Rain Spider

 

Here is a photo of lilies in our back yard. 

I had always called them Rain Lilies because they pop up after rainstorms, but an on-line check tells me that they are Red Spider Lilies (Lycoris Radiata).

When I said pop up, I meant that literally.  They go from invisible to bundles of blooms on a 16 inch stem in less than a day. 

I don't know where they came from - we never bought any, so they probably hitchhiked in on something we did buy.  I don't do anything to encourage them, in fact the brown in the fence line just behind them is the result of spraying weed killer a few weeks ago.

The particular blooms seen here were generated by what rain we got from Tropical Storm Beta.

Shocking

 

Getting There

 I have been playing around the edges of an idea for the past few days, and finally decided to try to write it down.  

Can an analogy be made between the changes in society and changes in transportation?

Let's say you want to go to California.  Never mind why - that's a topic for another day - let us just agree that you want to go.

Up until the mid-1800s you would simply set out walking, or riding if you were wealthy enough to own a horse. Somewhere about the Mississippi River, you might catch a ride on a packet boat headed up the Missouri or the Platte, or you might join up with a wagon train headed west.  The alternative would be to catch a schooner sailing around the horn of South America that would eventually dock in San Francisco.  Either way, you were looking at a danger-filled journey of six months to a year.

Somewhere after 1870, you could just take the train - assuming you had the $136 for a Pullman sleeper, or as little as $65 for a third class ticket that got you a seat on a wooden bench. Accounting for inflation, that $165 in 1870 is equivalent to just over $2000 today.

The first transcontinental commercial flight was in 1911, and took three and a half days, but it wasn't until January 1959 that the first scheduled commercial jet flight went from coast to coast. That flight would set you back about $170 which translates to $ 1138 today.

All that goes to say that getting there in the past was something of value - something you had to expend money and/or a hell of a lot of effort to achieve.

Today's young adults would just fly using their parent's credit card, or go on line and get there (virtually) for nothing.

A Tale of Two Cars

 I got my first car in 1957.  It was a 1930 Ford Model A 1/4 ton pickup.

I got to drive it home from North Shepherd in Houston to our barn in Liverpool, Texas.  Then my dad and I took it apart and laid all the parts out in the barn.  "Put it together and make it run," he said, "and you've got yourself a car."

I owned five Model A's and one Model B over the next few years - most of them rescued from fields and barns.  I kept the best parts and cleaned them up enough to sell. The proceeds helped keep me in gas money.

My Dad's first car was a Model T Ford.

He and his brother built the whole thing from parts they scrounged from the Camp Logan dump, just down the road from where they grew up on Washington Avenue.

He had quite a few stories about that old jalopy, but probably the most impressive was this one:

They had driven the thing to Crockett to visit relatives and about the time they got there it started knocking.  They knew they were about to throw a rod. They did not have extra rod bearings, and no money to buy any, so they replaced the worn out bearing with a piece of pork rind and made the 120 mile trip back home.

Beta

 One year ago today we woke up to knee deep water in our home.  

All the repairs have been completed and we are scheduled to replace the old windows and complete the finishing touches on the outside of the house next week. 

That may not happen now because.....

Not Exactly A Home Run

 

I don't drink much anymore.  

Over the past year or so, I've probably averaged maybe one beer a week, but I've always preferred dark beers.

My current favorite is Dos Equis Amber, and one of my favorite memories of Ricoh schools in Los Angeles was sharing pitchers of Bass Ale with the head of the training center.

All that being said, I really looked forward to trying Crawford Bock.  I appreciated the clever name and the tie-in to the Houston Astros and the Crawford Boxes in Minute Maid Park's left field.

I really wanted to like it, but I don't.  If it extremely cold, it is almost drinkable, but it has a weird whang to it.  For some reason, it reminds me of cilantro.

Almost Missed It

 

Yesterday was the real Mexican Independence Day - the day they celebrate their independence from Spain.  

Unlike Cinco de Mayo, it gets hardly a mention here in the USA. I saw only two posts on Facebook, and no ads for specials on Margaritas.

Phone Home

 

Ok, so this year my "daily" blog has been more like "once in a while."

Today, I'm posting twice.  Just because.

Honey's cell phone had been acting a little wonky lately, and we'd seen an AT&T ad on television hyping their 5-G coverage.  The ad offered a free Samsung phone for all new and existing customers.

Too good to be true?  You bet your buttons.

When I called the closest ATT store, they claimed to have no idea what I was talking about.  They also said they couldn't access my records based on a phone call, but that I could find out what was available by calling 611 (ATT Customer Service) on my cell phone.

That worked well.  

I was put on hold for over five minutes twice, and each time disconnected before I ever got to talk to a live human.  I finally loaded up our phones and went to the ATT store.

I first learned that our old phones were too old to have any trade in value, and the best offer I could get was for a pair of Samsung Galaxy phones for an additional six bucks per phone per month. I didn't like it, but I said OK, only to learn they didn't have the phones in stock.  Grrrrrr.

The Humble, TX store did have the phones, so I went there to pick them up.  Then the clerk told me that she could not transfer all our info from the old phones to the new ones - something they have always done in the past! 

Once I got the phones home, I was able to download an App that let me transfer the data.  That sounds easy enough, but I had to download and install the app on all four phones then get the phones on our wi-fi network then scan the QR code on the old phone to load the data to the new one.  The entire process, with glitches and all took a little over four hours.

Now we just have to learn how to navigate phones whose screens are nothing like the old LG phones we had been using.

Book Report

 

I read a lot in normal times, so it should come as no surprise that I have read a ton of books during these days of Covid 19.  I've not only read a lot of new books, I've gone back and re-read dozens of books we had on the shelf or stored away in boxes.

One of the things that I've found interesting is how many of the books I read years ago have remarkably accurate descriptions of the events of this year.  The more obvious examples are Richard Preston's the Hot Zone and his Cobra Event, or the Plague Tales by Ann Benson - with titles like that, you should expect some similarities.  

The one at impressed me the most, though, has been Oath of Office, a Jack Ryan novel written by Marc Cameron.  In the middle of a novel about spies and international intrigue, Cameron talks about the effects of an epidemic (instead of the China Virus, he calls it the American Flu) and proves to be even more prescient than his mentor, the late Tom Clancy.  Not only is the flu at the top of each news cycle, President Ryan's political opposition and their friends in the media are trying to blame the pandemic (yes, that word is used) on him!

Contractors and Pigs

 What do contractors and pigs have in common?  They've both been busy at the old Boggy Thicket for the last couple of days.

The contractors are beginning the repairs to the outside of our house - and no, we haven't got any more money from our insurance - this is coming out of our pocket.  They are replacing the old vinyl siding with Hardie plank, then they will be replacing the windows and painting the whole place.  The good news is that all this can be done while we continue to live in the house - no more camping out in the back yard!

The pigs have been visiting sometime between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for the past two nights.  We haven't seen them (or heard them, for that matter) but we have certainly seen the evidence of their visits.  It is amazing what a dedicated pig can do to a lawn in just a couple of hours.

Fly United

 My last post was titled Hot Hot Hummers.  Well, there's hot, and then there's Hot!  

Our hummingbirds have been mating almost constantly for the past few days.  They may start on the feeder, but more often they get together in mid-air, and they usually end up crashing to the ground before they're finished.

I haven't actually seen this myself, but this YouTube video ends with the lady on top - 

Hot Hot Hummers

 

It has been hot - really hot - at the old Boggy Thicket for the past few weeks.  Heat advisories almost every day with heat indices in excess of 100 degrees.

It has been so hot that our hummingbirds are showing the effects.  They still chase each other around the yard, but, instead of the usual high speed aerobatics, they are slowly cruising around like a little old lady in a school zone.

Conundrum

 

That is a look at a normal home breaker box  without the breakers.  The breakers that would be installed look something like these:

The two "Hot" busbars are arranged so that the wires attached to the double breaker on the right would carry 240 volts, and the single breaker would handle 120.  Anytime a single breaker is installed in the box, the breaker directly above or below it would be getting its power from the other leg of the 240 volt input.

Last Friday evening, during a thunderstorm, we had a nearby lightning strike that took out our phone, our air conditioner, our microwave and all the wall plugs in our living room.  I went out and tried to reset the breakers without any luck.

Early Saturday morning, our contractor sent his electrician over, and after an hour or so he had everything back up and running.  He told me that the problem was with two of our 120 volt breakers.  Both breakers were OK, but whenever he reset one, the other would pop.  If he reversed the sequence, the same thing happened, just in reverse. He said the solution was moving one wire from one of the shared circuits from one breaker to the other.

Neither breaker was pulling too much amperage before the switch, and they had been working fine wired that way for years.  I still have no idea why swapping that wire solved the problem, but it's hard to argue with success.

The only thing that wire change didn't fix was the phone.  The lightning fried the circuits in the phone and it had to be replaced.