Good morning!!!!

[txdon]

Yep, 68 here, too, with 90 forecast for a high. Glad I filled the car with gas yesterday since the TV news says a lot of stations have run out already.

I did also. Gasoline at Buckey's was $2.09 a gallon. All the rest of the stations were $2.16. We all got a text from AT&T that the areas affected by the hurricane will not be billed for overages Aug. 26 through Sept 15. This discount applied to 60 counties in Texas with our county being the northern most county in central Texas. Looking at the road closure map it shows only 9 roads closed in our county and those will probably open today if it was just water and not damage to the road that caused the closure.

Still don't know if any more relatives flooded. One niece down south had to mandatory evacuate and has not made it back home the other niece is still "stranded" on a carnival cruise and has not seen her home either. Almost everyone that had relatives in the Houston area are showing pictures of water up to the eaves of their houses.

In 1975 I bought my first House in Houston. Three months later, a month before my wedding, it flooded with about 6" of water. I was at work and my neighbors broke in and put everything up above the water level. I borrowed a canoe to get home. The next week I ripped the carpets out cleaned them and dried them and put them back down. Insurance did not cover rising water and I was out of money. I sold the house 2 years later, just never felt safe whenever it rained.

 

[PJSprog]

63°F and cloudy this morning, going up to 82° today. Looks like the moisture coming north from Harvey will avoid us this weekend. We could use a little rain here.

Can't believe it's the end of August already. Was talking yesterday with a coworker, and couldn't remember any 100°+ days this month. Guess we got our fill in July for the year.

 

[RedNeckGeek]

Good morning all. Struggling to get to onto here these last couple of days. The broadband supplier's automated line test page won't even load, yet when I called in the fault, it came back as everything ok :confused3:. Yes, they would send someone out, but would bill me big time if no fault was found. Amazingly, within less than a minute, I then got through to a lady who was pleasant, polite and prepared to go off script. I asked her to listen and after a while, sure enough she could hear the crackling in the background and made a note of it on the call log, together with the fact that the crackling could be heard with all ADSL equipment at my end disconnected. With luck someone will be here Friday afternoon to sort it.

Same thing happened here earlier this year, Eric. Took a lineman two trips to fix it; turned out to be a poor contact somewhere between the house and the substation. Apparently there are lots of spare wires, as the solution was to switch the connection over to a different pair of wires.

 

[MossflowerWoods]

Morning all.

My laptop seems to be dying after the last mandatory Microsoft update. I think they ar still trying to force me to use that crappy new browser of theirs instead of old Internet Explorer... Sucks to be getting old.

Seems everyone here made it through Harvey. One of my buddies oldest son & family are in Katy and they got flooded out but are safe.

Texas is tough, they will survive. God Bless Texas.

Be well all,
David

 

[farmer2009]

We've started to get rain from Harvey. Forecast is for 6 inches over next 2 days. Most falling overnight. 71 this morning and headed to 81 today.

Will be spending the day washing chicken coops. All birds are gone and we are cleaning the manure out of the barns. Estimates are for 500 tons. All sold to one local row crop farmer. Same guy as last year.

Good to hear the guys in Texas are safe. What did the rain totals end up being?

 

[CWB Wyo]

The low this morning was 46*, yesterday high was 82*. Did get some rain here yesterday afternoon . The forecast is for a 50% chance for today and some wind.

Going to make the weekly trip to town today. Not sure what I'll get done after that.

Hope everyone has a nice day.
CWB.

 

[RedNeckGeek]

Good Morning!!!! 69F @ 6:45AM. Plentiful sunshine. High 101F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.

Smokey out this morning and supposed to get worse as the winds start coming out of the north. That'll keep the smoke from the Ponderosa fire to the south, but smoke from much larger fires to the north will come in. The Ponderosa fire almost doubled in size overnight to 3500 acres; more evacuations in place as a result. Officials arrested a vagrant yesterday for starting it; he let an illegal campfire get away from him. Ten homes lost, five hundred threatened because of his stupidity. If he's convicted, he should be made to serve on a fire crew for the rest of his life.

Friend of mine "Liked" a live music stream on Facebook last night. I was too late to catch it live, but watched it and really enjoyed a young violinist I'd never heard of before. He's a bit like Jean Luc Ponty, kind of jazzy, but with hiphop and other modern influences. He goes by Daniel D., and you can check him out here.

Also on Facebook, caught a Houston video of a live flood "victim" rescue. I say "victim" because the driver of the car drove right into a flooded underpass. The car starts floating, the gal taking the video hands her phone to her companion, then wades out to it to help get the driver out. She then carries the woman back to dry ground. Here's the link.

More work on the bag mounts this morning, then a run into town for groceries and to check on the van...

 

[toppop52]

Heading down to the Outer Banks later today after a nursing home visit to mom for whirlwind 2 day stay, rain tomorrow and Saturday both there and here, have a classmate's reunion dinner in Elizabeth City Saturday night, then back home. 47 years, so who knows how many more get togethers there will be, lost 2 of good friends since the last one in 2011.

 

[lostcreekranch]

We've started to get rain from Harvey. Forecast is for 6 inches over next 2 days. Most falling overnight. 71 this morning and headed to 81 today.

Will be spending the day washing chicken coops. All birds are gone and we are cleaning the manure out of the barns. Estimates are for 500 tons. All sold to one local row crop farmer. Same guy as last year.

Good to hear the guys in Texas are safe. What did the rain totals end up being?

We topped out at 28" here in Colorado County.

 

[sodamo]

68°F and .03 inches rain.
I will be soooo glad to shake this cold.

May attempt to put a new deck belt on the Craftsman. This is 3rd or fourth time this belt has been thrown so I suspect it's reliability.

May run into town later. Today is 31st, Baskin Robbins 1.50 per scoop. Wife has been watching the calendar.

Be safe
Have a great day

 

[rswyan]

75F and cloudy/windy @ 13:30. Cool day by the looks of it, have already hit the predicted high.

Tomorrow even cooler ... high of only 67F. Saturday is next chance of rain (60%)

Latest NHC prediction for Harvey's path appears to show a good possibility of it going southeast of us which would be good IMO.

 

[rswyan]

very cool gizmo RS.

Thanks ... credit goes to someone here on TBN who built one pretty similar IIRC.

Do you have a back up alarm too?

Just me going "beep ... beep" ...

Can you rattle them for extra noise?

That would be the castanet upgrade/modification ... not even on the drawing board at this point ...

 

[rswyan]

From the looks of things, RS, you could fill those cans with bricks and that bracket wouldn't even break a sweat, let alone a weld.

I dunno :confused3: ... the cross tube is the weak point ... it's only 1/8" wall ...

Just don't forget your ballast out back!:laughing:

I won't ... hopefully it will never be all that heavy ... the recycles tend to be pretty light and with only the two of us, we could probably go 2 weeks or more before we'd need to empty the actual trash can, but I try to get it out there every week ... well, just cause ...

 

[rswyan]

Do you think you have enough power for carrying 2 trash cans?

Depends on what's in 'em ...

But mostly yeah, I think I've got it covered ... :laughing:

I always feel that I'm doing severe overkill when I use my M4700 to carry the trash a mere 100 yds to my roadside trash pickup site.

Our distance here is a little longer ... probably 800 - 1000 feet.

It's gonna be real nice in the winter ... will beat the heck out of struggling to load them in van and haul them up to the pickup point.

 

[rswyan]

Irv,

Good to see ya ... don't be a stranger.

BTW - you were entirely correct on the little cat ... she's pretty much totally out of control and shows absolutely no signs of mellowing with age.

 

[daugen]

Toppop I waved at you as you went by. You may have a wet weekend out there.

Did a lot of welding and really dirty rusty grinding and actually got a lot done. Most of welding is now done on deck. What is left is thick metal
to thick metal, saved the best for last. Maybe I'll finally be able to lay down a bead I won't have to grind off in embarrassment.
Yukky scrape job on the bottom, then dumped an entire can of rustfix on it, after doing some welding from underneath. Caught some old clumped grass on fire,
pretty similar to peat, so yeah it will burn. It just fell in the dirt below. Not a very heavy duty deck though the metal I added probably added a few pounds to it.
At least a pound of welding rod...:ashamed:

 

[txdon]

Grand opening, Ribnon cutting day, pic in the local Lagrange paper. What a heartbreaker.

 

[txdon]

The brick you see in the lower part of the pic is the front wall of the store. The Colorado river took it out.

My wife got a text from one of her friends and ex co-worker. She needed help with her flooded store. When we got there we were shocked.
She had quite her job to open up her own business selling scrubs and local school uniforms. Today was suppose to be her grand opening. Her husband is a Texas Peace Officer and she has not seen him in a week - he had been sent to Houston and has been rescuing people. She was told the river would rise to a record high and to expect 2 feet of water in her shop. She took her children to a relatives house and got all her inventory up 4 feet. The water rose 7 feet. She lost all her inventory. She had just spent the last 4 weeks unpacking pricing and organizing her store for the big opening.
We spent the day helping her get all her stuff out of the building and to her property. Today she didn't know if she had enough energy to start all over again. I'm betting she will after a little rest.

Another guy from Austin, Mike, was there and helped us. He knew of the flooding in Lagrange and drove there and asked a police officer where are the volunteers meeting he was there to help. The police officer said he did not know. He looked over at the scrub shop and saw people working and joined in. We had everything loaded in two trailers and 3 trucks and finished in 5 hours. The racks of clothes in the front of the store and the back of the store totaled about 5,000 pieces.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Wow,

Saw that disaster relief just sent a truck of supplies to LaGrange.

 

[txdon]

Aerial view Monday.