Good Morning!!!! 49F @ 4:30AM. Cloudy with occasional rain showers. High 51F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Less than 0.2" of rain is expected today, with another couple of tenths on Sunday. The real fun starts Tuesday night, with an inch, then more every day through the end of the 10-day. These are cold systems, and I might see a dusting of snow as well. Brrrrrr!
Please keep us in the loop with your LoRa efforts, Eric. The "driveway" here runs a quarter mile up over a hill to the front gate, and it would be nice to know when the mailman opens the box for a delivery. The gate opener runs off a 12V DC battery and a solar charger, so in a way there's already power up there. A simple relay closure on the mailbox door could be used to send some sort of signal. Video would be better, but is that reaching for the stars?
Last night's news broadcast had info on where to sign up for the CV vaccine, so I did that during a commercial break. Only 1/3 of the available doses have been given, though, and at that rate, my group won't get a call until June. :shocked: Right now they're still working on 1st responders, health care workers, and those over 75, and even that varies by county. The hold on that suspicious batch of the Moderna vaccine has been lifted, so that'll help. Glad to hear of the CV containment in Oz, Doug. When did the quarantine restrictions go into effect? Ours started at the end of January last year, but they figure almost half a million had already brought it here with them.
The days of two day Prime delivery have gone the way of the Dodo bird here as well, David. Some things arrive in four or five if they're in stock at an Amazon delivery center. If it's coming from one of the many vendors who market on Amazon, it could be up to two weeks before anything arrives.
Amazon recently announced a prescription refill service through Prime, so it makes a certain amount of sense that they could become involved in distributing the vaccine. But the two bottlenecks seem to be finding enough people that are trained to give the injections, and making enough vaccine to fill the syringes.
The triple tap on the side button works on my new fatPhone, Don. Thanks!
I like your PM for Politics idea, Buppies.
Not long after I made my post here yesterday, I got a call from a very nice lady at the French bearing distributor with which I've been having problems paying. Their system is refusing both Visa and Paypal. She forwarded instructions for sending them a wire transfer, so I spent almost an hour with a bank representative on the line while I poked and clicked through the bank website trying to make it work. What a total cluster, but it finally went through. Until an hour later when the bank sent an email notifying me that they'd stopped the wire due to security concerns. What they forgot to mention is that they'd also disabled my online access to my account, and deactivated my Visa card as well. Oh, and I have to go to the "local" branch to have my identity verified before they'll re-enable anything. That card is also the payment method for the Apple iCloud account, so no software updates are available until this is fixed, either. Yet another sign of the approaching apocalypse.:confused2:
I did manage to modify the rest of the pallets so they're pallet jack friendly now, and get another two-high stack loaded into the container. I ended up putting the full pallets on a wooden pallet, then using a vibrating cutting tool to cut away the offending plastic. The cutter was too short to make it all the way through the plastic, so a long pry bar finished the job without too much additional drama. It was pretty slow going, and I still ended up restacking two pallets because too many splits were hanging out beyond the hoops. I didn't catch that on the first four pallets, and the second stack hung up on the first one with six inches shy of being even side-by-side. With that much weight on the little pallet jack, it's all I can do to get it moving. The floor is slippery, too, so any dust has my feet sliding instead of pushing. There's a lot of weight up high in that second pallet, too, and there's no way I'm going to throw my weight against the, either. I was hoping to post a photo, but it seems to be marooned on the iPhone until the iCloud/credit card problem is resolved.:irked:
Edit:

Edited post with iPhone to add photo. Happy, Ron?:laughing:
The front is just coming through, from the looks of the radar map anyway. It's not raining, and the rainfall amounts in the gauges it has already passed is still zero. Just as well, as I don't particularly enjoy driving mountain roads in the rain.
TGIF gang!:drink: