Wednesday, 10 September 2014

By on September 10th, 2014 in Barbara, personal

07:57 – Barbara and I were married 31 years ago today. It sure doesn’t seem that long. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it felt like maybe eight or nine years. Ten, tops.


12:18 – For those of you who are building emergency car kits, here’s something you might want to get while the getting’s good. I just noticed that one of Amazon.com’s third-party vendors is again selling Polar Pure water treatment bottles. I just ordered two of them for Barbara’s and my car emergency kits, at $20 each plus $4 shipping. These things are the gold standard in portable water purification. They’ve been off the market for several years, ever since the DEA put crystal iodine on their controlled list. My guess is that the DEA will shut down this company in the real near future, so if you’d like one or more of these, grab them now while they’re still available. Their shelf life is unlimited, and they’re rated to purify 2,000 quarts/liters each.

22 Comments and discussion on "Wednesday, 10 September 2014"

  1. bgrigg says:

    Congratulations to you both! Many husbands would say the opposite.

  2. Ron Snider says:

    Congrats on the harmony you both have achieved 🙂

  3. Chad says:

    Not to bash on marriage as I too am happily married with no regrets, but I do get a chuckle out of some of the bitter anti-marriage humor out there:

    Why get married? Just find a woman you hate and buy her a house.

    A husband comes home from work early, runs in the house, and excitedly yells, “Pack your bags, honey! I won the lottery!!!” His wife replies, “What should I pack for? The mountains or the beach?” He answers, “I don’t care, but pack your bags because you’re leaving!”

    🙂

  4. dkreck says:

    Yeah, well I was at 42 years on Monday. I always tell people it doesn’t seem like a day over 60 (then I get punched).

  5. Lynn McGuire says:

    Congratulations! We’ve been married 32 years and I hope that I see the 50th anniversary.

    Filled up both cars last night and will be doing a grocery run tonight after work. Filled up the 3rd car Sunday. Tomorrow is September 11 after all.

  6. Lynn McGuire says:

    My guess is that the DEA will shut down this company in the real near future, so if you’d like one or more of these, grab them now while they’re still available.

    There is only one bottle for sale there.

    I hate The War on Some Drugs ™. It has ruined our nation.

  7. Lynn McGuire says:

    I sure do hope that nothing happens tomorrow on September 11. I’ve got a Engineering ethics webinar scheduled to complete my required continuing education classes for my annual renewal of my license this month.

    I figure the chance of something nasty happening tomorrow that affects the nation is probably about the same as the space shuttle missions. About 1 in 99. In 135 missions, the space shuttle only had two uh-ohs. Pretty good for the most complicated machine ever built.

  8. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    There is only one bottle for sale there.

    I’m not sure what you mean. If you’re talking about the “1 new from $19.99” line, I think that refers to one vendor selling it, not to only one bottle available.

  9. Lynn McGuire says:

    I’m not sure what you mean. If you’re talking about the “1 new from $19.99″ line, I think that refers to one vendor selling it, not to only one bottle available.

    Oops! Gotcha, I read that as only one bottle available.

  10. SteveF says:

    Thanks for the heads-up, RBT. I just ordered two. (And, yes, they said “1 from 19.99” but Amazon accepted it when I changed the order quantity to 2.)

    Congrats on the anniversary. My only question is “31” in what base? 31(base)16 would be impressive, especially considering your claimed age. 31(base)4, not bad but not that impressive.

  11. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Base-10 unless otherwise specified.

  12. OFD says:

    Sixteen years for us this past August, as married by the JP in the Round Church in Richmond, Vermont. Fourteen years with the blessing of Holy Mother Church and the signature of Saint Pope Johannus Paulus Secundus.

    I was a newly confirmed Catholic and divorced; she was a cradle Catholic widow.

    Another roller coaster Windows/network boot camp today at work; and we interviewed a new graduate of the local tech high school and made an offer, so he can come in and take some of the help desk load off these tired old shoulders. He has half of the A+ done and the Stratus done, and is used to working under pressure; his present gig is as a fry cook at a very popular summer burger shack near the ski resorts between here and work. He’ll get a two-dollar per hour raise and learn from a genuine fossil who started out with the PDP-11 and DEC Rainbow. He sez he knows Windows desktops pretty good but not the server end, and limited Linux experience, but that’s OK. 3/4 of the chit at work is the Windows desktops, laptops and printers. I wanna have some time to plan a backup hw/sw infrastructure, upgrade just about everything, introduce the concept of redundancy there for critical areas (which my bosses understand but the owners cavil at paying for anything), and eventually a better focus on security stuff. We’ll also have to decide whether to stay with CentOS for our main machines or move to TUV, the upstream vendor.

    Dunno what the nooz is today, no clue, don’t care. Ten hours, straight out, plus the two hours of commuting.

    It’s Davy’s brief goof-off time now for a coupla hours…

  13. OFD says:

    Just ordered three of the Polar wottuh kits per rec of Dr. Bob.

    We gots to have wottuh, warmth, shelter, food, light, medical, and security.

    Still working on my kits; one small one for work if I gotta stay there overnights during a blizzard or sumthin, and a substantially larger one for each vehicle. Our main vehicle scenario is breaking down terminally on some isolated back road up here in the dead of a subzero winter’s days/nights with heavy snowfall and having to wait a while for assistance, if any. In the event of dystopian societal collapse, factor in self-defense needs as well, beyond the EDC that I do now anyway.

  14. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Just a couple notes on the Polar Pure.

    1. It’s designed to yield a final iodine concentration of 4 to 5 mg/L or 4 to 5 ppm. Most people can taste iodine at 2 or 3 ppm. You can eliminate that taste by adding a vitamin C tablet or powdered flavor that contains vitamin C. (Wait until after the recommended time for disinfection has passed, because adding the vitamin C converts the native iodine to colorless, tasteless iodide ions, which do not disinfect.)

    2. Like any water treatment system, the Polar Pure works better if you pre-filter the raw water to remove as much sediment and organic matter as possible before adding the iodine. I’ve added a funnel, coffee filters, and a filter cloth to my kits (basically, any old piece of reasonably tightly-woven cloth, such as from an old T-shirt). The cloth can be rinsed/washed and re-used indefinitely. I’d use it to catch the larger particulates, which is actually sufficient for pre-filtering. But I’d also use a coffee filter to remove finer particulates before treating the raw water with iodine.

    And, as I’ve said before, iodine treatment is a fallback method for when you can’t boil the water. Bringing water to a full boil immediately kills just about every living thing in it.

  15. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    A few minutes ago, I mentioned to Barbara that I’d heard from several of my readers that they’d ordered the Polar Pure, usually multiples of it, and that I wondered how long it’d be before the company ran out. I just now visited the Amazon page for the Polar Pure, which now says:

    Currently unavailable.
    We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.

    As I said to Barbara, that little company must wonder what the hell happened to cause a flood of orders.

  16. OFD says:

    Understood. Fallback method. When we can almost always find a means to boil wottuh, esp. here in this state, when many months of wintuh makes that a highly desirable skill outdoors. I just got the email from Amazon that they’d be here in another ten days or so, tops.

    Low 50s at night now and high 60s during sunny days. Maybe a shower tomorrow night then back to nice sunny days again. Another eleven days of summuh; today woulda been my dad’s 87th birthday, but he didn’t make it; gone at 71 of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Mom is 82 now with Pick’s Disease. Two brothers are cancer survivors and my sister is epileptic. Wife has Graves’ Disease. I’ve got some myopia and astigmatism, tinnitus in one ear (guess which one, haha), and they say, PTSD, but otherwise am just fine and dandy so fah. Oh, and three family members since the 1950s have died from gunshot.

    Back to the salt mine in the morning; I got one or two things done successfully today and for each of them another list of ten more things to do. The clock gets eaten up by hours and hours for each issue; couple here for a barcode label printer this morning, with email on my phone at 06:11. And a couple more there for dealing with Outlook problems, now multiplying. Top of the day with three hours of installing Windows 7 on a former Windows 8 machine and failing, and having to do it on another box instead. And failing again at getting Outlook to connect to the Exchange server. Two of the women in Shipping as much as said, or said outright, “Man, you really walked into a pile of shit here, didn’t ya?”

    Yeah, let’s try to connect Outlook 2010 on a Windows 8 box to Exchange 2007 on a 2003 server from a subnet and through two firewalls. Extra credit if you can figure it out and do it in an hour. While at least one person openly wonders why you haven’t got it done yet.

  17. MrAtoz says:

    Obummer gonna send troops and bombs to “eradicate” ISIS or sumpin’. I watched about 2 minutes on TeeVee and said WTF? We’ve checked Russian aggression? I guess he didn’t read about the Russian bombers playing nuclear war with us. Also, ISIS isn’t Islam ’cause Islam doesn’t kill innocents. The doofus is strong in this one.

  18. OFD says:

    The show must go on:

    “So, will the Islamic revolution in Europe come from within? Well, as of this writing, it could also come from ISIS, the new and hellish country that straddles both Syria and Iraq in an area bigger than Britain, and as large as France, with great oil reserves, a population of about six million, and a military capability that is second in the area only to Israel’s. Instead of allying ourselves with Assad of Syria, the new British Foreign Minister has ruled out any cooperation with the man who along with his father safeguarded Christians these last 50 years. The “Caliphate” will surely come to the aid of fellow Islamists if, say, the Muslims in Belgium decide to take power at the point of a gun.”

    http://takimag.com/article/hate_on_the_march_taki/print#axzz3CyC42lQC

  19. medium wave says:

    MrAtoz beat me to it, but a little piling on can’t hurt, esp. when the pile-ee is BHO:

    PEACE PRIZE PREZ DECLARES WAR….

    Who could’ve seen this coming?

  20. brad says:

    Maybe I am naive – wouldn’t surprise me in the least. But it seems to me that ISIS is an excellent opportunity for the US to stay home. The governments in the Middle East have actually had to sit up and pay attention – ISIS is a threat to all of them. If the US – indeed, the entire West – were to stay out of it, the Middle Eastern countries would have to deal with ISIS themselves – which might just have a beneficial impact on the whole region.

  21. joseph yeardly says:

    many congratulations and may there be many more to come

  22. MrAtoz says:

    Maybe I am naive…

    Please forward to US Congress and Obummer, please.

Comments are closed.