Stephen emails a dad joke appropriate for the Florida summer weather:
I saw where the meteorologist who invented the ‘feels like’ temperature had passed away. He was 80… but felt like 94.
Actually, 80/94 would be a big improvement on the current 96/119 (!). Florida, amirite?
Update:
Here's what it "feels like" to walk out into the southern sun at midday.
Remember, it's Florida, which means the humidity is off the charts. Sing it, Buster ,,,
Congratulations to the Florida Panthers - and particularly to Panther Center Sam Reinhart who tied a Stanley Cup record with four goals last night. The Stanley Cup now returns to its rightful home in the Sunshine State.
So on Saturday there was a "No Kings" protest at the local library. The Queen Of The World said that they posted pix on Facebook, so there were there in the morning.
But I went by there on my way to the supermarket at 11:00 AM and there was NOBODY there. Nada. Zip.
That's some righteous protest, right there. [rolls eyes]
Well, and our precinct, at least. I'm not sure what that means - there's no way that Kamala Harris will win deep red Manatee County, Florida. But Republican voters seem eager to turn out and vote.
I guess we'll see tonight.
So Florida voters can amend the Florida State Constitution via the ballot. Next month has a number of amendments for voters to consider, most notably Amendment 3 to legalize marijuana. I've been increasingly skeptical about this simply because there is a very well funded TV advertising campaign. Someone is putting a lot of money into this, which I find suspicious.
Well, the devil is in the details, and the fine print for Amendment 3 is, shall we say, interesting. The Polk County sheriff cuts through a lot of the fog in a way that I find pretty convincing. While I'm not adverse to legal pot, this seems to be a pretty bad way to go about it. I'm not a fan of changing the Constitution so that particular interests can make money.
Overall we are pretty pleased with how our preps went. We have a "hurricane kit" which is 3 storage tubs of stuff plus water jugs and equipment like a generator.
I plan on adding a set of tiler's knee pads to the kit for when I have to be on my knees setting up the hurricane shutters. I also think I'll add another 5 gallon gas can, just for an extra window. That will give be about a week of generator time.
I'll also get a one gallon gas can so that I don't have to lift 5 gallons of gas to gas up the cars. I don't like to keep gas around when we don't need it because you have to put in a stabilizer and it still ends up getting gunked up. I just fill up the cars (which keeps me out of the post-storm lines at the gas station) but transferring it to make the lift lighter would be good.
With the water cans we were in good shape, and we filled up the bath tub and washing machine for wash water. I am pretty comfortable that we could have ridden out a week fairly easily, maybe two with our water filters.
I'm thinking about getting Starlink for Internet because that will be back as soon as the storm passes; no linemen needed. The kit is $350 and install is ~ another $350. Not sure I want to spring for that right now.
I do think that a battery radio with AM/FM/Short Wave needs to be an addition to our kit.
I'm shocked at the number of neighbors who had essentially no preps at all. This was maybe a good window into what things might be if something serious happens. Since I'm the guy with the loud generator, this would make me a magnet. Ugh.
Back now - the Internet connection returned from where hurricane Milton blew it away to late last night.
We had a fair amount of damage. We figured we did when we heard the hurricane make weird noises on the roof. Ah, well - Florida. You catch a Cat 5 over your house every now and then.
I'll put up some thoughts later, but the one that really stands out is how I was the only guy with a working generator. Even people with medical devices that plug into the wall didn't have anything. It didn't look like most people did any prepping at all other than grab some extra toilet paper and maybe a case of water bottles.
I'm glad that I went to Home Depot for roof tiles on Thursday afternoon - there aren't any within a hundred miles now. We're newbies in Florida and even we know that was going to happen.
Sumd00d posted to the neighborhood Facebook group, recommending that people prepare their lanai screen for the high winds by cutting them.
[blink] [blink]
That's some righteous hurricane prep, right there [rolls eyes so hard you can hear it over the hurricane]
My thought is why not open all your windows to keep the wind from blowing them out, amirite? Sheesh.
That dot that says "M" on Wednesday at 7PM? Yeah, that's right over my house. They're calling for Cat 4 and a 12 foot tidal surge. We're on moderately high ground - if we flood then 80% of Florida is basically gone, but the folks on the barrier islands are looking at a fresh hell coming at them.
As is Joint Base McDill. Maybe if it hits there the military can get some quicker rescue going when it hits there than they did in North Carolina. Yes, that's pretty nasty to write. The fact that you can write that is even nastier, IMHO.
This seems to be a useful site, if you're on the water:
I give NOAA a lot of flak for their climate change nonsense, but this is exactly what you would want from a world class national weather bureau. The model may be wrong - all models are - but the fact that the tidal surge arrives at high tide is no bueno for McDill. I hope they are taking action, and I hope that people along the water are evacuating.
Lord Almighty, what a hurricane season.
Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind. Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.
So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:
Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.
...
While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.
Divemedic has some thoughts that are worth your time. The Silicon Graybeard does his preps. We're battened down for the fifth storm in the four years we've been here.
As you'd
expect, there's terrific classical music for this occasion; as a matter
of fact, you've probably heard it.
Antonio Vivaldi was one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his Four Seasons
suite of four violin concertos is without doubt his most famous work.
Sadly for him, it didn't help him very much - the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles VI died before appointing him court composer, and Vivaldi (like
Mozart after him) died in poverty.
But there aren't many who leave behind a legacy such as this. Vivaldi's
life story in a way matches the mood of autumn, with a glorious youth
behind it and a cold, poor finish ahead of it.
But don't let me harsh your mellow! The music is sublime, and the temperature (in Florida at least) will barely drop below 70 ...
More than $1 million worth of cocaine washed up on a beach in the Florida Keys after Hurricane Debby battered the Gulf Coast’s Big Bend Monday morning, officials said.
Debby, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane early in the morning, carried more than two dozen 70-pound packages of cocaine ashore as winds topped 80 miles per hour, the US Border Patrol said.
“Hurricane Debby blew 25 packages of cocaine (70 lbs.) onto a beach in the Florida Keys,” US Border Patrol acting chief patrol agent Samuel Briggs II said in a social media post.
Well all right then. I love Florida, but it has some goofy branding.
Yeah I know - hurricane season in Florida. Ian kind of blew past us a couple years ago and while it did have hurricane force winds here the rain went by pretty quickly. Debbie was the opposite - only 40 MPH gusts or so, but two solid days of soaking. They even had to do an emergency release of water from the Lake Manatee dam.
So yeah, it's pretty wet.
Wet. With continued wet throughout the day. It's Florida in hurricane season, right?
And to answer Graybeard's question, yes we are within the white cone:
So we're fine. My generator started up first pull a couple weeks back (you do run it every month, don't you?) so we weren't worried about all the TV ZOMGwe'reallgoingtodie!!!11!!
I mean, it's Florida in hurricane season, right?
Anyway, it looks like Graybeard is going to have a more interesting week than I will:
The other is that back in May, I got a reminder from "the system" that I'm due for a routine colonoscopy. The appointment, made well in advance, is for Tuesday. Those of you who have been through this know that the worst part of it is the night before, which is Monday night. With luck, the storm will stay on that track and be centered somewhere near the Georgia/South Carolina border. With bad luck, I'll be having to be working outside while the storm is clearing out - or stalled too close for comfort. Bad luck could mean not being able to put the tower back up for days.
The last time I went through this, I found that some car seat belts would prevent "liftoff" off the toilet seat and the troublesome, messy aspects of uncontrolled flight around the bathroom. The hardware is still bolted to the floor in the bathroom, I just need to remove a nut, put down the belt, and tighten the nut back down. One on each side of the toilet. It's a five minute job but can save hours of cleaning.
I wonder if this is something that NASA and Boeing can use to try to fix the Starliner thruster problem ...
UPDATE 4 AUGUST 2024 14:48: A day like this is perfect to just not go anywhere and watch old movies. For example, the 1944 Arsenic and Old Lace starring Cary Grant*. We hadn't seen this in forever, and both of us laughed out loud all the way through it. Makes you wonder why they can't make films like that anymore.
Arsenic wasn't nominated for any Oscars that year, which seems odd until you think about the other films that were nominated - Double Indemnity and Gaslight to name only two. Ingrid Bergman (deservedly) won Best Actress that year for Gaslight; interestingly, Cary Grant was nominated for Best Actor but for a different film that year, losing to Bing Crosby in Going My Way. Just a casual year of films all of which were better than anything produced in the last decade. [/rant]
Oh, and a quick note to all the Florida newbies: it's summer, we get storms here. Don't panic. This isn't a snowstorm up north where nobody can drive for a week until the roads get plowed. It doesn't do you any good to buy out the milk and frozen goods if the hurricane takes out everyone's power for a week. Don't go to the grocery store for your panic buying, get a darn generator.
To those of you considering moving here from up north, don't. It's too perilous.
And gas for it.**
* And also Edward Everitt Horton, best know (to old farts like us) as the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales on Bullwinkle.
** Dual fuel is even better, with propane tanks.
So yesterday had the expected and the unexpected. The procedure itself went smoothly - it was a Mohs surgery, where they shave off layers of skin and then have a pathologist analyze them under a microscope. If there's cancer in the cells, then GOTO 1 and repeat. Keep going until there's no cancer left. Simples.
I assumed (correctly) that they'd numb my ear right up so I wouldn't feel a thing. What I hadn't expected was that I would hear everything, up close and personal. Scrapey-scrapey. Then when they were done they cauterized the area, which kind of sounded like crackle-crackle. And the whiff of black smoke that floated past and the smell of burnt barbecue just added to the whole experience.
Still, it's better than cancer.
My cancer was Squamous Cell Carcinoma, the middle (on the deadly scale) skin cancer. The one you want if you get one is Basil Cell Carcinoma, which doesn't really spread. The worst kind is melanoma.
I had noticed a bump on my ear that didn't go away. I went to the dermatologist after a couple months because, well, it didn't seem like it was improving with age like a fine wine. While I was there I pointed out various other bumps and blemishes which they were unconcerned with, but they told me that they weren't going to let me leave with the thing on my ear. And so off it came.
A week later they called and said that the pathologist had determined squamous, and I had to come back in for Mohs. And none of that waiting six months for the next open appointment slot, can I come in next week?
And so there I was yesterday. Done and cancer free.
What was unexpected was how bad I felt yesterday when I got home. Everything was out patient, and I drove myself. But I kind of felt like I had been run over by a bus. Probably it was something unrelated (summer cold) that happened at the same time. Spent most of the afternoon in bed and crashed early, but feel pretty good now.
Lessons learned:
Skin cancer - hey, it's Florida, right?
I expect this is just going to be a pain in the butt (well, ear) since we caught it early and since it's not the nasty variant. Back later.
We ran across a local artist whose work we quite like, Tim Steller from Stellar Art Works. Here are a couple of examples:
Of course, The Queen Of The World is a mermaid. He has that, too.
One of the things we really like is how he takes local materials and creates works that look one way during the day and a different way when light up at night.
Recommended. I have no business relationship with Tim, I just like his work.
Oh, yeah, he does some with gun, too. Go check his work out.