changed hands.
Another factor is that having that much of Berkshire’s portfolio tied up in a business they don’t own outright with such intense need for capital like Apple’s probably makes the Gecko nervous.
Having BRK.B be such a sizeable chunk of my non-401(k) holdings in addition to AAPL stock of my own makes me uncomfortable.
Well, the lake did continue to rise, and I dont’ think we’re peaked yet. I now have over 7 inches in the dockhouse lower level. It’s lower at the lake side, because of course it is, where there is almost 10″ of water up the wall, but it’s only half way up the pony wall for the upper level, so 7″. That sloping slab will make drainage easier, when there is someplace to drain to.
Wife says we are about 1.5 feet below the emergency spillway of the dam. If we get another 1.5 ft of rise, the upper level of the dockhouse will be wet too.
We have rain in the forecast. I should start moving stuff out of the upper level, at least the scopes and stuff that is sensitive to damp as well.
Coffee will be in the cup shortly, then me shortly after. Which is a small bright spot. And that it’s only 68F and not 98F.
n
I guess I should have moved the stuff when I still had access with the pickup truck. No one has seen levels like this in 40 years though.
n
ARRRrrrrgggg!!111! I forgot to put a pod in the coffee maker. What a cruel disappointment to get a cup of hot water instead of french roast! [insert gnashing of teeth and wailing] Cruel world, indeed.
n
LOL, just yesterday I forgot to put coffee in the Breville filter. Hot, murky water greeted me.
It’s cool man! The machine needed rinsing anyway. Grin.
Megan Kelley played the audiobook portion of Kristi Noem’s “I shot my dog…” memoir. In her own words, and compared to interviews, it is as bad for her career as you think. She “Mitt Romney’d” herself. The Dumbocrats will bring this up to no end. I can just imagine the talk with her ghost writer:
GW: “We are a little light on the word count…”
KN: “Well, I shot my puppy ‘cause I’m a tough chick.”
During the audio clip, she says “Got that Joe Biden?” She better bow before tRump.
Seeing some of the neighbors driving around. Very few have any real structures other than docks that are affected. The moisture is going to be the main problem for me as the rest of the structure gets steamy. The water itself just gets things wet, but the condensation grows mold.
At the moment it is very still up here. No waves, no wind. No noise. Unlike the hurricane when it’s all chainsaws and generators, there is little to do until the water recedes.
Wife looked at the level recorder and thinks we might have peaked for now. We’re down a tiny bit since last night.
With more rain coming, we need this bathtub to drain…
n
@nick:
That’s better than not putting your cup under the spout, and wasting the coffee pod (Tassimo, in my case).
G.
Yes, that is a small bright spot!
——–
looking over the DM this morning, and it finally clicked. Has anyone else noticed an increase in the number of stories featuring violent or disturbing WHITE crime? They are usually several years old when you read the article, and it’s often unclear why they are back on the page. DM is very good about following up on stories, no matter how long it takes, but these aren’t updates to a case, or a “what ever happened to xxxxx” story.
I find it odd if I’m really seeing what I think I’m seeing.
Hmmm.
n
While remaining silent about showering with one’s teenage daughter, or somehow going from deeply in debt to having a net worth of tens of millions in only four years on a Representative’s salary.
Yes, over the past year. Maybe not that long. And Emmett Till has been brought up several times in the past month or so.
RE: pone to PC transfer problem: Often the phone is invisible to the PC. Tried different ports, cables, and setting on both ends. nada. The next time it links automatically as soon as the cable is plugged in. Worked fine last night. Today the phone is a ghost. WTF… All I did was charge the phone over night.
What would it cost to lower the emergency spillway?
The water management districts won’t do that unless property is severely threatened.
Central Texas has been in a prolonged drought, and as the aquifers continue to be drained, the dam/lake systems become more important than ever in maintaining the water supply.
I think we’ve noted in here before that 100 year weather (flooding, snowfall, freezing temps, etc.) isn’t really 100 year weather. I think you need to divide by 5 when it comes to these 1000, 500, and 100 year events.
>>“Warren Buffett Just Sold More Than 100 Million Shares of Apple, and the Reason Is Eye-Opening”
@Greg, has it been revealed how much the Gecko lost selling off its Paramount position?
YEah, the “100 year flood” thing is really a mis-named statistical thing, not a prediction for how often a big one actually happens. Shorter to use it though.
We seem to have peaked unless more rain hits. The monitoring station actually is down a fraction.
The lake is still smooth with no wind, which has been very helpful. I have been “sweeping” the floating debris off my dock and property back out onto the lake. MUCH easier to move it when it floats than after it’s deposited on surfaces.
I’m glad I turned the power off, I’ve got at least one receptacle under water even if all my work holds up as watertight. That means I’ll have to be careful turning it back on though, removing that receptacle as a start…
W says no insurance cover for the dock or dockhouse. It was crazy expensive when they quoted us for everything, so we cut back. Still probably a good decision but I won’t know for sure until we’re all back together.
n
The rain is moving into San Antonio. Thunder bumpers so far.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/05/13/us-has-been-withholding-intel-on-hamas-locations-tunnels-n3788300
No, but the annual report had the holding figures
Even in February, that stake was still projected to be one of the company’s biggest deals of the year when the Skydance deal closed.
Something bad happened in the last couple of months at Paramount.
About a kilo of C4. Not sure of pricing on that where you are. Do you have friends in low places?
Hang in there, Nick. Glad you’re not manning the lifeboats just yet.
Apparently, the information is in one of the SEC filings, but I couldn’t cite the specific document.
The Googles would probably be able to give an answer.
Solved the problem with the water feature. My foundation is dead level, but the center sits on (is hiding) a cover that provides access to our sewage pipe. I thought it was level, but it’s not, so it tilted the whole thing. A bit of gravel under the rim leveled the lid. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the essence.
Not even necessary. Get a number of lengths of flexible plastic drain line, 6″ diameter or bigger, length as determined by the layout of the spillway. Set up a row of the the drain line along the spillway and get them siphoning. They’ll stop automatically when the level goes down enough.
While it’s true that suitable application of explosives will solve almost any problem, explosives aren’t always necessary. In fact, and this is a thing I’ve had trouble convincing people of, sometimes explosives are not the best solution to the problem.
Then the Feds knock on the door because your siphoning rig endangered the endangered Texas plaid river smelt.
What would it cost to lower the emergency spillway?
About 20 years of discussions with The Army Corps Of Engineers with engineers and lawyers. And then the answer will be no.
I think we’ve noted in here before that 100 year weather (flooding, snowfall, freezing temps, etc.) isn’t really 100 year weather. I think you need to divide by 5 when it comes to these 1000, 500, and 100 year events.
At least divide by 5. Maybe divide by 10.
Until the 1960s, we moved rivers around willy nilly in the USA. Somebody would say, I want to have the Mississippi further away from my land to their congresscritter and the congresscritter would put money in the Army Corps of Engineers budget for the next year. No studies, no environmental impacts, no nothing.
And the new river path would invalidate the old river water level gauge so they would just throw it out and start over. Crazy. So we don’t even have a 100 years of data for most water level gauges.
RIP.
Two words: Lethal Weapon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY-UNDCLQbI
Texas invented “swimming naked”.
Divide by 20.
“Newsom Forced To Slash California Budget, Blames Crippling Deficit On “Rain Bombs” And Tax Shortfalls”
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/newsom-forced-slash-california-spending-blames-crippling-deficit-rain-bombs-and-tax
“In the course of two years, California has turned a $100 billion surplus into a $73 billion deficit, forcing governor Gavin Newson (D) to propose painful (token) spending cuts on Friday while announcing his revised state budget.”
Just remember this when the party replaces Biden with Nuisance this summer at the convocation. Nuisance likes to spend money he don’t have. Since the USA does not have a balanced budget requirement, he can go whole hog. Chickens in every pot !
And State Farm is leaving California. Pretty soon there will nothing left but grifters.
FIFY Gotta go Green, man, gotta go Green!
“SpaceX’s Starlink Pulls Through Solar Storm Without Major Impact”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacexs-starlink-pulls-through-solar-storm-without-major-impact
“Several recently launched Starlink satellites also sailed through the solar storm without disruption, according to SpaceX, which had warned of potentially ‘degraded service.’”
Cool !
Start siphponing at the emergency spillway when the first dock is about to go under. Add more siphons as the water rises. Remove them when the above first dock is clear. No one talks to the Corps of Engineers.
The renewal notice came for my driver license. $43. It was $33 last time. I put the receipt in the truck in case I forget my wallet so I’ll have something with my license number.
Water is down about 1 ½ inch so far but there are rumbles in the distance and some light spattering of rain just started.
REALLY don’t need a bunch more rain tonight.
Wife says Houston is pitch black and about to get hammered.
n
Teslas in every one percenter’s garage. Electric skateboards for the remaining 99 percent.
FIFFY (FIFurtherFY)
I just don’t know about the wISP folks. This morning I had an e-mail from them:
My anomalies?
I replied. “Of course I’m offline! My radio BLEW UP. It’s in parts and pieces. I do know about the credit on my account. It’s because you needed cash to buy radios and I was to get it back in a month…. but it’s ok as an account credit, you were going to get it anyway ”
Chris: Like, “blew up, blew up” ?
Me: In pieces
Chris: Of course, which is the 3rd point on your account. I was just going to ask for another 2 weeks to get it back.
Holy crap, I kinda can’t wait to get a picture of that, lol
Me: It looks like the Ethernet jack is still on the end of the wire. I found the circuit board and it’s kind of smoky. The power supply is dead. My router was zapped, just a dim power light. And a brand new switch was fried.
Chris: Dang.
—
I posted a picture on discord today. Sheesh. I entered a trouble ticket a week ago Friday. Sometimes it seems like every day is a brand new world to Chris.
The POE has a little vent on the bottom. Though, by memory I think it’s a reset button for the radio. Poke it with a paperclip. Because, hey, a radio up on a pole and having to drop the pole to push a reset button is silly. The little vent / reset button has char smoke.
I’m actually lucky that I lost only my router and the new switch. I could have lost everything on the switch. A PC, a Squeezebox, and a Nanobeam.
I posted a picture on discord today. Sheesh. I entered a trouble ticket a week ago Friday. Sometimes it seems like every day is a brand new world to Chris.
https://www.starlink.com
@SteveF
“explosives are not the best solution to the problem.”
To paraphrase JEP: Best is the enemy of good enough.
And “boom” is usually good enough and entertaining.
Rain rain go away, come again some other day…
REALLY would like the rain to stop. It’s about as light as it can be and still be called “rain” but still…
n
Yes. I know about Starlink. But I have a $1000 credit balance on my wISP account. And I really really do want them to succeed. They do a pretty good job for being a couple of brothers trying to make something cool. They are not assholes (sorry for cussing ladies) but they are overextended a bit.
They are getting a new fiber line to the main tower in Burnet. They have a 1GB line from one company. The new line is from another company and it’s 2GB for now and can go to 100GB. Planning ahead? You bet!
@nick – big storm in your area according to Windy.com . Ton’s of lightning flashes in South to NorthEast of Houston.
Real-time map certainly looks exciting … https://www.windy.com/-Weather-radar-radar?radar,29.854,-94.889,7
I had some lightning and thunder a few hours ago with a misty rain. It was dark in the house. It’s all moved away and while not sunny, it’s bright. I bet the mosquitoes are going be simply fabulous in the next few days.
The hummingbirds are on a tear today. Their feeder looked empty last night at sunset. This morning it was dry. I make sugar water a quart at a time. I give them about a pint when I fill the feeder. Keep the feeder clean.
Anyway. A pint this morning about 7 am and now at 4:30 pm it looks like I’ll have to refill around 6 pm. I counted 10 buzzing the feeder one time today. Pretty good crop of hummers this year.
I have to disagree. If the diligent application of kinetic disassembly techniques is not the answer, then one needs a better question.
That said, I am proud of my self-restraint today. I refrained from explaining to a distaff colleague in excruciating and excoriating detail just exactly what I think of her working practices.
I believe I saw some in Australia?, Singapore?, many moons ago. Flying jewels. Amazing. Enjoy them, Paul.
Already there, talking to my friends and relatives back in Cacafornia.
You skipped a chance to manspread in detail? Oh, right. Gotta watch out for the distaff folks in HR.
The hummers here are grey with a tinge of green on their bellies. They are not flashy like the birds you see in magazines. They are fun to watch no matter.
It’s sort of like sparrows compared to cardinals or bluejays.
There are a couple of concrete pads in the road from my cattle guard to the pavement. Places where the water runs.
One had a tiny trickle of water this morning. Enough to be wet. First time in maybe four years. It’s been dry here. The other, just some mud so far.
Spent a few minutes in a medical office’s waiting room this afternoon. TV was on. Of course. There were quite a few commercials and not a lot of show. Almost all of the commercials were for medical ailments of some kind.
The only one which stuck in my memory was a guy who claimed to be 36 and to have had a heart attack… because he used to smoke. Sounds legit. People have been smoking modern cigarettes for most of a century and it’s just in the past few years that there’s been a spike in heart attacks even as tobacco use has been declining. I totally believe that. Just like there have been student athletes and young pro athletes for a century but it’s only in the past few years that heart attack and stroke have been the #1 cause of death among young athletes. (Don’t bother waving “debunking” articles from Snopes, factcheck.org, wikipedia, or the NIH. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” means that ponderous, chin pulling analyses by any person or group with an agenda aren’t worth the match it takes to torch them.)
The youngest heart attack victim I know about directly was my father-in-law who was 43.
He did stop smoking but didn’t change any of his other lifestyle choices.
In the end, he was a victim of the nurses in the heart transplant program at UT Southwestern.
Killed by the healthcare system, not the cigarettes.
Dad lost a good friend at 35.
Heart attack on the golf course.
Dad was shook.
Psaki: Still a Lyin’ Psak”
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/05/13/jen-psaki-attacked-misinformation-about-biden-in-her-new-book-but-her-account-was-misinformation-n3788314
Noem tells a true if embarrassing story, gets pilloried for it, and isn’t fit for office.
Psaki tells a bald-faced lie and is already promising a correction in the next printing of the book, so she must be on the top of the Dems choice for VP now.
Gold Star Families Blast Jen Psaki’s Lies: ‘Her Useless A** Wasn’t Even There’
Mark Schmitz, whose son Jared was one of the 13 American service members killed in Afghanistan on August 26th, 2021, told Townhall that Psaki “will be hearing from our attorney, [and] so will her publisher…to the fullest extent of the law,” adding that “what she wrote was absolutely disgusting and clearly only for political and financial gain at the expense of grieving Gold Star families.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/matthew-foldi/2024/05/13/gold-star-families-blast-jen-psakis-lies-in-her-book-her-useless-a-wasnt-even-there-n2639005
She’ll be using MSNBC to flog that book, so they should put them on notice, too.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/11/judge-aileen-cannon-is-a-heroine/
Was Merrick Garland ever a competent attorney, or was his rejection as a supreme court nominee the excuse for his becoming a twisted partisan hack with no regard for the law?
After Trump gets re-elected the neocons and the NeverTrumpers will try to make the case that the Biden Crime Family, Clinton, Garland, Pelosi and the rest of the corrupt traitors should not be prosecuted. His response should be: “They will be investigated, the facts will be ascertained, and the law will determine their fate.”
All of the investigations should be headquartered in red states, preferably in the hometowns of patriots railroaded by the J^ inquisition.
That said, I am proud of my self-restraint today. I refrained from explaining to a distaff colleague in excruciating and excoriating detail just exactly what I think of her working practices.
“What is the meaning of distaff for a woman?”
“A ‘distaff’ is a long stick around which flax is wound in preparation for spinning. But the word is also used to describe the mother’s line of descent within a family. Distaff is a noun and adjective that refers to the mother’s line of descent within a family.”
Huh, I do not get what “distaff” means in this context.
Peppermint Patty?
She probably wants George Snuffleupagus’ gig in the “This Week” host rotation.
Casually, “distaff” just means female. C’mon, Lynn, it’s your native language.
I’m not saying that young(ish) people didn’t ever have heart attacks or strokes until a few years ago, but they were exceedingly rare, not even statistical noise. And most of them had some sort of problem, visible after the fact, like a congenital heart defect or -mumble-mumble- neuro transmitter problem which stopped signalling when -mumble-mumble- the person got dehydrated.
Sorry about the vagueness. Details faded since I looked into it in depth a few years ago, when I still had access to non-public medical information. (And I’m running on a couple hours sleep. Ran into a work problem last night which got knotty because of, it turns out, a bug in a widely-used Python package. Finally got to bed sometime after 0230 and still had to get up before 0500 to take care of the birds.)
I see your lake level & missing coffee pod and raise you a dental file broken off inside a root canal.
Still there btw.
A dental file? Is that the barbed thing they use to pull the wiggly earthworm looking nerves out while doing a root canal? How the heck?
Yeah, kind of a rasp. Hair thin, I have slender roots, just snapped off. I also have lots of calcification that required a rasp apparently, this all took forever.
The oral surgeon suggestion is to simply leave it there as a metal post, it’s made of titanium (unless it is hurting by the time the crown is ready, then more surgery will be needed).
Fine by me.
I’m bouncing hard off of the walls tonight.
I went and got a box of cremains this morning. So that’s done. One more step to somewhere…..
No one is online or doing e-mail lately. The kids? yeah, they have their own lives. I have no complaint there.
It’s just a thing. I sorta figured out many years ago that I was going to outlive all of my friends, pretty much everyone I know. And you know what? It sure is quiet around here.
Huh. Where are all the old folks?
My dentist that did my root canal was really cool. He let me make payments. I didn’t have a car so it was like five miles on a bicycle. Pedal over and pay $50 a week. Dr. Wilbur was a good guy.
But it was really neat that the nerves he pulled out wiggled like earthworms. And he acted like most folks do not want to see that stuff. I was numb almost al the way to my right eyeball. And that tooth has not bothered me at all and it’s been about 40 years.
“Where are all the old folks? ”
I’m here but it’s almost bedtime.
“And he acted like most folks do not want to see that stuff.”
IIRC, it was Zelazny’s “Lord of Light” that included a scene where a sorcerer was using the entrails of a still-living rival to forecast the future. The dying man looked at the signs and told his murderer that he was all wrong.
“John Kerry Pushes Massive Tax Rises to Meet the $13.6 trillion Climate Finance Challenge”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/13/john-kerry-pushes-massive-tax-rises-to-meet-the-13-6-trillion-climate-finance-challenge/
“The public sector will have to provide about 30 per cent of climate finance globally, and the heat is building on governments to come up with ways of doing that.”
“The bill will be immense. If average global temperature rises are to be limited in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate finance globally will need to increase to about $US9 trillion ($13.6 trillion) a year globally by 2030, up from just under $US1.3 trillion in 2021-22, according to a report last year from the Climate Policy Initiative.”
Did we get rid of this guy back in 2020 ?
Doesn’t Kerry fly around the planet every month using thousands of gallons of jet fuel each month ? Just shut him down and we will go into a glaciation period.
Paul, do you want a phone number? Much of your night is my morning, if you want someone to talk to.
I don’t consider myself old, but I am on the downslope side of the half-century, and trying to continue further down the slope.
I had my carotid arteries Doppler scanned yesterday. My father had a stroke in his fifties because of a blockage, so it’s better I be checked out. The doctor was seriously noncommittal, so I see an angiogram in my near future. Joy, but still better than a stroke.
Watching Mark Serbu on YouTube. He is demonstrating a barrel rifling machine. I wonder how long before YT takes that one down…
>>And you know what? It sure is quiet around here.
@paul, watch much streaming TV? Several folks here do and can provide recommendations if you’re interested.
No update from @nick, hope all is well at the BOL.
If nothing else I suppose you’re validating some of your preps.
Phew, power is back up. Went down about 930pm, and was very messy doing so. Lot of low voltage flickering, stuttering, and surges. So I threw the main breaker to OFF and waited.
Got my kerosene lantern out and the kindle and sat reading until my buddy came to check on me. We chatted until midnight but it stayed dark. I finally got my phone and lappy and got in the truck. Drove to the top of the hill, and the first place I can get cell service without the booster, to call home, and post.
While I was talking with my wife, the streetlight came on, so I headed back home. That was 1 am. Got everything back up and running, did my post for tomorrow, and here I am.
That was a long outage by local standards. They are frequent, but usually shorter. Some standby auto fail over power system is moving higher up the list… although I was fine, and comfortable tonight, that isn’t always the case.
Now I’m so sleepy my brain itches. I’m off…
n