Kinda sad.
It was chill, spitting rain. Most of the ones we ever got were little tykes with parents, and the occasional shy batch of early teens.
Nada last night.
The local churches put on a show for the little ones.
Spokane is getting to where adults have taken over Halloween. We could have gone in costume to a bar or a party we sort of wanted to go to, but Jane and I are on pre-turn-in edit, and I shut down the pond yesterday, well, mostly, except pulling the pump, because the weather’s dropping the temperature down where the fish need to start going to sleep. Getting into the 30’s at night. And once the water chills down past 50, they shouldn’t be eating. That’s your day-night average, which for us is 58 by day and 38 by night.
So I’m on the bridge trying to squidge the winter cover ( a floating round shield of sunscreen fabric held by a ring of irrigation hose, about 6′ diameter) under the predator netting.
Good thing I went out—we’d had a disaster with the lotus pond, a pipe coming loose, which was pouring water next to our foundation/basement. We had a little pond going right next the house. It dried quickly, however, once I cut that flow off: I’d been noticing the quince tree was acting incredibly happy this fall. Had to bail out the filter box on the lotus pond (its drain is covered. and I think I may put some tarp under its lid to prevent winter precip from freezing in the box.
Outside of that, and getting the garden tools in, we should be pretty good. Jane’s giving a close read to Tracker, and I’m doing things to keep her head free for that special kind of reading.
Cooked a big pot of stew last night: beef, potatoes, carrots, celery, can of tomato paste, pepper, salt, basil, oregano, and that’ll feed both of us several suppers this next week, from a crockpot kept on ‘warm.’ I way too optimistically thought it would be done last night. Nope. So it was pizza. But we’re set for the coming week. Cost about 35.00 for the makings, but feeding 2 people supper for several days, not so bad.
Where is the lotus pond? Is that the one Jane and I worked on or is it out front?
Our “Beggar’s Night” was Thursday, and I was at dance class during the hours the kids were out. I did go across the street to the new family’s house and dropped off treats for their 3 daughters before I left for class, but I wasn’t available to pass out treats for anyone else. I had planned to give treats to the three houses in the neighborhood where I knew there would be kids going out, but only the one house was occupied, so I didn’t get the treats distributed. One other thing, my amateur radio group usually does what’s called “Witch Watch”, where we drive around and make sure things are all right, and if we see a problem, we call the police and let them handle it. Most people don’t even know we’re there, or why they see cars with all of those antennas driving by, but that’s all right, most people don’t even think about what we do, even in times of disaster (think how the news of the earthquake in Haiti got out – ham radio).
Stew’s always good during cold weather. I make up a pot and then put it in individual freezer containers and store it for those days when I think it would be just right. I don’t put tomato paste in mine, and I also like to sprinkle in some rosemary. Once the stew has cooled enough to put into the containers, it goes into the freezer for that special day. Many nights, I’ve been thankful I had it, because the thought of another peanut butter sandwich for supper is just not what I want…..
Yep…but everything’s ok.
THings were incredibly quiet. Rainy. Silent. Only noise was Jane and her sis and Lynn Abbey and yrs truly whacking heck out of spooks and candycorn elementals and spiders in the Guild Wars Halloween maze.
If you have a crock pot insert which can be pulled out of the works and a glass lid, you can throw it into the oven at 225F to bring it up to temp faster. I like to just leave mine in the oven overnight, pull it out and slip it into the works for serving.
That’s a great idea, Tommie!
People are astonished that a crockpot is good for Hawaii, but I use it to make dinner so it is ready when I get home, and I don’t have to wait on it. A crockpot will also not heat up the house like the stove will. I got beef ribs on sale, put a mess of them into the crockpot with oyster sauce, Worcestershire, ketchup and some herbs, and let it go all day. When I got home from work, the ribs were done to falling off the bone (as they should be). Some of the neighbor dogs will have rib bones to gnaw later, and if you make your own soap, the rib fat that renders off is good quality tallow.
We went out Halloween night for dinner with a bunch of friends; DH has made a tradition of going out with our people for the mandated annual corporate meeting. We get dressed up, eat very well, and have a good time as required by law 🙂 Strangely, although I put out a box of treats for trick-or-treaters, it was untouched when we returned. I think a lot of our little goblins are going to private parties instead of roaming the neighborhood.
I only got about 16 gremlins. (Many, many leftover mars bars, bwahhahaha!)I live in a large strata complex of 3-story walkups so homes are close together, but there are a lot of stairs. The nearby mall has Hallowe’en activities and candy so that draws off many of them, plus most of the families with trick or treat aged kids are recent immigrants from Asia or Eastern Europe. Explaining Hallowe’en to people with no cultural experience of it is just about as complicated as explaining baseball.
It was relatively cold but dry in the Boston area. We had 32 kids at our house, most of them fairly young (I was Trick or Treating until 14 or so when I was a kid, then made a costume anyways and took my little brother out for a few years after that). We give out full-size candy bars or (unpopped) microwave popcorn, which is especially nice for kids who have diabetes or whatever. One kid was so taken by our offerings that he let out a long, swooning moan and couldn’t choose for a bit.
Reynolds makes crock pot liners. Wonderful things. Especially at pot lucks where you don’t want to carry home a pot to scrub. I’m on the cleaning crew and I wash those things before people pick them up.
No little here, but I blocked the porch and it was cold! Sat in a chair with two blankets and a 12 lbs. Security chief on my lap.
We had six groups in three hours. Most of them were not from our neighborhood. I noted most of my neighbors houses were dark with no decorations out, so the children would have been better off going to the mall less than two miles away and getting their treats there, rather than the long hikes between houses here. In all I think we had 6 children under the age of 12 and most of the rest were taller than I was (and going around by themselves). I don’t have a problem with giving candy to teens when they are accompanying little ones but packs of teenage boys don’t get much love at this house.
I was a grinch, I guess, and turned out my light, but also, I didn’t hear any trick or treaters out last night.
The times I have geared up for Halloween here, bought candy ready to give out…very little happened, and I had lots of leftover candy.
My neighborhood’s mostly older, with a few families my age and younger who’ve moved in since I’ve been here. So there aren’t many kids.
The Christmas decorations outside have been less the past few years, which I take to be the economy and electricity expenses, and perhaps the warmer weather.
Tonight and another couple of nights the coming week will be among the few nights we’ve had so far close to 50 or under, Fahrenheit.
It was chilly enough, I wanted something hot, and so fixed Beef Ramen. Yes, I was lazy. I’ll fix something more balanced tomorrow, though.
We had no trick or treaters last year, and had left over candy so this year we didn’t buy any candy that we would end up eating. I know there are young kids, but our street is short and there’s nowhere to go except out onto a narrow 2 lane road with no shoulders so it’s not safe. Maybe they are going to a nearby neighborhood that is a lot larger and a better prospect for a good haul.
The crash of the Virgin Galactic test flight looks like a Hellburner-type mess, only worse.
What I find most interesting is that the major problems with the program have not been covered by the mainstream press in the USA, as far as I can see.
From the Telegraph and Daily Mail in the UK:
• Three senior engineers at Virgin Galactic – the vice-president in charge of propulsion, the vice-president in charge of safety, and the chief aerodynamics engineer — all quit in recent months. The chief aerodynamics engineer reportedly said that he’d never work there again.
• Carolynne Campbell, the lead expert on rocket propulsion at the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), said: “This explosion is not a surprise. None whatsoever, I am sorry to say. It is exactly what I was expecting. It was Russian roulette which test flight blew up.” She has been warning since 2007 that the propulsion system they are using is unworkable.
• Tomasso Sgobba, executive director of IAASS and the former head of safety at the European Space Agency, said that Virgin Galactic had refused to share information with industry experts outside the company and declined to have its rocket design peer-reviewed. Representatives of Virgin Galactic had refused to come to IAASS meetings, he said. “They operated in secrecy, which is difficult to understand,” said Mr Sgobba. “They don’t use modern techniques in putting safety into the design. … There is no peer review. I have been saying for some years now this was an accident waiting to happen.”
• Dr Geoff Daly, acting as the spokesperson for an international group of aerospace propulsion engineers, wrote to officials at the Federal Aviation Authority in 2013, warning of a major accident if test flights were given the go-ahead. He also wrote to the US Chemical Safety Board that “everyone realises there is a problem, even the engineers at Grumman have said so off the record.”
• Tom Bower, who exposed the safety concerns surrounding the project in his biography of Richard Branson published earlier this year, said: “What happened yesterday was very sad for the pilot obviously but it was predictable and inevitable. All the engineers in California working on the project I’ve spoken to said it was very dangerous.”
So it looks very much like a case of management trying to create their own reality and overriding the engineers.
I wonder if coverage of this situation in the mainstream media is being influenced by the fact that Richard Branson is a multi-billionaire with major investments all over the place, so big media companies don’t want to criticize him.
I don’t think that Virgin Galactic will recover from this, because recovery would mean starting from scratch with a new design.
It’s a big setback for private spaceflight.
The description for that kind of multiple mess is not family-friendly, but it does seem to describe it. I fear one major part of it all is a corporate design where you have one fairly reckless personality as the king, and everybody else concentrating more on giving positive reports than in checking his momentum. Sometimes an adventuring can-do/must-do personality and multi-talented know-how can repeatedly get you out of personal jams, but in a large organization, translated as a philosophy of complex project management—I have serious reservations.
Thank you for that information. There’ve been technical reasons it’s taken so long to get us a runway-to-orbit spacecraft…and while design-by-committee gets a lot of criticism, the philosophy of backups to the backup has worked better than ‘it’s going to be simple.’
That’s very disappointing to read — we all want Virgin to succeed and put space flight into the realm of ordinary (ok, wicked wealthy) folks and not just government — and a tragedy for the dead pilot and severely injured crew.
The BBC is reporting some new information: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29876154 and Richard Branson seems to be claiming that the IAASS people are ‘self-proclaimed experts’. I hadn’t heard about the rotating tail-planes as a descent mechanism, and I can well believe that a sudden deployment in thick air would tear an airplane apart.
I expect it will take at least a year to sort this out.
My understanding is that the engine was not properly mounted which resulted in catastrophic vibrations.
Latest reports on the crash are that one of the pilots unlocked the “feathering” mechanism too early in the flight program.
Normally, deployment of the feathering system (which changes the angle of incidence of the tail feathers to help the craft stay stable and under control during re-entry) requires both that it be unlocked and that it be activated via a lever. The crew unlocked the thing, but it seems to have deployed uncommanded (without actuation of the lever).
This would cause a rapid pitch-up at speeds which would induce a g load that the aircraft could not withstand.
@Jcrow9
If it deployed without the lever being moved, that may be due to excessive vibration and shuddering.
This article says that their previous engine, using rubber, “produced vibrations and oscillations so severe that the ship would have been shaken apart if it had been burned anywhere near full duration of about a minute. This is why on three previous test flights the engine didn’t burn for more than 20 seconds.”
It sounds like the plastic fuel may be better, but not sufficiently better.
The public schools here in this belt loop of the Bible belt don’t have Halloween activities. If they have anything at all, they have “Harvest Festivals” later on in the month because a very vocal minority raised a howl about school sponsored Halloween parties, because, as we all know, Halloween and trick or treating promote idolatry and devil worship. That crowd usually has church sponsored “harvest” parties.
I live in an apartment complex and nobody lets their kids trick or treat around here as it’s just not a good idea. My mom didn’t have any trick or treaters in her neighborhood either. Probably just as well that most folks take their kids to organized activities rather than turn them loose on city streets with the way people drive here, and this being a university town and so many college kids having parties that promote binge drinking . . . That said, since my dad passed away in September and I don’t have to be ready at a moment’s notice to spell my mom and provide respite care for him, I’ve gotten a part-time transcription job, working from home for 8 hours a night on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Now if ya’ll will excuse me, I have to go play with the stupid clocks . . . grumble . . .$#@%^&!! daylight savings time . . .
A couple of years ago, when I was last substituting for head librarian at this library, we had a ruckus over some decoration for Chinese New Year. A patron complained that the ornament we had hanging over the circulation desk was Buddhist and promoted religion (actually just ‘good luck’ in Chinese characters, we checked with one of our Chinese-speaking patrons). He went so far as to complain to our administration, who made us take it down. I don’t know which chilled me more, that we had such narrow-minded patrons to complain over a holiday decoration, or that our higher-ups didn’t have our backs over a fairly innocuous display. This person is loudly Christian of the very restrictive flavor, and I was terrified he’d come in and raise a fuss over the Halloween decorations (naturally Christmas or Easter is a-ok).
Last I heard, when Oklahoma decided to fling wide the doors that separate Church and State, a group of Satanists have decided to give the state capitol a statue…
Frankly, religion that wants to silence everybody else but them is persuasive that that door should stay shut—and in my opinion, everybody can put UP what they like, but nobody can force anybody to take it down.
Now, if some cult of Ishtar wants to put up a display that scares the Puritans, the only thing the state should do is prevent mayhem.
Back in ancient Greece, the city-states used to erect their own ‘treasuries’ at the religious sites like Delphi, navel of the universe, and each successive city would site their building in front of their worst rival and build it taller. This here and there reached ridiculous proportions.
But if religious fanatics want to indulge in sculpture wars, at least it feeds the artists.
I understand that to be a “freedon of speech” position, not a “freedon of religion” position. Is that enough?
We live in a lovely young suburb 2 blocks from the elementary school and sandwiched between 3 major parks and a wooded ravine. Lots of kids. LOTS of kids. We had about 150 trick-or-treaters Friday night, and it was a slower night than usual. Some years we have 300+. My son is at that awkward teenaged age where he thinks he has outgrown Halloween… up until about 2 hours before, at which point he rather frantically cobbles together a costume. Last night’s last minute wonder was a box painted white and covered with a computer printout of his latest video game design efforts — he was a piece of code.
Wol – I’m curious… what kind of transcription do you do? I’m a part-time medical transcriptionist.
Whoops, that should have said “Friday night” not “last night.” Daylight savings has my brain in a muddle apparently.
I do medical transcription, too, and have done for 27 years. About three 8-hour days of typing a week is all my pore ol’ fingies can take any more. As much as I’d like to be a lady of leisure, I can’t live on what I get from Social Security and have to augment my income to the point where I can pay my bills and support a serious reading habit. I work three nights a week for a medical transcription firm, but I also work for a general transcription firm out of San Francisco now and again, which I do whenever they have an interesting sound file. (I won’t do more than two or three speakers, and I won’t do any of the “iPhone on the table in a crowded restaurant, or in somebody’s pocket on the street” sound files. But most of the ones I’ve done for them have been very interesting — some of their jobs are quite long — as long as an hour or more, but then others are quite short.) If their pay rate wasn’t so piss-poor, I’d do more work for them than I do.
IMO, the cynicism and mistrust that seems to be all “talk-radio” is about is changing America for the (much) worse! Americans are no longer trusting and optimistic. It’s “entertainment” not policy, people!
I listen to “classical” music instead–lovely local radio station streaming on allclassical.org.
Vibrations were very likely a factor in the Virgin Galactic crash, but that’s due to the nature of that kind of rocket engine. It produces uneven thrust, which results in violent shuddering and vibrations. That’s one of the many problems with it.
Even though the rocket engine didn’t blow up (this time!) the violent shaking may be what caused the ‘feathering’ to deploy, or may have caused the pilot to inadvertently hit the wrong switch. We’ll have to wait and see what the investigation turns up.
Here’s a good interview with Brian Binnie, the test pilot for SpaceShipOne, who worked at Scaled Composites in a senior position for 10 years until Feb this year.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2817945/Did-rush-build-space-ship-big-carry-passengers-cause-Virgin-Galactic-crash-Former-test-pilot-reveals-concerns-scaling-engine.html
Extracts:
For Binnie, speaking from his home in Rosamond, California, the rocket motor had been problematic in all the ten years he worked at Scaled.
…
Binnie said he was uncomfortable with the ‘scaling up’ of the original design of the rocket motor to fit SpaceShipTwo – a craft three times the size. He said the new larger motor ‘didn’t fit the curve’ and experienced the same ‘instabilities’ he had experienced with SpaceShipOne.
‘I know a lot about the vehicle, the rocket motors, the rocket motor’s development, I was the test director for the rocket motors, I knew what worked, I knew what didn’t work,’ he said. ‘And these bigger ones are too rough running for our comfort.
…
The problem, Binnie says, was that by then the design and larger size of the new SpaceShipTwo had already been ‘well-defined’.
He said: ‘The room for the rocket motor was pretty well-defined, so whatever they were gonna do had to fit in there.
‘Now we’ve got this thing that is three times the volume we had before, it’s got a bigger valve, it’s got a bigger injector, it’s got a bigger combustion chamber, it’s got more fuel, it’s got a large nozzle.’
…
‘It was full of instabilities initially,’ he says. ‘We had instabilities from the get-go and we had end-of-burn instabilities.’
Even on SpaceShipOne, the uneven rate at which the solid fuel burned produced uneven thrust. That problem worsened on SpaceShipTwo, says Binnie.
While trying to fix the problem, Binnie says, ‘we did everything but break down and pray to God to show us the light of day.’
…
We changed horses mid-stream (with the plastic motor) and this thing gets fired eight times or so and you’re making changes.’
Binnie added that the design team also continually added features to SpaceShipTwo which in turn increased weight. ‘Weight is everything in space,’ he said.
…
They had rocket motor issues. We had the smartest people on the planet trying to make suggestions on what to do and how to do it, we did that for seven, eight years with still unsatisfactory results.’