Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends...

Me, Last Year: "I need to upgrade my Mac Mini to keep running Photoshop for work. I can save money by getting the smallest HDD since I never play games anymore."

Me, Last Week: "I need to de-stress. Maybe I'll take up WoW again."

Me, Yesterday: *googling 'how expand mac mini hard disk cheaply'*

When your first hard disk was a 20MB Seagate, it feels wild that with just MacOS, MS Word and Excel, Photoshop, and World of Warcraft, you've filled a 256GB HDD to the point that PShop is howling about its scratch disk size every time you open it.

"My little dude, nothing I ask you to do really requires much of a scratch disk."

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Daily Low

The heat wave is definitely here.

Just before sunrise this morning it was 77℉ and 90% humidity and I'm afraid that's as good as it's going to get today.

I'm gonna try and dip over to the outdoor range just after nine, as soon as morning rush hour's over, to get my shooting in before it gets too swamp-ass hot out there to bother.

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Travel Day Yesterday...

Woke up in a hotel in the middle of Nebraska yesterday after a two-day carbine class/match at Heartland Public Shooting Park just outside Grand Island.

Left the hotel at 0600 local for a ride to Lincoln, a flight to Denver, and then... after my connecting flight wound up delayed by over two hours ...a flight home to Indy. I arrived home around 9PM EDT.

Included in the day was the experience of looking out the airplane window at 6PM and seeing Grand Island below, the place from which I had departed twelve hours prior. Ah, the magic of hub-and-spoke air travel.

After a full day of tours on the concrete floors of the various Hornady plants in Grand Island, two days on the range, and then an absolute Hell Day of travel, I am officially whupped.

 

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig!

I bailed out of Dallas on Monday morning and overnighted an extra night in Springfield, MO because it was a long and tiring weekend.

Alas, between weather in Missouri and atrocious and unexpected traffic snarls in Illinois, Wednesday’s journey turned into a nightmare. I sat there chewing the steering wheel and watching the ETA on my maps app increment upward until it was predicting well after eight o’clock.

Even before I reached the Wabash river I was starting to nod off behind the wheel, which is never a good sign.

Rather than risk getting kilt inna streets by “Get There-itis”, I made a command decision and grabbed a room last night at the Holiday Inn Express in Terre Haute and finished my journey home this morning.

Glad I went, but even more glad to be home.

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Ugh.

Imagine me showing you a photo snapped out the window just now showing snow blowing around after yesterday afternoon’s sunny seventy degrees and captioning it “What fresh hell is this?”

That’ll save me the effort of walking over to the window.

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Brrr!

We’re stuck in an extended cold spell largely because of all snow to the south and west of us.

A couple days of southwesterly wind is what usually snaps us out of these, but wind out of TX/OK/AR is blowing across hundreds of miles of snow covered ground. Until they thaw, we aren’t going to get above freezing.

Depending on whose forecast you believe, it may be as late as next weekend before any of this starts to melt.

Bullying myself.

I hate having to do a big load of laundry around this time of year. Specifically I hate having to dry it.

Throw two to four pairs of jeans, four or five long-sleeved shirts, and a couple pairs of long johns in the dryer and...

Well, there was a type of prank when I was a kid, see? Actually, let's not call it a prank, but rather what it was: bullying. Anyway, it would occur any time you were at the lake or the swimmin' hole or the pool and the victim of the bullying left their street clothes unattended. The perpetrators would grab said clothes, get them good and soaked, and tie them in a bundle of knots. This practice was known, for reasons lost to time, as "chaw raw beef-ing" the clothes.

...Anyway throw all those clothes in the dryer and they manage to chaw raw beef themselves. Go to empty it and tug at a pair of jeans and watch as it drags a ball of shirts and socks and unmentionables, around which the trouser legs have become entwined, out of the dryer and tries to deposit them on the floor.

It's a parade of frustrations.

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Ow.

I don't know if I slept in an odd position or what, but I just rolled out of bed and I feel like I've been beaten all over with a sock full of nickels.

I hope this isn't one of those things that just starts becoming more common with the passage of time.

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What a difference a day makes...

When I checked the forecast in the middle of the week, today was predicted to be cold, with maybe a chance of freezing rain or even snow flurries.

Yesterday afternoon I looked at the same forecast and now there's a winter storm warning in effect, calling for 4-8" of accumulating snow.

Since it hasn't been above freezing for about a day and a half, whatever falls is going to stick.

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Weather Report

They say the sun may come out this afternoon.

I remain skeptical.

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What fresh hell is this?

Minding my own business over lunch yesterday, having watched the Colts pull off a nail-biter against the Falcons in Berlin and engaged in watching the Bears hold off the Giants, I glanced out the window to notice that winter had rather abruptly arrived on the scene.

This morning there's an inch or so of snow on the grass, it's still coming down in fits and starts, and it's starting to stick to the roads.

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Sick Days...

Did not feel groovy at all yesterday or this morning, but I'm starting to perk up a little bit.

Sorry about that. Posting will now resume.

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The Heat

The tail end of September was unusually warm and it's continuing on into early October.

We're supposed to get a front come through on Tuesday that will briefly knock temps down to something more close to seasonable, but we'll be back into the mid-'70s after that.

Really should have gotten the a/c recharged on the Mustang back in spring. Oh, well. 

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Sticky

It cracked ninety degrees today, and it wasn't a dry heat. Checking the forecast, it looks like we're slated for another week under one of them "heat dome" thingies. It feels like we just left this party.

At least it's only supposed to rain on Friday and Sunday, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.

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Drip

It has rained six out of the last eleven days. It's supposed to rain four out of the next seven. This lengthy stretch of gray skies and wet weather is giving me the equivalent of Seasonal Affective Disorder in July and I am, to put it mildly, not a fan.

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Ouch.

I have got a headache so bad it is making me slightly nauseous.

I'm sitting here writing a hundred words or so at a stretch between bouts of lying down.

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Ugh.

Yesterday's high temp here in Indianapolis was 91°F, with a dew point of 74 degrees, which translates to a heat index of 101. Thing is, with the dew point that high, sweat doesn't evaporate. This is New Orleans or Houston weather (fortunately air conditioners are more common in Indy than salt trucks and snowplows on the bayou.)

Today they're calling for 94 degrees with a similar dew point to yesterday's, so it's gonna be like the devil's armpit out there. By comparison, it's only supposed to get up to 88 in Miami, a daily high we won't see again until Saturday if the weather gnomes are to be believed.

I say again, ugh.

The people I really feel for are the folks who are still without power from the storms last Wednesday. Apparently there are 600-some-odd AES customers still without electricity scattered around Indianapolis.

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Tech

The basic USB socket had a good, long run. I've been using Lightning connectors for a bit because of the iPhone and iPad and, when I upgraded my desktop and laptop earlier this year, finally had to start switching over to USB-C.

Honestly, I was prepared to hate it, what with it being smaller and therefore nominally fiddlier.

Thing is, I was not ready for how much I'd appreciate the symmetry.

With the classic USB socket, we all just kinda dealt with the fact that, despite what should have been a 50/50 chance of inserting the plug correctly even blind, on the backside of a tower or in the dark or whatever, USB sockets were surrounded by an eldritch field that warped the laws of probability and guaranteed that no matter which way you oriented the plug, it was wrong the first time.

I just had to plug up a regular USB battery charger for the first time in a couple months and ran afoul of that. I won't miss it when it's gone.

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TurboMonday

The biggest downside to three-day weekends is that it turns Tuesday into turbo Monday, and also that you now have one weekday fewer to get all the shit done you need to get done before Saturday rolls around again.

On the upside, it stayed dry all day yesterday... not a common occurrence for the last couple weeks ...so that gave me a chance to beat the front lawn into submission. That cordless electric mower was money well spent. No futzing around to get the gas mower up and running in the spring, you can mow at odd hours without pissing off the neighbors, and the two batteries are more than enough for the dinky expanse of lawn with which I have to deal.

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Ugh.

I am sick unto death.

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