Friday the 13th Strikes

Well!  Friday the 13th kicked some butt today!  FAA called a full ground stop for the entire country due to problems with the air traffic controllers not being able to talk to each other, or the planes in the air.  Apparently Secretary of Transportation Duffy's organization rolled out an upgrade three days ago.  It did not go so well.  

Microsoft is still down in many places.  I have read, and this is twitter, so it's suspect, that in one of the mass layoffs done by Microsoft, they let go of the people that had written, maintained, and understood the legacy code.  There is a lot of legacy code.  New code is being written by AI, old broken code does not have the knowledge base to know how to fix this.  Today was the second day of the outage.  

The National Weather Service is also experiencing difficulties.  This is from Gemini, (Google's AI) :

What is not Working Well

Websites & Forecasts: Users may encounter slow loading times, error messages (such as 500 or 503 errors), or outdated weather data on Weather.gov and local office pages. [1, 2]
Data Flow (NOAAPort/SBN): A major degradation affecting data dissemination began around 10:30 a.m. EDT, delaying non-warning products while emergency alerts are prioritized. [1]
Radars: The NWS has pushed back on rumors of a total radar failure, confirming that radar.weather.gov is functioning normally. [1]

What Continues to Work

Emergency Alerts: Local weather offices continue to issue critical watches and warnings.
Wireless Emergency Alerts & NOAA Weather Radio: Essential severe weather alerts (such as tornado or flash flood warnings) continue to push directly to mobile phones and radio broadcasts.
Social Media: Local NWS offices are posting updates and alerts through official channels like X and Facebook (e.g., @NWSLosAngeles). [1, 2, 3]

Technicians are actively working to resolve the network and communications disruption, which coincided with a separate nationwide FAA telecommunications ground stop. [1, 2]

So, one wonders if we're under a cyber attack, or if everything just decided to break at once.  

Scott Colum (last syllable gets the emphasis) won the Senate seat in Mississippi.  He beat Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was then the senator.  President Biden had nominated Mr. Colum for a federal judgeship.  Hyde-Smith torpedoed that with her use of the blue slip.  She was cackling about how she had denied him the judge position, and now she would deny him the senate seat, during her election night celebration.  Hah!  Hah! Double Hah! She lost, couldn't happen to a nicer person.  He is the first Black senator to be elected since Reconstruction, which was in the 1800s.  I am very happy to see his election.  

Here is a youtube of an ad he ran.  This is the best thing I have ever seen.  Please do play it, it's not long.  

We had a major packing fail.  I had Jim's Tilley hat sitting out where we would see it.  Do you think either one of us put it in the car?  No.  Given his propensity for skin cancers, a broad brim is a necessity for hiking out here.  I failed to put a hiking long sleeved shirt in when I packed.  It's hard to understand how two such important items failed to make it into the car.  

We went to the new Bass Pro Shop that has been built, along with a lot of other retail, in the southern end of Tucson.  We weren't there last winter because we don't like that Costco.  We went to Costco yesterday and were stunned by what all has been built.  Anyway, I bought a shirt I didn't like.  There were no hiking suitable hats.  I don't think we're really part of their demographic.

We came home, found a hat on Amazon that was on sale, and a Columbia shirt for me which was also on sale, so now we can hike.  We may leave these down here, hats are difficult to pack.

Random photos!
 
Wooly cactus in the front yard.

Cactus and Mesquite tree, front yard.

I think this is a Desert Willow, which we saw in the parking lot at the southern Costco.

Late afternoon sunlight.

 That's it!  That's all I have got today.  Make sure you watch that video, it's funny.

Nature and Evil

Jim has headed off to the local hardware store to obtain two 2 inch flapper valves for the toilets.  One has failed, and is allowing a small leak, the other one is also old, so we're replacing them both.  I am so not looking forward to this.  Even thought we successfully replaced the guts of two toilets in Spokane, I just hate doing stuff like this.  We will watch you tubes and get 'er done tomorrow.

Remember the in-ground trash containers we have? If you don't, that post is here.  We don't use ours, we have too much trash to put it in one.  Anyway, the recent torrential rain washed gravel under the lid, the lid opened slightly, and three mice got in.  They're all dead, they were all partially decomposed.  Ewwwwww.  Nitrile gloves were worn, as well as KN95 respirators.  Mice carry Hanta virus, which has no treatment other than death.  It was awful.  There are no photos, you're welcome.  The lid is now back down with a large rock on it.  Too much nature!

Who knows about horn worms?  I've read about them because they eat bloggers' tomato plants.  We have them in Tucson.  Who knew?  They live in trees, and when it starts to get cold they burrow in the dirt and spend the winter.  I can not imagine these soft sided critters burrowing in to the dirt here.  That would be the dirt that requires a jack hammer for a large hole.  We saw this guy first.  I think he's sick, he wasn't moving much.

We scooped him up on a trowel and put him in a planting bed in the back that has some dirt in it.  Hopefully he burrowed, I'm inclined to think something ate him.  Later we saw a healthy horn worm heading down the driveway, I wonder where he ended up.

We rode twice this week.  The weather has been stellar since the rain.

Mrs. Wiles resigned her position as 47's Chief of Staff yesterday.  Today 47 announced her replacement would be the ever odious, evil spawn of Satan, Stephen Miller.  This is not good.  Miller is the architect of ICE raids capturing US citizens, green card holders, and law abiding people and deporting them to countries that they have no knowledge of.  He's heinous.

The vote counting continues, Democrats are still picking up seats, especially in the house.  It would be wonderful if both houses reached the number required to over turn vetoes.  That would be something to see.

That's it!  That's all I've got for now.

 

 

The House and Senate Have Turned Blue

 Are we happy today?  I certainly am.

The whole world looks a little brighter.  I have "ding dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch, the wicked witch" stuck in my head.

Rain - NOW With Flood Video

 A large storm has come in from the Pacific, carrying a lot of water.  Yesterday it rained, and then cleared up a little.  Today it's raining a lot

Our dry stream is running.

Water running down the street, eddying a little.

Backyard, more dry stream.  Look carefully, you might be able to see it raining sideways.

There is a lot of water to be dropped.  Eventually, that red streak made it on top of Tucson.

Yesterday we had rich people saying stupid things out loud.  
BREAKING: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says having RAM in personal computers is an inefficient use of the world’s limited DRAM supply, arguing it would be better allocated to data centers, per Tom’s Hardware

Think about that, he wants the population of the United States to have their data on data center servers.  Who is going to provide all that network?  This is the dumbest thing Sam has said to date. 

And then Haley Stevens, who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in the MI Senate Democratic primary said this: I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.  She just killed her future in the party.

Other than this, I have nothing interesting or important to say.


Here is a video of how flooding starts in the desert.
 

Work and a Ride

We're back, we're still exhausted.  After the unpacking, there is the pulling of weeds.  It was a very wet summer, and everything has grown.  We spent today outside picking up mesquite leaves and killing weeds.

I discovered termite tubes up on the hill behind the house.  Come to find out, they're not wood eaters.  They swarm, land somewhere, drop their wings and then settle in to reproduce.  The internet says it's not necessary to kill them, but I am still thinking about that.  This is a tube.  It's center photo, and looks sort of like a dog turd.  They build the tubes so they can forage without dehydrating in the sun and heat.

The oleanders have filled in.  Last year they didn't have bottom leaves due to the shade from two enormous sage plants.  This year they grew a lot; lots of rain. 

Last winter, the fruit trees did not produce anything.  I don't know much about citrus, actually I don't know anything.  However, it appears there will be fruit this year.

Yesterday we rode the bikes.  Even though we'd missed a week, 4 days of which were sitting in a car, we weren't as de-conditioned as I was expecting.  You've seen this photo before.  Left of the photo is a house.  There is a trail that runs behind their house.  Evidently, they're hoping to discourage people from walking on the trail by piling debris at its starting point.  I view this as antisocial behavior.

We've made the obligatory trip to Costco.  It was very disappointing.  They don't carry the Kirkland ravioli, Aidell's chicken sausage, Nature's Bakery fig bars, or Nature Valley granola bars.  I was able to source the last two online, but Aidell's will come from Safeway at an exorbitant price.  This Costco also doesn't have the olive oil I buy in Spokane.  I'm surprised the stores are so different.  Next year, we may be traveling with olive oil.  

47 continues to deteriorate, just not fast enough.  He's started making weird sounds, that are not words, when he's speaking.  The twitter neurologists (and there are some) are saying it's damage in the part of the brain that controls speech.  The DOJ continues to try to prevent democrats from voting and winning.  It's going to be interesting to see how far they're willing to take this.  In Alaska, 47 is taking the position that if Mary Peltola wins, the election was stolen, and the only true result must be the republican won.  Sore loser much?

In news of the delightful, it does not appear that Vanky and Jared Kushner will not be able to buy the protected island off the shores of Albania.  The citizens have been protesting in large numbers, threatening to overturn the government if development is allowed to proceed.  We should do that here.

I mentioned that Jim's laptop had a catastrophic hinge failure on the trip down to Tucson.  While at Costco, we saw an Acer on sale.  It has one terabyte of storage. (!) I am really tempted to go buy one as back up for when my current Lenovo self destructs.  Their hinge/screen frame design is just criminally bad.  We've had two failures so far.  How long can a PC sit around and not be used?  Anyway, we UPSed the pc corpse to the Spokane computer guy, he is very confident he'll be able to retrieve the documents and downloads files.  Fortunately Jim does not have photos or music on his laptop.

Jim captured a nice sunset the other night.

 

In news of the very sad, Patrick Stewart has died.  He was a stage actor famous for his Shakespeare roles, then he was Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek, and was in X-Men.  He was so good, with that deep plummy British accent.  
A family statement shared via his official social media and Instagram accounts confirmed he passed away following a brief battle with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia.  It's interesting to me that the Alzheimer's was brief, it took 10 years to kill my brother.  Brief is better.

Was he not a lovely man?

So, that's what we've been doing as of late. 

Bullhead City to Tucson

We're back.  I'm too tired to type.  Maybe tomorrow.  Anyway, all is well. 

Ok, this is funny.  When we arrived, we each had a new pair of indoor flip flops on the shoe rack (for wearing indoors only) that are identical to our current pair that we have in Spokane.  Neither of us has any memory of ordering them.  This is just weird.  

Also, neither one of us could remember how to turn the ice maker on.  This is how.

Turn switch in the freezer to on.  

Old people, we're fun to watch.