Day 3588

Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. I thought I was in the clear when the tornado passed to the north of our house. Then, as I was getting ready for bed there was another severe weather alert on my phone. A second storm system was headed or way. This new storm carried little danger of tornadoes. The worry this time was heavy rain and seventy mile per hour straight line winds. The threat of straight line winds made me nervous. This is what knocked down our trees and destroyed the greenhouse back in June.

The new storm only lasted about thirty minutes, but there was definitely a lot of wind and rain. When the squall line passed, it was a lot colder. The cold front I'd been hearing about had arrived. I made sure that all the trees in the yard were still standing and went to bed. There was no point in going outside and turning on the roof pumps. The wind had probably blown them over anyway.

This morning I turned on the pumps, made my morning smoothie, and listened to the local news. Wow. Last night's tornado was pretty bad. Some familiar parts of town had been wiped out. A large Home Depot near the Land Rover dealer had been demolished. A strip mall where Janet and I used to shop suffered the same fate. The best garden center in Dallas was totally destroyed. Here I was worrying about a roof leak and a few miles away people's homes were gone. It just seemed unreal that so much damage could be created in just a few minutes.

After breakfast, I went up on the roof and cleared away the standing water. The quicker I can remove the water, the less chance there will be of a leak. I don't know when I'm going to be able to apply the silicon coating. Our next cold front arrives Thursday and it will be preceded by a line of storms as well. Several people have suggested putting a giant tarp over the roof. A tarp can provide a temporary solution on a pitched roof, but they are generally just a nuisance on a flat roof.  I can guarantee that the standing water would find a way under the tarp.

The weather was so pretty today that it was hard to believe all the damage Dallas received last night. What a difference a day makes. I took my long walk when I finished removing the water from the roof and thought about how lucky I'd been. The house was fine, the trees were still standing, and I didn't even have a roof leak. Lord knows when I'll finally be able to apply the silicon coating, but you've just got to take things one day at a time during the rainy season.

I was unusually tired when I returned home. I guess I'd forgotten about how much effort it takes to clear the roof. This was a good time for a nap. I fell asleep almost immediately and didn't wake up until mid afternoon. I felt refreshed when I woke up and returned to my regular schedule. I paid a few bills, took them to the post office, and then finished trimming the trees in the back yard. I wanted to have this chore completed by the time Janet returns from her trip. I think bulky trash pickup is tomorrow as well.

It was a long day and I'm pretty tired. 22,000 steps on a weekday isn't bad though. I'm beginning to think that the little circus in the park brings bad luck. When the circus was here last year we had severe flooding. This year we have a tornado. Sure, October is the rainy season anyway but I'm blaming this on the circus.

Lance is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3454

We had a terrible storm today. Our power is out. Our large elm tree got blown over and is sitting in our yard. The roof got blown off the greenhouse and I don't even know where some of it is. The worst thing is that the power company doesn't expect to have electricity restored before 8:30 PM tomorrow evening. We don't even have good cell phone service now because a lot of cell towers got knocked down during the storm.

This storm caught almost everybody by surprise. It certainly caught me by surprise. I had returned from the gym and was taking my three mile walk when the storm arrived. Luckily, I was near a shelter at the time, so I didn't get too wet. I'm so glad the shelter was nearby. The straight line winds were so strong that dozens of large trees were blown over. We kept hearing them come crashing down all around us. The wind was blowing sheets of rain horizontally through the gazebo. At one point there was a lot of nickel sized hail and I saw several power lines come down nearby. Even though I was wearing waterproof boots, my feet were soaked. The water was coming in through the top of my shoes.

A small group of cyclists, joggers, picnickers, and myself were trapped in the gazebo for over an hour as the storm passed through. We saw a large tree land on somebody's truck in a nearby parking lot. We kept hearing fire trucks and emergency vehicles off in the distance. This was a very bad storm. When the storm finally moved off to the East, I started heading for home. I knew the power would be out, but I was hoping that I wouldn't find a tree on our roof. I passed dozens of uprooted trees on the way home. They looked like they had just been ripped out of the ground by a giant hand.

The yard looked terrible when I arrived home, but when I went up on the roof I didn't see any serious damage. Luckily the tree appeared to have missed hitting the house when it fell. I tried to call my tree guy right away but the phones weren't working. I couldn't send or receive calls until Janet and I went out for dinner later this evening. Large sections of Dallas are still without power. We had to drive quite a way to find a restaurant that still had electricity. We'll see what tomorrow brings. I may need to fill a cooler full of ice to save the food that is in the refrigerator. We still have WiFi using backup battery power, but I don't know how long that will last.

I'm hoping that the power will come back on during the night, but I'm not very optimistic. The Oncor website says that over 300,000 people were affected by the outage. It's troubling to be so dependent on electricity. Everything grinds to a halt without it. Thank goodness the gas works. We can still take hot showers.

I was worried that I might not be able to upload tonight's post since cell service is so spotty. Luckily the fiber optic line doesn't seems to be dependent on electricity. All I need to do is use a backup battery to power the router and we're in business. If the power is still out tomorrow I might be in trouble. All the backup power is being depleted fast. We're both charging our phones now.

I'd almost forgotten how bad severe straight line winds can be in Texas. Today was a good reminder that the weather always has the upper hand.

Liberty is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2999

The wind woke us up this morning. It was fairly dramatic. The windows rattled. Small branches broke loose and landed on the roof. There was no rain, but inexplicably the fiber optic cable went dead. How was this even possible? The cable is buried underground. When the wind subsided, I went outside  to see if the greenhouse was still there. The yard was littered with branches, but everything was intact.

I was baffled by the broadband outage. Wasn't the underground cable supposed to prevent this sort of thing? I called AT&T tech support, and as usual, wound up talking with someone who could barely speak English. As I was trying to explain my situation to someone half a world away, I noticed that the fiber optic line was trying to reconnect. The line re-booted several times and eventually became stable. Then the router and the DVR went through their own reboot cycle. The system was trying to repair itself. Before the tech support person could run her tests and figure out what was going on, everything was back to normal. This is why we won't have jobs in the future. The minute the line went dead, artificial intelligence algorithms kicked in and were already beginning to diagnose the problem. I never could explain the problem to the tech support person but the robots knew. The robots fixed everything.

I thought that Dash was going to get us up early, but he was oblivious to the time change. The wind storm didn't even wake him up. Eventually, he yawned and got up around 8 AM, with was really 7 AM to him. He wasn't the least bit upset about the lack of Internet, so we all went on a walk. We didn't feed Dash right away because we were still a little apprehensive about last night's vomiting episode. Everything was fine though. Dash took a nice walk, ate a normal breakfast, and then went back to sleep.

I was wide awake, so I went to the gym. I think everyone must have forgot to set their clocks forward, because the gym was virtually empty. Even the basketball court was empty. I quickly took advantage of the situation and shot some hoops. By the time I finished my workout, I was tired. My cold isn't completely gone, but I'm feeling better. There was a sign at the gym saying that if you had the flu it would be best to stay away for a while. I definitely don't have the flu. I never had a fever or any of the other symptoms associated with the flu. I just had a lot of nasal congestion and some weird night sweats. Hey, I slept well last night and my nose isn't running today. Maybe I'm better.

It was obvious that I needed to clean today. The house was a mess. I vacuumed, cleaned the front porch, and used the leaf blower in the back yard. Pretty soon it will be time to call the landscape guy again and have him remove all the leaves in the yard and plant new grass. The grass lasted a little longer this year, but not long enough. We're still going to have to put new sod in the back yard this Spring.

I'm going to take my big envelope of tax materials to the accountant tomorrow and then that chore will be out of the way. Looking for toilet parts is on my list for next week. There's one place in town that may have some. Dash needs his nails clipped too. I'll try to make an 8 AM appointment, so Janet can go with me. I hope something nice happens tomorrow. I'd like Day 3000 to be memorable.

Tyson is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1989

The bad weather continues. Last night our power went out twice and strong straight line winds blew part of the roof off the greenhouse. This is the second time that winds have blown part of the roof off the greenhouse, so I'm not sure if the problem is strong winds or a weak greenhouse. Dash was upset by the thunder and lightning last night, but Dot slept through the entire thing. Even the beeping noises from the electronic devices when the power went out didn't wake her up. One of the blessings of old age is that Dot sleeps very soundly now. She needs her rest, so I'm glad the storms didn't send her into a panic like they used to.

It became obvious as soon as I looked out the living room window that one of today's chores was going to be putting the greenhouse back together again. The structure is so old and rickety now, that it's hardly worth the effort. Rain gets inside with or without the roof, since two of the roof vents blew away three years ago and a couple of panes of glass are broken. I gave up raising plants in the greenhouse decades ago, since all the local critters just looked at the place as a convenient place to have lunch. Rabbits, squirrels, rats, and possums all managed to get inside. They all seemed to love tomato plants. Now the place just houses the lawn mower.

When I was testing one of my mobile sites this morning I kept getting an error message from the phone company when I tried to make a call directly from the website. I thought I had made a coding error and wasted about an hour trying to research the problem. It was a mystery. I marked up the code exactly the same way I did on another site where everything worked successfully. Why wasn't this working? Finally I noticed that I had the wrong area code in the phone number. The number I was trying to dial didn't even exist. When I corrected the phone number in the HTML document, everything worked perfectly. Sometimes obvious mistakes aren't so obvious after all.

I hope the power doesn't go out again tonight. There's more rain on the way and I need to get some sleep. Whenever the power goes out I have to immediatly disconnect the Uninterrupted Power Supplies for the computers to save the batteries and make them stop beeping. Then I have to call in the outage report from my mobile phone and hope the battery will last long enough to navigate my way through the power company's lengthy automated messaging system. When the power finally does come back on again, I have to go to the utility room and quickly turn off the washer and dryer. They always turn themselves on automatically when power is restored. The printer beeps when it tried to reconnect to the WiFi and the thermostat has to manually be rebooted before it will reconnect to anything. The two clock radios and even the clock that turns the coffee maker on every morning all need to be reset. I try to do all this without waking the dogs, because if they see I'm up they will think it's time for breakfast even if it's three in the morning.

I'm not even going to bother with the water on the roof. What's the point if it's just going to continue to rain.

Libby is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1253

I had to cancel Dot's acupuncture appointment today because of the bad weather we're having. Actually, I had to cancel pretty much everything today because of the weather. There were no tornadoes in the area, but we did have some strong straight-line winds and hail. I definitely didn't want to be driving around in the brand new loaner car with a storm phobic Dot in the middle of a hailstorm. We made the smart decision and just stayed home.

It was almost inevitable that the new roof would get rained on before it was finished. I called the roofers and explained what had happened and they assured me that the integrity of the new roof had not been compromised. Well, that's not what they really said. They just told me that if something got screwed up, they would fix it. So far, there is no sign of a leak, so maybe we're OK.

Since I was more or less confined to the house today, I managed to get a lot of work done. I added a ton of cute adoptable cats and kittens to a rescue website. I wrote a press release as if I had attended a glamorous Versace party. Nope. Once again I didn't get to go to the party. Instead, I did a load of wash and made myself a big bowl of oatmeal and fresh fruit. I guess I checked the weather radar on the iPad quite a bit too. It was basically a pretty boring day.

Towards the end of the day, the rain stopped and I was able to take the dogs for their regular walk in the park. There were large downed trees everywhere. I knew it was windy during the storm, but I didn't realize it was that windy. Hopefully, things will dry out tomorrow and stay dry for the rest of the week. I'd really like to get this roof finished sometime in the foreseeable future.

I'm on an e-mail list now for a vintage guitar store in Chicago. I don't know how I got on this list, but it pains me to see the prices on some of the guitars they feature. Jeez, I used to own some of these rare guitars back in the day. If only my Mom hadn't given away all my high school stuff to the GoodWill when I graduated from college and moved to the West Coast, I'd have a small fortune in old guitars. Oh, well. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Casey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day