71F and wet.
Wife finally made it home sometime after 130 this morning.
I’m so tired I can barely think.
Review of my class last night (full auto on the range!) and a lesson learned later this morning.
n
Wed. May 8, 2019 – lotta stuff going on
28 Comments and discussion on "Wed. May 8, 2019 – lotta stuff going on"
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@Lynn: Saw the pictures of the flooding on your property. Having been there I have some gauge of what the place normally appears. That is a lot of water in a short time. Scary.
45º and cloudy, with a very low chance of rain today. (Tomorrow is another matter). Sunsets lately have been poor because of the clouds, but they’ll clear up. Summer sunsets around here are amazing.
Hearing Lynn’s and Nick’s accounts of the weather in Houston brings home how big that metropolitan area really is. 1″ versus 14″ to 20″ is rather significant.
I live in an area with very good drainage, and won’t be flooded in a 1000 year storm. Might have water in the basement, but that’s quick to drain unless I clock the pipe to the orchard. I would hate to live anywhere that I had to worry about earthquakes or floods. Or hurricanes. Tornadoes & blizzards are bad enough, and they’re prep-able.
Houston weather is very micro-climate… I’m tucked into a corner between two expressways and they act as windbreaks. It is surprising how many storms stay just south of I 10 (the major E-W freeway, and the middle of Houston.
It’s also important to remember Houston is on the Gulf of Mexico. That’s a lot of water and open area…
n
bitcoin
“This isn’t the first time that Binance has been targeted by cyber thieves. These types of hacks are embarrassingly common. In Q1 alone, hackers stole more than $350 million in crypto.”
“Aaaannnnnd…. it’s gone.”
n
Houston weather is very micro-climate… I’m tucked into a corner between two expressways and they act as windbreaks. It is surprising how many storms stay just south of I 10 (the major E-W freeway, and the middle of Houston.
I-10 probably runs at a specific elevation.
I-75 around Tampa is approximately where the thunderstorms form in the afternoon during the rainy season. I don’t think that is a coincidence
Well, last night was the last session of my Citizen’s Police Academy with HPD.
Topic was tactical and SWAT. Presentation was led by a doorkicker and “knuckledragger” and his entry team. There was a LOT more joking and jostling than any of the other presenters. Esprit de corps runs high in SWAT.
Showed the history of SWAT in Houston (established ’74, only 2 years after Daryl Gates created SWAT in LA.) A lot of the guys have been with SWAT for more than 2 decades.
Covered their varied missions. They do 8-10 high risk warrant service calls a month, and on average about 20 SWAT callouts. They can insert by air, or now by marine as well as rolling up in their Explorers.
They went to great lengths to emphasize the non-lethal gear they deploy and the negotiators… (taser, beanbag shottie, 40mm grenade launcher with rubber rounds, teargas, etc).
The best part was shooting the M4, full auto. we got 10 round mags, one each. I shot 4 singles, then 2x 3 round bursts. Loud. Not much recoil.
The other best part was working the shoothouse with simunitions. I shot bad guys, didn’t hit the good guys (but did shoot at them mistakenly). I would like to do a WHOLE LOT MORE shoothouse practical shooting.
We do our ‘graduation’ tonight. It’ll be weird having my Tuesday nights free again.
I heartily recommend that EVERYONE try to find a CPA, PIP, RideAlong, or other outreach program in your AO. No matter what you expect, learning how things work in your area is a plus. Being a credentialed ‘friend’ of the org can’t reasonably hurt either. Being a ‘known quantity’ to them will open up other volunteer and training opportunities too.
n
And I-90 in Northwestern PA is along a ridgeline. Weather forecast applies to “North of 90” and “South of 90” on a regular basis in the winter.
I think Divemedic nailed it.
” Nothing to see here
Wonder why yesterday’s school shooting in Colorado was swept from the news cycle so quickly? Two hours after the story broke, the national media had already returned to talking about the 2020 election.
The two shooters were a tranny and an 18 year old gay man who is a registered Democrat. They used a handgun. The shooters didn’t match the media’s agenda of making guns owners look like racist white Republican males who are using “assault weapons” to butcher kids and minorities.”
CNN mentions it down the page.
MSNBC doesn’t even have it on their home page, it’s all TRUMP all the way down.
even FOX (which hasn’t been ‘right’ for a long time) has disappeared the story.
As usual, DailyMail still has coverage.
n
Apropos yesterday’s “creatures of light” theme:
South Africa can’t say when rolling blackouts will end
Like Venezuela, SA appears to be another victim of “bad luck.”
Over The Hedge: fairy tales
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2019/05/08
You know, Verne is not wrong.
Don’t know if anyone else has seen it recently, but I just got one of those “500” errors after I refreshed they page to get the latest comments.
Wizard of Id: spring cleaning
https://www.gocomics.com/wizardofid/2019/05/08
Heh.
Apropos yesterday’s “creatures of light” theme:
South Africa can’t say when rolling blackouts will end
Like Venezuela, SA appears to be another victim of “bad luck.”
The rolling blackouts will end when they lose electrical power totally.
Have not seen any 500 errors for a couple weeks.
Page views count ranges from about 600 (28 Apr) to 900 (29 Apr, 6 May) per day. Page views. Visitor count is steadily around 150/day.
BTW, the site is running WordPress 5.2 (the latest – updated yesterday). All plugins are current. PHP version is 7.2.11, running FastCGI. Server is Linux 4.14.67-grsec-grsec+ x86_64 .
And Google News is showing the Colorado school shooting stories on the headlines section still.
Is google news an aggregator or a producer?
n
Google News is a news aggregator and app developed by Google. It presents a continuous, customizable flow of articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available on Android, iOS, and the web.
Wikipedia
https://news.google.com/
Nothing at all suspicious about this story…
” Mother-of-four, 45, who had survived two previous house fires is killed in Harlem apartment blaze along with her children and step-brother ‘after she fell asleep while cooking and left burner on’
Andrea Pollidore, 45, her two daughters, ages 11 and six, two sons, aged eight and three, and a 33-year-old man believed to be her stepson, died in the fire inside their Harlem apartment overnight.”
”
I just saw My name taken in vain yesterday. In My great mercy I shall not smite he who blasphemed Me.
Haven’t been commenting here and barely been reading because I’ve been ludicrously busy for the past couple weeks — one health issue after another for family members, the various maintenance that has to be done on house and vehicles, obligations for shuttling kids around, and on and on.
In less annoying news, two weekends ago my daughter and I made a big batch of cookies, enough for her entire school.* She reported that evening that she was the hero of the day and that the cookies were very popular. News flash: kids like chocolate chip cookies, especially surprise chocolate chip cookies.
* More than enough, in fact. It turns out that a surprisingly large minority of the student body is gluten free. Given that something like half a percent of the US population is clinically gluten intolerant, either there’s a mysterious cluster of intolerance around here or 10% of the mothers** of the students are hypochondriacs at least where their children are concerned. There are others, such as the one kid, whose mother is a vegetarian, who “can’t” eat any animal protein, Raisin Girl, who “can’t” eat raisins, and others.
** It’s always the mother who claims the child is allergic to this or sensitive to that or needs special handling because of the other thing. At least, I don’t know of a single exception.
Translation: Win32 isn’t going away anytime soon.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-wants-to-close-the-uwp-win32-divide-with-windows-apps/
We are holding together here on the west side of Sugar Land. The Brazos River is right below the moderate flooding stage. Our 40,000 gpm of pumps is steadily running, reducing the water levels in our bayous because Thursday and Friday are forecasted to be doozies with either 1 inch of rain or 8 inches of rain depending on whose forecast you believe. 40,000 gpm of pumps is good for removing 8 inches of rain over 24 hours over our 2,000 acres. Our bayous can hold 8 inches of rain and our streets can hold another 4 inches of rain reputedly. And then things get nasty like they did yesterday.
https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=HGX&gage=RMOT2
After yesterdays official 12 inch rain I am once again ready to move to higher ground. My neighbors unofficial rain gauges are showing 14, 17 and even 19 inches of rain. Some of my neighbors got their houses flooded with 15 inches of water in their homes yesterday. That particular area of our 2,000 acre subdivision has never even flooded the streets before according to them.
I know that nobody around here has this problem (includes picture showing off all the gubs):
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hundreds-weapons-seized-ritzy-los-angeles-neighborhood-n1003551
And the dirty thieving bastards are just chucking them on the ground. Notice that “there was no threat to the public.”
This is because, unlike books in the Unseen College, simply having a lot of guns together in one place doesn’t cause danger to the public.
n
I wonder just what kind of “illegal” guns they were…
‘cuz the seized guns look like run of the mill shottys and wood stocked rifles….
n
In the midst of the turmoil and concern, there are light hearted moments. One of my neighbors put a picture of a milk carton on our private Facebook group. He inserted a picture of his trash can with the caption, “Have you seen me ? I was last seen floating down xyz street.”
And, he was serious ! Those big trash cans are about $70 or more.
Ummm.
The article makes mention of an illegal cache of weapons. They do not mention what law was broken.
What law was broken?
The name of the gun owner was redacted.
I see – there’s a local story says that he violated his federal firearms license. “conducting illegal firearms transaction outside the scope of the federal firearm license that the individual possess (sic).”
@Harold: Dialysis is no fun at all. I don’t blame your wife for being grumpy. On the other hand, it’s no picnic for everyone around her either. I saw this with my dad – the whole routine was nearly as hard on my mother as it was on him. Be sure to take some time for yourself, to recharge your batteries. Hiring that cleaning service was a good idea!
That article about the weapons cache: there’s something more going on. Apparently, the guy the arrested is not the owner. According to one article I read, the owner lives in Europe, and the house was supposed to be empty. So the guy is likely a long-term squatter, who was running a racket out of the house. This would all be non-news, if the racket didn’t involve guns. Because it does, the liberals get all over-excited.