Making progress on the book finally. Not as if we haven’t been trying, but a year and all that surgery and anaesthetic has kind of a scrambling effect, and getting back up to speed, and getting my hands typing again is a biggie!
Thank you for the offer of a hand warmer. That’s very kind. I do have one and it is a help, or was before we had furnace heat right at our doorstep.
Another person who has helped is Patricia Briggs, our distant neighbor and real good friend, who is a doll. We went out to a couple of horse shows (she breeds Arabians) and got out of the house—great fun. Patty writes the Mercy Thompson books, and if you’ve not read her stuff, either the regular fantasy or the Mercy books, you might give them a try. She blessed me with a cold laser, a veterinary thing they use on horses, and you have to know lasers even of this mild grade can be seriously dangerous, but I do know, can use it, and find it helps the neuropathy. So that is a real positive.
This is Jane’s week and mine for doctor appointments, things postponed during 2020, and my followup with my doc, and the endocrinologist (thank you, Grant) who is trying to get me medicated for osteoporosis without screwing up the neuropathy. I think we may be on the right track. I hope so.
Anyway, enough med stuff. The heat wave is past and work is proceeding. We now have 90,000 words of 120,000 word typical length on the Alliance book, and are making steady progress.
Glad to hear that both of you came through that heat alright and are continuing to sort out how to treat your healing bodies. How did the koi do in the dreadful heat? …And, write on!
I thought about you girls during the wave of heat we went through, good to hear you are busy and having some fun too. Take care and stay safe!
As I was just typing I had to get up to see what kind of helicopter was going over, when they have a bucket dangling we worry, my car has 4 suitcases – photos, art and journals etc – ready to go – California is really taking a hit – again. Everyone please stay safe. Thankfully no bucket on that ship!
With the kind of humidity you guys usually have up there in the upper left corner, it must have been like living in a sauna. I have a blog friend in Seattle, and the heat has been brutal on them too. Glad you guys caught a break from it. That kind of heat is even worse when it happens to people who aren’t physiologically used to it nor live in houses equipped to cope with it. (My typical response to heat like that is to go nocturnal. )
I’m more than ready for reality to lighten up on all of us, you guys especially.
Actually, no, Spokane is very nearly[1] high desert terrain, in the rain shadow of the Cascades. Seattle’s average rainfall is 37″, Spokane’s 16.5″. The west and east sides of the Cascades are VERY different! On the afternoon of June 29th, when Spokane International reported 108F, humidity was 15%.
A local online weather station reported we hit 114F, while PDX reported 116F. No AC, of course, but inside temperatures maxed at 86F, manageable with a couple of tepid showers. It WAS impressive to walk outside, “into an oven” comes to mind. Either blew our prior all-time record, 107F to smitherines. (I was in 117F once, crossing the Mojave Desert, but that WAS the Mojave Desert!)
1. It also looks that way because the lack of topsoil in so much of Eastern Washington, washed away by the Missoula Floods, makes vegitation sparse.
I’m glad you’re feeling more like yourselves. We’re having high heat here in Vegas, too. It’s really unbearable when we get back from across the parking lot while shopping! We’re rooting for you, though.
Very good to hear you and Jane made it through the oven okay and are starting to heal. Our heat has not been quite so unbearable, but we have been running the a/c more recently, so there goes any savings we might have accrued from feeding solar power back into the grid.
A few days ago I discovered our toilet tank was leaking, so decided to replace it with one better than the ‘cheapest available’ one that preceded it. After many alarums and excursions, including 2 trips to both Lowe’s and HD to procure parts and the correct toilet to fit our small bathroom, tomorrow will be toilet replacement day. That is the first step in the bathroom redo, which will also involve replacing the vanity with a custom job and eventually tiling the floor.
ReadyGuy and I are happy to know you survived the heat dome that is a regular part of Arizona weather. Please send rain so we can get out of this extreme drought. Climate change is here and now.
Cj, Any word when the latest Foreigner books will come out on Audible?
How nice to hear you and Jane were able to get out and about a bit more … Arabian horses, Wow! Returning to something closer to your normal, writing again … even more wonderful. It’s been 14 months since my husband got hurt, ended up with brain surgery and then various complications … he’s finally really on his feet and back to himself, and NORMAL feels pretty good. Hand Warmer offer stands, always 🙂 I have a few, as I backed a great kickstarter from some good people I know … small, well designed, USB chargeable and can even charge your phone a couple of times … a pretty nifty little device. Take care, stay well and stay safe.
Glad you made it through the heat wave (without a shore,,, breeze.) Always good to hear you and Jane are doing well. And great to hear you are working on the Alliance book. Fallan has had plenty of time to plan a surprise. Good luck to him and the two of you.
Fosamax and its evil kin, the usual fix for osteoporosis… awful stuff: stabilize in a bad state, and wait for it to get worse behind the scenes, hello spiral fractures. Better is T3 to ensure the utilization side of thyroid is working (T4 conversion becomes an issue with age; root cause of osteoporosis) and normalizing levels of calcitonin, which you can take sublingual if it messes up your nose. (It’s most effective orally, but that official form is just now in final FDA approval.)
Really good news — I’m so that that the fish are surviving in their various pool cool spots, and that you’ve got some additional equipment to help with your hands. It sounds very interesting and I’m glad it’s helping — typing with hurting hands is no fun, for sure! Hugs to both of you. : )
It’s really great to hear things are going ok and to have you blogging again. I’ve missed your updates! Glad to hear the neuropathy may be getting better too. Good luck to you and Jane with all your appointments☘️
I was wondering about the koi…since heat isn’t really good for anything much above invertebrate level. It could have been worse: I know some people near Salem, OR, where it hit 115. (They moved from L.A., so they do know heat.)
I was amused by a story in S.F. where they were talking about the heatwave in the valleys there, citing Livermore, which was hitting 105. I know that the record there at this time of year is 112-113, and that was set in 1961 – I remember it. (112 on our front porch, where the thermometer was in the shade all year round. And that was the week they were pouring the concrete for the “temporary” building at church. Delivery at 4pm.)
My rheumatologist saw me on Monday (July 12) and says that the RA isn’t progressing so much as before, but because I’m having twinges more often than before, he’s increased the frequency of my Humira injections to every 10 days, up from every two weeks. He also added another 100mg of Allopurinol to lower my uric acid levels, which are back up again. He said that in previous years, RA was the difficult condition to treat, but they’ve got lots of different treatments for it. It’s the osteoarthritis that’s the hard one to treat, and I have a severe case of it in hands, feet, and other joints. I haven’t picked up my guitars in over a year, and I don’t know that I will again.
Sorry to hear that, Joe. I hope the treatments can keep the progress at bay.
Ow! Arthritis in any format is annoying at best, acutely painful at worst. Hope you can keep yours under control; I wouldn’t wish it on anyone!
Climate change? Yes – with teeth! Here in Western Europe we’ve got a rogue off-shoot of the jet stream spinning over Germany and Belgium. Unprecedented rainstorms with widespread and tragic consequences, for life and property. Shades of “A Wind from Nowhere” a dystopian SF novel by another of my favourite authors, JG Ballard (best known for “Empire of the Sun”). There, the jetstream touches down at ground level!
So far, in my little bit of England (bottom left corner) it’s all very peaceful, but you never know.
Lots of devastation and 120 people died in Germany and Belgium, from severe flooding along tributaries of the Rhine and the Meuse, and still more rain is expected there (it’s dry, nice weather where I am).
In southern Limburg, the only hilly bit of the Netherlands, there are ongoing evacuations and some damage in lowlying parts or bits bordering on creeks and rivers, of villages and towns, e.g. the neighborhoods bordering the Meuse in Maastricht. It’s officially been declared an ongoing disaster, so there will be disaster relief from the government for those things the insurance companies won’t pay for; but it’s nowhere near as bad as in western Germany and eastern Belgium. At least no-one has died yet, here.
My sister lives near Maastricht, but she’s near the top of a slope and not near a river, so she’s safe – but friends already had water flowing in the streets yesterday. (I’m not putting in more links to avoid being sent to limbo; you can look for Valkenburg or Maastricht, plus “Limburg overstroming” =inundation for some of the scenes of the current flooding in Limburg).
And the big wave of floodwaters that is now causing devastation in Germany and Belgium is still to arrive in the Netherlands, flowing down both the Rhine and the Meuse – the southern part of the latter is the most constrained, and thus the most likely to cause problems.
My sister was one of the people who worked on the “room for the river” plan in the 2000s. We all know that a lot of the water dumped on Germany and Belgium will be flowing off downstream as fast as possible and end up in the Netherlands, so in the last two decades they developed this plan to give the big rivers room to expand into unobstructed floodplains (the river’s “winter bed”) when big floods come through. Still, even that project didn’t expect the kinds of extreme and persistent torrential rains that climate change is causing to be this widespead all at once.
The “border Meuse” in the hilly bit of Limburg doesn’t have as many options for floodplains with nature reserves and meadows, and the river runs right through the center of the city, so the past few years the waterships have started to build small retaining basins all along the runoff creeks and waterflow-paths in the surrounding hills, to avoid all the water from a cloudburst travelling downhill to the Meuse at once and causing trouble on the way down, or in swelling the already high Meuse too fast at once. But lots of those weren’t built or finished yet, and the heavy rains of the last two days overwhelmed some, which caused more damage when they broke through.
Obviously the timeline needs to be moved up on those, and the endpoint needs to be moved to take the new extremes into account.
Maybe the devastation in Liège (just over the border from Maastricht) will convince the Belgians that it would be a good idea to do something similar throughout the Ardennes, to avoid all the runoff heading into the river at once. As long as they still try to get rid of excess water as fast as possible, there isn’t much any Dutch waterplan can do to avoid the river rising to extreme heights in a short time in Maastricht.
The Room for the River project was only just finished, in 2018, so these floods will really put it to the test, and show up all the weak spots that will need to be addressed further.
It’s awful for those hit by flooding now, but it is a wake-up call, and can be planned for and dealt with with enough foresight and investing in solutions for the future.
Hanneke, ReadyGuy and I are glad you are safe. Thank you for the information on the flooding. The videos we are seeing on the news are devastating, but real descriptions of the areas involved are few and far between. I could just imagine the German town we spent five years in flooded, but fortunately it is safe. Stay safe yourself.
Hanneke, it is good your government is so forward thinking about climate change. I only wish ours would do likewise; instead we get treated to interdepartmental and political squabbling!
Be safe, Hanneke.
In the meantime, the main reservoir here in Southern Nevada has been drained of so much of the reserve, due to our persistent drought, that it is nearly empty. We are also experiencing near-record heat. 250 kilometres from here, in Death Valley, they have recorded nearly the record high for the planet, just last week.
Hi Spence! Thank you, and Ready and Chondrite for your wellwishes.
Yeah, droughts and heatwaves are the other reason for building lots of small water-retaining features all over the place.
We’ve had a few years of more-than-usual summer droughts and heatwaves too – nothing compared to where you are, but for here it did some damage to nature. Especially in the (slightly) higher and drier east and south of the country, the sandy soils don’t retain moisture well and the vegetation suffered.
In one small reserve, they noticed that the area around one creek did much better, because a beaver had dammed it – that kept water back from rushing away when it fell, and so kept a trickle going long after all the rest of the park had dried out, as well as infiltrating into the soil around it and replenishing the aquifer.
That is the kind of thing they now want to install wherever possible along all the little creeks and waterflows, to keep some of the winter rains available over summer, as well as lessening the deluge flowing downhill during cloudbursts, as it first starts filling up all these little basins. But you need a lot of them to really help with that!
For the sort of desert climate you are in, open basins would evaporate too quickly – you’ld have to try to catch as much rain as possible when it falls, and channel it into underground storage tanks and channels, like the ancient Persian qanats, the underground water reservoirs of the Maya, and the aqueducts of the Incas in Peru.
A lot of small rainwater collection efforts, before it has a chance to run off and turn into a flash flood, are much easier to realise and have a lot of benefits, and no downsides I can see. It’s something many people could try to do, on their own or in small groups. Did you see the recent article about the rainwater harvesters in the dry western US? I thought it was quite inspiring.
Though the southwest US climate is unstable and prone to very prolonged droughts, and if those last too long, for decades, combined with the increased extreme heatwaves, I don’t think anything will be enough to keep the area livable.
I still remember the guides talking about the ruins at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, how they’d found that during a 2-decade drought the people of the area had moved east to Mesa Verde and managed to survive there, on the edge of the desert-dry area, with very very little rainfall; but how less than a century later another prolonged drought returned, this time lasting IIRC fifty years, which finally made the area uninhabitable and the pueblo people had had to move off, southward.
Hanneke, I am relieved to hear you are safe, and pray you remain so. My heart breaks for Germany and Belgium … our riverboat traveled many of those waterways … so devastating. Please do take great care, and your family as well.
Glad to hear that you’re ok, Hanneke… and, T-in-W, that you’re doing fine in your end of England too. I heard from a friend in Edinburgh tonight (just outside in Portobello, actually)..he’s been the Scottish version of overly hot but otherwise weathered things ok. Here in New England, we’re well on the way to a record-setting wet July (3rd highest rainfall on record only half way through the month) but our personally grim heat of June hasn’t (yet) returned. The volume/time of our rain doesn’t in anyway compare to that hitting Germany & the other flooded areas of Europe, though… which is good because we (being blind-sighted Americans) have not prepared. Kudos to the Nederlands and may your preparations hold!
My in-laws are preparing to move here since they are now both in their 90s. I’ve been inspecting houses to refer to them. I was struck by a couple of houses that had rainwater catchment barrels. One house had two five-hundred gallon containers! Now I’m investigating ways to install barrels in our yard.
Good idea, Ready!
I hope you manage it, while keeping enough garden to enjoy.
Maybe put them underneath the patio or deck, if you have a small garden?
That would keep the water cool too, so less chance of breeding bacteria.
Though then you might also need a small (hand)pump to get the water out when you need it.
You could also let gravity do the work. Put a tap at the bottom of the storage barrel, make sure the barrel is off the ground enough to put a watering can under it (or put a hose on the tap), and let it run to where you need it. It depends if you will be using it for gardens and lawns, or in the house for washing things.
If you’ve got enough room in your yard for aboveground storage-containers while leaving enough garden to enjoy, that would be the easiest option. But I wonder how hot the water in those tanks would get, if they are left out in the sun in a state with high summer temperatures. If it gets warm enough to allow Legionella bacteria to grow, that would not be good.
Regarding the flooding in the Netherlands, we’re doing alright. The floodplains are working as intended, flattening the extreme peak out into a high plateau, even though the peak was higher than expected.
Plans were built around the experience of floods that happen on average once per 50 years; they were meant to protect against “once in a hundred years” floods.
The 1995 floods that were the trigger for the Room for the River project had a peak flow of almost 2800 m3/s in the Meuse; the former record-holding one in 1926 hit 3000 m3/s; this one reached 3260 m3/s, where a flow of 600 m3/s is normal in summer.
So the flooding was a bit more than was planned for, but the protections mostly held, and the highest point has passed for both the Rhine (at 7500-8000 m3/s, less than 15 meters above N.A.P.=sealevel at Amsterdam, that is high but not a record) and the Meuse at the borders.
The bulk of the water is still moving downstream, and it will be several more days before it gets to the sea; but with the floodplains doing their job there doesn’t seem to be any anxiety about further potential for inundations and damage.
The dikes in Limburg are saturated, which can cause weaknesses. So they need to dry out after the high water has passed, which will take a week – then they can be assessed for safety.
There were some leaks at known weak spots, some houses and businesses did get their ground floors inundated, but they will receive compensation, as will the farmers who are losing crops planted in the floodplains.
The 17 known weak spots in Limburg will get priority and be tackled with greater urgency now, as will any new weak spots discovered after the dikes have dried out and been checked.
We really are getting through this relatively lightly, compared to other countries in Europe. The torrential rains have moved on southeastwards to Austria, causing damage in Hallein and Salzburg, and are expected to go on to Croatia and Serbia. I fear those will not be any better prepared for these downpoars than Germany and Belgium were.
That phrase we so often hear, “once in a century”, rankles! That was then, this is now! How can anybody say that in an era of climate change?
One can make one’s own insulation for such things as water tanks that is highly efficient (NASA uses it!) out of cheap materials readily at hand: aluminum foil & newspaper! Laminate several alternaing layers of aluminum foil and newspaper, using a light adhesive spray to keep them in place, foils outermost, crimping the foil edges tightly, then because foil always has some pinholes, paint the outside of the foil. It won’t work if the paper gets wet.
[sniff, sniff] I smell something like roasting coffee coming in the windows–time to close-up! Mephitis mephitis must be wandering around tonight, at some distance, I hope!
LOL Paul, I had to look up that name to figure out why the scent of roasting coffee would make you close the window. I didn’t know that not-irritated skunks smelled of coffee!
I don’t quite understand why aluminum foil sandwiched between newspaper and painted over would make for such good isolation. How can it be reflecting light and heat away if it isn’t visibly reflecting? I’ve been told that when light is absorbed by materials it is converted to heat, so I’d expect painting over shiny aluminum would make it less effective.
It’s probably a stupid question, but I’d really like to understand.
Yeah, the “once in a century” norm is only usable nowadays if you continually re-evaluate that, in the light of new information.
For our river protrctions the norm is “once in a century” as they count on having some time to see extreme watermasses coming downriver and being able to evacuate those bihind the known weak spots.
But I’m glad that for the coastal defences the norm is a lot higher, at least once in a 1000 years or even once in 10000 years IIRC. Though that changes too, there is a lot more margin built in there.
Given that I’ve never been a coffee drinker, preferring the superior hot beverage, a coffee roaster in the neighborhood can be quite strong smelling, stinky in my opinion, if with different notes. Many odors change nature depending on concentration. “Mephitis” obviously recalling Mephistopheles and sulfurous brimstone.
This form of insulation would certainly work best if it were kept out of the weather, dry without the necessity of plugging pinholes. A few things about that necessity if outdoors, 1) a clear varnish would work, 2) so would thicker aluminum, e.g. thin sheet, though one can get thicker foil, 3) don’t forget about “black body radiation”. It doesn’t matter so much how hot the outer layer of aluminum gets because the newspaper provides a thermal conduction break. It can only radiate to the next layer, which divides the radiation and radiates half back. Note too that the aluminum conducts heat from the “sunny side” to the “shady side” for radiation. Radiation is much less efficient than conduction; we’re trying to stop conduction. “Rinse and repeat” through the layers of aluminum and paper. After all, the exterior environment one is trying to shield the interior from is “given” to be hotter.
I once saw a demonstration where they put a baby chick in a two layer metal box, where the inner and outer boxes were separated by this sort of insulation, then hit the outer box with a blow torch. Its metal of course conducted the point-source of heat around, and they used non-flammable separation layers, being less interested in using “materials at hand”. After a few minutes of roasting the box, they opened it with their asbestos gloves and the chick was still cheeping.
I, also not a coffee drinker, have often thought that skunks smell like rotting lemons (or perhaps more honestly put as “what I imagine rotting lemons to smell like”). And, yes, really strong or fresh-roasted/ground coffee also smells that way at times.
I don’t know what kind of skunks you folks have in your neighbourhood, but they actually smell like bad dope (cannabis). (Speaking as somebody who has lots of both skunks and skunky dope in my area with everybody’s windows open in this hot weather, I have lots of opportunities for comparison)
We have a ‘smoke shop’ across the street from the library, and frequently their clients partake in the parking lot. I hope that whatever they are smoking is sufficiently strong to justify the smell! Higher end pakalolo smells almost like Oolong tea; the inexpensive stuff they favor is just rank, hence ‘skunky’. I used to live on the mainland, and am familiar with roadkill skunk. Luckily, although strong, roasting coffee is quite different.
It absolutely does at close encounter, high concentrations. But when it’s way upwind it’s diluted, the nose picks up different components.
Although I prefer tea, I do occasionally drink coffee, and it has always smelled good to me. Weird, I’ve never noticed a “skunk” or “rotten lemons” smell. :shrugs: Uh, I have very infrequently smelled what I think was, y’know, other people’s recreational herbal substances. 😉 But those have a distinctive, rather sweet odor different from tobacco. So maybe I’m unaccustomed to some other manifestation of any of the above. (Used coffee grounds don’t smell great, but smell more like, wet dirt, and coffee, to me. If those have gone off in the garbage, I don’t know what they’d smell like, but not good, surely. Other, ah, herbal recreational pharmaceuticals, I’m not around enough to know at other stages. :shrugs: I am not sure if this makes me more white-bread or just unexposed. But I feel like my post sounds overly Vulan while attempting to avoid keywords which the filter might find quasi-objectionable. (I wouldn’t think it would, but I don’t know for sure.) (I am fine with one of those used for pain relief or other medical uses, and so I am OK with it for recreation. But I’m not a fan of tobacco smoke.