08:35 – Colin still had the squirties yesterday, so Barbara called our vet. We hauled him out there for a checkup late yesterday afternoon. She put him on metronidazole BID for five days and recommended (as Jenny had earlier in the comments) giving him two tablespoons of canned pumpkin twice a day for soluble fiber. We stopped at Lowe’s on the way home and Barbara grabbed several cans of 100% pumpkin. As it turns out, Colin loves the stuff, so we’ll keep it in stock. Barbara is going to start using it instead of lunch meat to give him his pills every morning.
The movers came yesterday to give us an estimate for the move. It’s based on weight and distance. Up to about 11,000 pounds, it’s $22.50 per hundred pounds, which’d run us about $2,000 for the weight he estimated. The price per hundred pounds drops after 11,000 pounds, so it might go up to about $3,000 maximum if we have them haul a lot of our extra heavy stuff like canned food. I can haul 1,000 pounds at a time in the Trooper, or about $225 worth per trip, and Al can haul 1,600 pounds at a time in his pickup, or $360 worth, so we’ll haul a lot of the stuff that’s heavy but easy to fit in one of vehicles. In other words, we’ll have them haul up furniture and light but bulky stuff, while we’ll haul stuff like LTS food and water bottles. It doesn’t make sense to have them haul, say, cases of bottled water. They cost only about $3.50 per 50-pound case, and they’d charge $11.25 in haulage fees.
We close on the house this coming Monday, the 30th, for which we have a house-sitter lined up to stay at the old house. Moving day is Friday of next week, so as of Friday 12/4 we’ll officially be living in Sparta. We’ll still be down to Winston-Salem frequently, both to get the house ready to go on the market and to haul up stuff that we don’t have the movers haul for us. I’m not too worried about security at the old house. After 12/4, the only stuff left here will be low-value items that aren’t worth stealing.
Outstanding, Bob! Congrats to you and Barbara and that squirty little mutt!
Best wishes for the future!
Your idea of valuable and a crack head’s idea are wildly different.
Copper wire ripped from the walls. Copper pipe ripped from the walls. Brass plumbing fixtures ripped from the walls. Rain gutters and down spouts ripped from the walls. Aluminum siding stripped as far up as people can reach.
$40k damage for $40 scrap.
Not a fun situation to walk in on.
nick
We don’t have any crackheads in this neighborhood, and our next door neighbor lady watches everything constantly and calls the cops if there’s anything unusual going on.
“Your idea of valuable and a crack head’s idea are wildly different.”
As illustrated in minor fashion by the “Bubbles” character and his minions on “The Wire.” No crackheads around here, either, that we know of, but crystal meth and heroin and pills are big. And of course, booze, as always.
Our immediate neighbors seem OK so far, at least one is a fellow ‘Nam vet. And at least one is armed, as is the postmistress. County sheriff HQ a mile up the road, and occasional drive-bys from the city PD who have their contract patrolling the town as well (and this village) and the state police. We also sometimes see Border Patrol, Customs and Immigration and the Federal buildings and grounds police/security in the AO here. And National Guard troops all the time.
Can’t seem to find much going on yet with CERT training but will keep looking.
Our big T-Day dinner thing is on Saturday, so today is just another day of grunge and scut cleaning work and I’m doing the stuffing and cranberry sauce in advance. Also the pumpkin pie.
Overcast/partly sunny with heavy winds and gusts all night long and all day today so far. Surf off the shore and spray shooting 30 feet in the air off the remaining wharf. In the 50s and no need yet to fire up the wood stove or the oil heat.
Happy Thanksgiving day to all.
While we are certainly in uncertain times, everyone here must have something to be thankful for.
Store up the good times. There’s a real possibility these will be ‘the good old days.’
Don’t let them pass you by while focusing on the future.
nick
@Bob,
Page titles are off a month, for example, today’s says “Thursday, 26 October 2015”.
ooh, it was yesterday too, and that’s translating into the ‘recent comments’ too.
Date is correct where it autofills, on comments.
I guess the date on the post title is just text, entered manually?
nick
Merry Thanksgiving!
Had our traditional cornbread stuffing with oysters and serrano peppers. Except, Dad made it (under Mom’s supervision) instead of Mom. Her chemo treatments have just about done her in and luckily are over. Radiation next for her.
Hope Colin gets better and hope for a clean closing.
_The Martian_ by Andy Weir
http://www.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir/dp/0553418025/
A freestanding book, no prequel, no sequel that I know of. Interesting variation on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe story. You want hard science, I’ve got your hard science right here. I did not run into a single problem with the story other than the fact that this is a $10 to $50 trillion program and thus, will never get funded. And, I loved the movie also. See the movie first then read the book.
So, your buddies take off and leave you alone on Mars with one year of food. Your new buddies will arrive on Mars in three years. What do you do?
I was horrified by the author’s solution to the problem of feeding the five marsnauts if they did not get resupplied on their Earth flyby on the way back to Mars. Necessary but, horrified.
There are two XKCD cartoons about the book and the movie!
My son says that if you like the five minutes in the “Apollo 13” movie where they are fixing the spaceship, you will like this movie because the entire movie is one crisis after the other.
https://xkcd.com/1536/
And a totally weird coincidence between “The Martian” and “Fifty Shades of Grey”.
https://www.xkcd.com/1585/
An excellent “The Martian” review by Howard Taylor
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/the-martian-movie-review
“I declared that The Martian (novel) was the best hard science fiction novel I had ever read. It is not a perfect book, but it is an outstanding book that does “book things” brilliantly.”
“I’m now declaring that The Martian, (movie) is the best hard science fiction movie I have ever seen. It is not a perfect film, but it is an outstanding film that speaks the way only a film can, and uses the medium in ways that the very best films do.”
Even James Patterson gave the movie an A, “This is the perfect time for a smart, dramatic film that celebrates trying to accomplish what might seem to be impossible rather than giving up because it’s too damn hard (like fixing America’s schools).”:
http://www.jamespatterson.com/moviePicksArchives.php?ymd=15.1008#2
BTW, here is a cool picture of the “The Martian” movie Hermes spaceship:
http://www.space.com/30400-the-martian-how-to-stay-alive-on-mars-infographic.html
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (23,214 reviews)
” Page titles are off a month, for example, today’s says “Thursday, 26 October 2015”.”
I’d like to blame it on the technology, but Nick is correct that it was manually-entered text. Fixed. Thanks.
One criticism I read of The Martian is that Mars’ atmosphere is so thin that it would be well nigh impossible to actually have a dust storm. Mind you, I’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie, so I’m going on hearsay.
The atmosphere is certainly very thin on Mars. I could do the calculations on the wind loading (I did calculations on wind loading for crude distillation towers on the ship channel while I was in college). But, I am not interested enough at the moment.
The only real question that I have about “The Martian” is, could he grow potatoes in the habitat given Martian dirt and his poop as fertilizer? He started off with 20 potatoes and ended up with thousands of potatoes. But, no sunlight since inside the habitat. Plenty of soil, fertilizer and water.
Both my paternal grandfather and my father-in-law grew up on farms in Texas and upper New York State. They both maintained that six months out of the year when they were growing up, they and their siblings ate potatoes three times a day. It was many times their only food for weeks on end. But, they did have it for food always and they never starved. Just no variety.
So, if TSHTF, should I put in a potato patch immediately? My FIL maintains that they had a huge bin of potatoes in the farm house basement at all times that they were continuously pulling from and refilling. It was one of his jobs to pull potatoes and bring them upstairs for his mother to cook for him, his six siblings, and his father. he has said many times that he grew disgusted at the sight of potatoes by the end of winter. But, they always had food to eat.
Spuds were also the main ingredient in Ireland during the early 19th-C and we know how that turned out. I wanna get a pseudo root cellar setup down in the cellar this winter, where I can store spuds, carrots, turnips, etc., bought in bulk for the time being and then maybe we can figure out some way to get them growing in our small shady plot with clay soil. Haven’t done the research yet, and this weekend ain’t the time; we’re doing our T-Day dinner with guests tomorrow instead of yesterday so I’m on most of the food prep today and doing most of the cooking tomorrow.
I see from the radio and net nooz and my blizzard of “Black Friday” emails that the North Murkan derps are as usual going crazy out there. Maybe we’ll see some more riots, brawls, etc. again, a few on Drudge already. “Black Friday Matters” is his headline today. Where is the outrage?
One criticism I read of The Martian is that Mars’ atmosphere is so thin that it would be well nigh impossible to actually have a dust storm.
There are dust storms there, but nearly as strong as what is shown in the film.
Again, I think Lynn is off by a couple orders of magnitude on a Mars program cost. $100-200 billion for what we see in the movie, if done using more realistic base and spacecraft design.
The Earth-Mars cycler was built with crew and common areas like a luxury cruise ship, the reality is more like a submarine. The crew mess area is like a big restaurant in size – think more like the officer’s mess in “The Hunt for Red October”, where they had squeeze in a booth around a small table.
Again, I think Lynn is off by a couple orders of magnitude on a Mars program cost. $100-200 billion for what we see in the movie, if done using more realistic base and spacecraft design.
The Earth-Mars cycler was built with crew and common areas like a luxury cruise ship, the reality is more like a submarine. The crew mess area is like a big restaurant in size – think more like the officer’s mess in “The Hunt for Red October”, where they had squeeze in a booth around a small table.
Keep in mind that the Earth to Mars trip is optimally 8 months. It can be longer. The book makes the point that if the crew spends their entire time in weightlessness then they will not be able to walk when they gets to Mars. So, the spinning habitat is needful. But, the book makes the point that the Hermes, the cycler I believe you call it, is the only spaceship built. Between the nuclear ion drive, the spinning crew area, the food and water storage for a crew of six, etc, etc, etc, I still price the spaceship at a trillion dollars. And, won’t the Hermes need to be built in GEO, way above LEO which is much more expensive to reach?
The author of The Martian acknowledged (in an interview on NPR’s “Science Friday” a month or two ago) that the windstorm thing was an error and that he’d have had some other initial disaster if he could do it over again. (He said what the replacement disaster would be, I just don’t remember it.)