Just Wow

Five Houston police undercover officers were injured yesterday - four of them shot - when they conducted a drug raid in southeast Houston.  The two drug dealers in the house, a man and a woman, were both shot and killed.
During the press conference last night, the Houston police chief revealed that one of the wounded officers had been shot twice before in the line of duty during his long career.
I don't know what to think about that - shot THREE times.
He is either a very slow learner, or he has more guts than the guy who ate the first raw oyster.

Hoskins Mound

Back in the 1950s, if you turned South off Texas Highway 35 onto Brazoria County Road 203, it would take you past Liverpool, Texas, and Lute's fishing camp on Chocolate Bayou, and miles of featureless coastal plains.  
Eventually, on the left just before you drove off into Chocolate Bay, you would encounter a massive yellow block, several stories high and several city blocks long.
What you were seeing was sulfur that had been mined from the Hoskins Mound salt dome.  From there it was loaded onto freight cars that often made trains a mile or so long.

Relief for Cabin Fever

Haven't posted for a few days - not because I was too busy, but because cabin fever had me in a steadily declining mood.  
It has been too cold, too wet or too windy to try to accomplish anything outside, so we've just sat around and moped.
Yesterday we put an end to that.  
We took a trip to Naskila Casino for a day at the slots machines.  We had a great time, and a great meal at the Timbers Grill.  Honey won more than I lost, and if we had stopped playing when we stopped to eat, we would have come home ahead.
Still, the small amount we did lose was an easily justified investment and a definite cabin fever cure.

Torx

Whenever we lose power here at the Boggy Thicket, our generator comes on automatically and everything continues to work normally until the lights come back on.  The generator does have a built-in 30 second time delay which means that our DirecTV receiver must go through a lengthy reset procedure, sometimes as much as five minutes, before we can get back to a show.

A few years ago, I bought an unlimited power supply (UPS) and put it on the circuit that feeds the DirecTV receiver.  That should have solved the problem - the TV reception continued without interruption - but the darn thing would beep until the power came back on.  The UPS help desk technician explained that the device was so sensitive that if the generator wasn't putting out electricity at precisely 60 cycles per second the UPS would beep and there was no way to turn it off.

When I decided to open it up and disconnect the little speaker, I discovered that it was held together with tamper-proof screws - little torx head screws that had a post in the middle so a normal torx bit would not work. I just let the UPS lie around for a year or two. Finally, when cleaning up after Harvey, I threw the darn thing away.

That  might have been the end of the story, but recently our little electric heater started getting noisy.  When I went to open it up to clean and lube the fan, I discovered that it had the same sort of tamper-proof screws.

Okay, enough is enough.  I found a whole set of torx bits with holes in them just for this type of screw.

I don't know if I'll be able to fix the heater, but I'll darn sure be able to get in it and find out.

Eclipse

For the first time in what seems like forever, we had a celestial event that was actually visible from the Boggy Thicket last night.  The skies were actually clear for the lunar eclipse.
As much as I have complained about clouds obscuring meteor showers, etc., you would think that I would have stayed up and watched, but I didn't.

We watched the start of the eclipse, then went to bed.  I woke up about 12:30, and went out in time to see the end, but we totally missed the part where the moon was completely obscured.
Oh well, maybe next time.

Very Preliminary

We had a great phone conversation with our old friends and former next door neighbors the Graffs yesterday, and picked a tentative date to go see them later this year.  

After we got off the phone, I got on the computer and began planning our trip.  

From our house to theirs is about 1350 miles, so I'm allowing for stops near Texarkana, Memphis, Bowling Green and Cincinnati, which would average out to about 270 miles per day.

We really like Corps of Engineers parks (with our Senior Pass, full hookup campsites are only about $12 a night versus the $30 to $45 at commercial RV parks) and there are several of them that would be perfect for this trip. But when I went on line to check the facilities, I hit a wall - or the lack of one - the reservation site is currently unavailable due to the government shut down.

When Facts Become Lies

I used to wish I had a truth meter to test the statements we hear on the news every day, but I've come to realize that it would be practically worthless.  

The problem is not so much the outright lies we hear, but the statements that are factual but deliberately designed to mislead.  That, and the fact that our news sources determine which stories they choose to report and what slant they put on them, makes it almost impossible for anyone to know what to believe.

A case in point from our current impasse over a border wall - 

A democratic senator pointed out (correctly) that the majority of illegal aliens in the country are actually people who came in legally but overstayed their visas.  She offered this as proof that the wall was useless.

My congressman, Dan Crenshaw, refuted that argument by saying (I'm paraphrasing) that if you had a migraine and a broken foot, you wouldn't ignore the foot just because it wouldn't help your headache.