Seeing as how we’re already 7 or 8 inches above normal rainfall for the year (can’t find a useful link, but I remember seeing it on a local weather report), today’s rain will be very much welcomed around these here parts. What would we do without it? Besides cut the grass that is.
Maybe I should start building an ark.
Behold Cubestormer! Its only purpose in life is to solve Rubik’s Cubes. Powered by a smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S II, it solves them faster than humans.
Do I even need to say “cool”?
To understand my afternoon, I have to supply a small, seemingly meaningless event from yesterday. I got a phone call during the afternoon, ostensibly from a “cleaning service”, that had done a random drawing and our address had come up to do a word of mouth ad campaign. We were to get a free demo of their services where they would actually clean a floor for us. I figured since it was someone else doing the cleaning, and it was “free”, I’d give it a shot.
Come 1 o’clock this afternoon, they cleaners arrived. My hope was that they’d be in and out within half-an-hour, 45 minutes tops. But when they got inside the house, I realized that I had been suckered. The devil was in the details.
You see, the outfit who called me does in fact sell a “cleaning service.” It’s just not what the average Joe or Jane would consider a cleaning service. They sell Kirby vacuum cleaners. Only (as I found out over the next 3 hours) it’s so much more than a vacumm cleaner. It’s an upholstery cleaner, and a carpet shampooer and a mattress cleaner and an electronics cleaner and a blower for inflating mattresses all rolled into one wonderful machine.
From a product standpoint, the demo is impressive. It’s clearly a well thought out and designed machine. It pulled more dirt off our floors and carpets than our current central vac setup. In fact, it was so good at it that I asked them to just clean a single spot because I was trying to figure out if the machine was actually cleaning or just recycling crap from a hidden chamber. Alas, it was legit.
The problem came when the actual cleaning portion of the program finally arrived. They shampooed one of the carpets and then asked me if I wanted to buy the thing for $2500. I told them it was an impressive machine, but I couldn’t justify paying that much money for it. Even though it clearly did a superior job, it wasn’t worth that much more to me.
Then I made 2 big mistakes by answering 2 of their questions. The first was, what would a like for a trade in on the current vacuum? The second question was, what would it take to make me interested in actually buying it?
I’m not a natural jerk, but I really wish I could have been at that moment. It would have saved me at least another hour worth of time. But rather than tell them to just get out, I gave them reasonable answers to their questions, at which point they called their “boss” who told them to give me everything I asked for the trade in value on my current vacuum. I was … shocked.
But I still wasn’t buying and told them so. So they got back on the phone and their boss dropped the price of the vacuum to $1500. Now, we were firmly into sleazy salesman territory. It’s one thing to peddle a quality product at a high price. It’s another thing entirely to then drop the price of the product by $1000 just to make a sale. Plus, the whole contact the boss thing gave the affair a distinctive car-salesman-tactics flavor. The only thing more they needed was some bad coffee.
So I finally told them “NO” in no uncertain terms. Even telling them that, at this point, I wasn’t really sure what the vacuum was worth since they seemed willing to give it to me at any price. They finished cleaning the floors and, to their credit, didn’t try to push me any further on the sale and didn’t show any kind of animosity. They packed up and were gone by 4:30. My entire afternoon was shot, just like that.
But at least the floors were clean…
Just caught the result for the Cardinals-Phillies game last night, and I have to say I’m shocked. There was a point where the Phillies really did look undeniable; their late season swoon (they lost 7 or 8 straight towards the end of the year) not withstanding. After 102 wins, it looked like the money had been well spent.
But sports in general has no favorites. Anyone who’s been involved in sports for any length of time and takes the time to watch and observe quickly realizes there are eddy’s and undercurrents swirling all over the place, just out of sight but there and significant none-the-less. The Yankees and Red Sox have had the highest payroll for years now; the Phillies put up a lot of money to have the best starting rotation in the Majors. None of them will be hoisting a championship trophy of any kind this year.
The same goes for the NFL- the Colts are winless; the Bills are leading their division and have a comeback-win over the Patriots to their credit; the “Dream Team” Eagles have 1 win in 4 games. Come back in another month, and all of these current facts could look irrelevant.
Last season, my normal racquetball partner returned for the final league and we won the league after he’d been away for almost 2 years. His elbow problems were fixed and he was feeling good. Since then, I haven’t played a game and this past Monday, he herniated himself and won’t be able to play again until next year sometime.
Of course, money didn’t have much to do with that last point. Although it helps to underscore that the only constant in sports is its unpredictability. Small wonder people love sports so much- we never know what we’re gonna get.
Just catching up now to the news that Steve Jobs has passed away. I was never an Apple fan to any degree, but it’s hard to have anything but admiration for what the man accomplished. It’ll be a sad day for many an Apple fan, and it’s a little sadder day for everyone really. He oversaw the creation of a string of products that made peoples’ lives better. It will be awhile before we see his like again, if ever.
We’re so far ahead this year on rainfall totals, that we could go from now until the end of the year without any rain and we’d still end up, like 7″ above normal. According to the local weather talking-head, we’re closing in on a record for yearly rainfall. Just another 10″ or so should do it. If the current pattern holds, we should be there by the end of October.
While it’s nice for lawns and such, one problem all that rain has created is a large bug population. In particular, mosquitoes and those little biting flies. Even though the heat of the Summer is gone, the bugs have remained well past their usual time and it sucks to go outside. I’ve been bitten more in the past week-and-a-half than the entire Summer preceding. I guess that’s one thing the Summer heat is OK at- making sure the puddles and standing water dry up so that the bug breeding program is kept in check to a degree. With the heat gone, the puddles remain and the bug thrive.
Clearly, we need a frost or two to take a machete to the problem. Luckily, we may get just exactly that a little later this week. Though it’s supposed to warm up again for the weekend. Still, I’ll take what we can get at this stage. I’m tired of breathing bugs.
Awesome.
I think today has to be the unofficial first day of fall. Temps this morning were in the low 40’s and temps right now have fallen below 50. It was cool all day. All we need is some color in the leaves and we’re good to go.
The boy got good news today. His teeth are holding the correction and the orthodontist should be able to take them off during our next visit. He took a panoramic x-ray of his jaw (very cool technology BTW- all the incoming adult teeth are visibly obvious) just to make sure there weren’t any obvious problems with the incoming adult teeth. I think he’ll be happy to have them off, but sad he doesn’t get to choose the colors that cover the braces.
Our new couch arrived today. The kids were so excited it’s hard to describe it appropriately. While they were in school I moved the old couch into the basement; leaving a big open area in the family room. When the lass came home, she ran around the space just because she could, squealing with delight. You’d think she’d never been in the room before. Or any room period for that matter. When I picked the boy up from school, the first question out of his mouth was whether the couch had arrived. When he got home, he also ran around the room. When the couch finally arrived, they were the first ones on it. Who knew couches were such a hit?
Both kids have soccer tomorrow. It’ll be the lass’ second practice and the boy’s first game. It’s supposed to be a beautiful Fall day.
Just got 6 chord of firewood delivered. I’m always amazed at how good the operators are with the claw-arm. It might as well be their own hand moving the wood. Considering they’re moving logs weighing several-hundred pounds each and moving 4 or 5 at a time, that’s pretty dexterous for a mechanical extension.
One more thing for the to-do list.
I’d seen this earlier, but I hadn’t seen any follow-up until now. There appears to be decent evidence that “Hurricane” Irene was never, in fact, a hurricane. At least, not at any point where she made landfall. In fact, it appears that once it cleared the Carolina’s, it was barely a tropical storm.
The theory also does a neat job of explaining why the storm surge failed to materialize as expected: the winds weren’t strong enough.
I’ll be curious to see if this gets any traction from the likes of The Weather Channel or The National Weather Service. It doesn’t change the fact that Irene did do damage once she made landfall. But it is important from a decision making standpoint, allowing the people in charge to determine the appropriate actions to take in preparation for the storm, as the above link points out. It’ll also be a serious blackeye for the “over hyping” of weather. As such, I expect this to be quietly swept under the rug, if it’s dealt with at all.
One more thing: if the storm really was as weak as the evidence suggests, I’d say it’s even more damning for our local power company, whom seems to be pretty hamfisted in terms of getting power back on in a timely manner. They’ve already cost a lot of kids an entire week of school, in addition to all the other frustrations being without power entails. Makes me shudder to consider the results if Irene really had been a hurricane when she got here.
While we here at chateau SAHD have once again been blessed with the wonder of electricity; sadly, the same cannot be said for the rest of our fair town. In fact, it’s something like 80 or 85% of the town is still without power. There’s something to be said for living close to a commercial stretch of road. And for living on the same road as the town’s First Selectman!
Anyway, the kids were scheduled to start school this past Monday. School was cancelled largely due to lack of progress with power. So too on Tuesday and today. Finally, a “decision” has been made to open school on September 6th. My understanding is the kids need to be in school 180 days and there wer 183 scheduled this year. So they’ll be starting the year two in the hole. With Winter to come.
A very frustrating state of affairs, in my opinion. I’m tempted to frustration by the lack of progress by the power company and the lack of contingency planning by the school district. But ultimately, I just can’t hold them accountable for an event like this. At some point, I think we have to throw our hands in the air and admit that we cannot account for everything. With the infrequency of hurricanes up this far north, I judge this to have been too far outside the norm.
On the flip side, its a good thing this storm didn’t pan out like the original forecasts suggested. We’d be that much the worse for wear.
In the end, I did more damage to our yard than Irene.
After losing power at 9AM Sunday morning, we just had it come back on about half-an-hour ago. I was in the middle of making a comment to the Wife when we both heard an electronic beep and then the house roared back to life. The furnace fired, toilets started running as the water pump kicked on, the refrigerator and freezer compressors fired up, we had light. It was more than a little shocking since, after talking with folks around town, it was starting to sound like it might not happen until later in the week. I’m still wondering if it might only be temporary.
The last I saw, Irene was tracking further west and weakening faster than the early predictions indicated. I think that trend might have accelerated as I’d guess we had wind gusts some where in the 50’s with sustained winds around 30 at the peak of the storm. The rain also pretty much ended around noon on Sunday.
Not that I’m complaining. I’m glad I experienced it because it gives me something to go on for the next time.
The kids ended up managing just fine. They actually got kind of bored with the whole thing and started asking wondering why it wasn’t worse and when it would be done. Explaining that it’s a good thing that it wasn’t worse by telling them just how much worse it could have been had the desired effect. Unfortunately, we were equally anxious for it all to end, so there was no satisfaction there.
As far as damage goes, it was pretty much mild to non-existent. Downed limbs and the like with a couple of spots around town where trees came down on power lines. I saw one tree that hand landed on someone’s deck when it fell, but that was it.
We barely lost any food either. Just a couple of things from our refrigerator freezer. Although, if the power outage had lasted longer, the toll would’ve climbed substantially I’d wager.
In our yard, we basically had limbs and a few larger branches. I pulled out the chainsaw to chop of one of the branches to make it easier to deal with. Once I had the chainsaw in my hands, I decided now was as good a time as any to take care of some other problem shrubberies. That ended up taking longer than cleaning up the stuff from Irene.
But I’m OK with that.
The winds started up around 2AM this morning, as well as heavier rain. Even so, it hasn’t been too bad. Looking at the radar images, Irene is further to our West than the original forecast. Irene is already a minimal Cat 1 hurricane and she hasn’t reached New York yet, so she’s going to be a lot weaker than expected as well. That’s all to the good.
The state is basically shutdown. Towns have closed roads all over and I-95 and the Merritt Parkway are closed. Frankly, I can’t imagine why people would be out driving in this weather, but there’s always some yahoo somewhere I guess. The state has further imposed a tractor trailer ban. The state has about 250,000 power outages at this point and that will likely continue to increase. School has been cancelled for tomorrow pretty much all over.
The worst is yet to come, but I’m more optimistic than before for us getting through this with minimal damage. The sustained winds haven’t been bad so far, the gusts have been pretty good, probably into the 40 mph range. One tree has sustained damage to its top, with most of it’s leaves stripped. Other than that, no damage to speak of.
The kids slept through the night. Getting them to bed was the hardest part, but the fact that the brunt of the storm hadn’t arrived meant there wasn’t anything to actively feed their anxiety, so they slept well. The lass finally came down as I’m typing, as did the boy. One good thing about the timing is that the worst of the storm will hit during daylight hours, so this won’t be some faceless nemesis in the dark for them to deal with. They’ll be able to watch it come and go. With a little luck, watching it go will reinforce to them that bad times do, in fact, come to and end.
A little different from yesterday, huh? A mere 24 hours later and suddenly it doesn’t look so great. Though still, it could just be another cloudy day.
I flipped the picnic table over so wind couldn’t get under it and lift it while the umbrella is now in the garage and the chairs are under the deck, also upside down. All the plants are in the garage or the house. The grill has been moved into the alcove area between our garage and the house, along with some deck chairs.
We’ve pretty much done everything we can at this stage. The best news we’ve heard so far is that Irene has already “weakened” to a Cat 1 storm. The not so good news is that’s how she’s expected to remain until she hits Connecticut sometime in the early AM tomorrow. It’s all a matter of “How fast?” and “Where?” at this point.
We’ve had a little sprinkling at this point, but nothing intense. That’ll change, no doubt. The Wife was out a bit this morning and said that, even though everything was picked over, there was no mad rush. I observed the same yesterday. So, even though the news stories are all about the madness before the storm, let it be said that in north-eastern CT we calmly went about our business of getting ready. No panic, no fuss, no muss.
For now, all there is to do is wait.
I finished the second book, A Clash of Kings, in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire epic a couple of nights ago. In my estimation, it was a better story than its predecessor with a more satisfying conclusion.
Martin continues to tell the story through many eyes. The interesting thing is how the timelines overlap between these varying viewpoints. Martin’s attention to detail here certainly seems pretty good on a first reading, though I’d venture there are discrepancies that can be teased out with enough research. In addition to the characters he started with, notably those of the Stark family, new character viewpoints are added to fully tell the story Martin wants.
That picture was taken around noon time today and the day has not deteriorated at all since. It’s hard to believe we’ll be in the middle of a hurricane in another 36 hours. Tomorrow morning is supposed to be the same with conditions worsening as Irene bears down on us.
Looking at a day like today, it’s easy to understand how, 50 years ago, people could be caught completely flat footed. Even if people were to hear about a big hurricane, who’d think that it was going to make it all the way up here into the Northeast? Hurricane modeling and so forth gives us a big advantage nowadays.
For those curious, we’re solidly in the purple area of this graphic I captured off of The Weather Channel’s site:
In fact, I’ve seen path projections that would take Irene directly over us, but the majority of the projections place her out to the West of Hartford. We thought about packing up and heading out, but based on the track and the projected impact area there’s no where to go. Even to the north of us, amazingly, is expected to get a pretty good licking from Irene.
I’ve never experienced a hurricane, so I have no reference point for what to expect. My biggest concern are those trees in the 1st picture. That’s our Southern sky, so that’s where all the wind and rain will be coming from. Those trees are probably 70 to 80 feet tall, and they’re parked about 30 feet or so from the house. The math there isn’t hard. Since I can’t cut them down at this point, I’ve at least prepped my chainsaw for some work in the event the worst happens.
As far as other preparations, we’ve got flashlights, canned goods and propane for cooking. Additionally, we’ll be filling tubs as well as pitchers with water and turning our freezers and fridges to max sometime early tomorrow afternoon. We don’t lose power often out here (not even last Winter during the 2 big snow storms), but I’ll be very surprised if we don’t lose power. We don’t have a generator, but we’ll make the most of it.
We’ll also be, essentially, cleaning off our deck and front porch. Plants, chairs, umbrellas, picnic tables all will get relocated to minimize the chance they get picked up and deposited somewhere. Even though the wind predictions have diminished, best not to take any chances with stuff getting airborne. That’s the main chore to be done at this point.
We’re prepared to ride tomorrow night out in our basement, if need be. We’ll treat it like a camp out to try and keep the kids from getting too freaked out. They may well be the biggest challenge as they both don’t care for extreme weather. The boy in particular. I’ll need a lot of patience.
The timing is the strangest element to this storm, for me. Tomorrow we’ve got a birthday party to attend and then on Monday school starts for the kids. That’ll be a helluva end-to-the-Summer-start-of-school.
Record setting snow in the Winter; tornadoes this Spring; and now a hurricane in the Summer. Wonder when the locusts are gonna show?
Yesterday was just fantastic weather wise, high 70’s and dry with nary a cloud in the sky and today’s supposed to be more of the same. The only thing marring it was my annual late-Summer allergy affliction which finally reared its ugly head late yesterday. A bummer to be sure, because it was so late in coming this year I started to believe I was going to get a free pass.
But checking the longer range forecast, highs are forecast for mid-to-upper 70’s for the most part, with a couple days of low 80’s. Even for late August, that’s highly unusual. More typically, this has been mid-to-late September kind of weather.
My sense tells me that we’re gonna get another round of heat because, well, we always do. But there’s a niggling doubt telling me the Summer has packed it in. That’s because, even without a lot of rain, it’s really been an unusually cool Summer to my mind. The pattern this year has been for a few days of heat followed by many more days of relief. In recent years, the relief has been brief while the heat has stuck around to make life very uncomfortable. The humidity has sucked, like always, though.
As with any amateur weather forecasting, I reserve the right to be wrong. But I’ve still got my cord wood and pellets on order. Best to be prepared.
The website Watts Up With That? shows us something novel and cool where science is concerned. In particular, it involves a solar panel array and how best to arrange it.
A 7th grader designed a 5V solar array based on the arrangement of leaves on an oak tree. It outperformed a typical flat array in overall output as well as the length of time the panel generated electricity. The results and original link are all in the above link.
Who’d of thought that something that depends on sunlight for it’s existence would be well designed for the situation?
Just finished reading A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. I’m really late to the game here, as it’s been out several years now. It’s the first in a (so-far) 5 book series. The Wife picked it up for me and said it’s being compared to The Lord of the Rings.
I can see why. The book is filled with royal families and set in a land all it’s own. Martin takes the time to develop family histories and relationships in great detail. There’s so much of it that it’s hard to keep all of it straight. There’s even an appendix in the back for reference on who the main characters are and there positions in the families.
That said, the book mainly deals with people, as opposed to the hobbits, elves, orcs and other fantastic characters of the Tolkien lore. That isn’t to say it’s inferior; rather, it’s just different. The book itself is a fairly dense 800+ pages and it took me less than a week to read it. So clearly, Martin knows how to write a story and keep it interesting.
The world Martin creates is a harsh, brutal one and not just in the day-to-day lives of the story’s characters. It’s brutal to the traits of the characters. It’s a world where honor and innocence counts for little and seems as like to end in the characters demise as not. By contrast, being a feckless little weasel seems to offer the best chances for survival. That, and being an honorless pursuer of power. There are few “good” guys to speak of. Instead, Martin fills the book with characters ranging from out-and-out sociopaths to severely-flawed-but-doing-the-best-they-can. The Stark family appears to be the good guys of the story, and they suffer severely as the story is told.
Having started the series, my main fear is that I’ve signed on to a never-ending tale. There are so many moving parts that it’s difficult to see how the story ultimately resolves itself, or where it is, in fact, even going. With the Tolkien version, there was a clear purpose to the story and was something that everyone could easily grasp. That was the strength of the story.
Martin’s unfolding series is less straight forward. Is it about the path a young Princess will take to work her way back to the throne that was so savagely seized from her family? Is it about the path a family will take to retain it’s honor in a time of change? Is it about the toll that exacted on the innocent by those who seek power at all cost? Or perhaps, in a more simple sense, is this just a story that Martin has created with nothing more to offer than a chronicling of the lives of his creations? All of the above?
The next book in the series is +1000 pager. In fact, none of the 5 books is less than 800 pages, putting Martin firmly into Stephen King territory in terms of verbosity. That said, he’s so far proven that he could write a story interesting enough to get my attention. We’ll see if he is able to keep it.
Vacation week for the Wife didn’t get off to the best of starts, weather-wise. It started early this morning and has been relentless ever since. I’d forgotten about our little pool out back and, when I finally did remember to check, it had filled within an inch or so of the top. Seeing as it was continuing to rain, I had to setup a siphon to drain it back to normal levels. I’m pretty sure it’ll still get topped off.
Judging by the weather radar for our area, it doesn’t look like it’ll be stopping today.