Afternoon, everyone.
Ray, I think most lawns back in the 18th century were really just nice looking pastures for the sheep and goats. I remember reading that Thomas Jefferson even designed Monticello with lawns sized for a certain number of goats to be able to keep the grass clipped. Maybe I need some goats.
Congrats to your FIL for getting to 95 and for having a son-in-law who still cares for him. Sounds like a character, which I seem to be slowly turning into as I age. I figure if I make it to 95, I can do just about anything I darned well please and people will just write it off to me being a character.
Rex and Paul, oil actually fell today. The oil platform anchors have been substantially upgraded since 2005 and the pipelines are buried deeper in the ocean floor. Gustav will cause some evacuations from the drill rigs and temporary disruptions but it's not going to be a Katrina by any stretch of the imagination. I still expect oil will continue to fall once hurricane season hype is over.
Rex, there's no way Bama is going to beat Clemson, no matter how much the faithful are rooting for it to happen. If they can play them close, that would be a good sign for the rest of the season though.
Tom, there's really not much to learn about E-Z Command. You can set the engine number up to 9, turn headlights on and off, and control most sound functions using F2 through F8. Other than that, there's not much more to it. No setting CV's or anything exotic. It's served me well for a year and, although I'm upgrading to a Zephyr, it was a good, cheap learning experience. If anyone wants one, I'll be selling mine cheap shortly.
Corey, take some pictures of your progress. always nice to see a new layout come together.
Larry, that sounds like a sweet tractor. I've always wanted a tractor just because they seem like a cool thing for a guy to have but there's not much in the way of level spots on my lot and some fairly steep grades. I'm pretty sure I'd end up wrong side up at some point. If I lived in a place that got snow, I'd definitely get a tractor just so I could plow snow. I'd deserve it after being the family's human snow plow for ten years in Ohio.
Chris, my lawn service uses a big drop spreader and they put on some kind of combination fertilizer and weed killer. I paid extra to have the lawn aerated in the spring and I suspect that helped as much as anything else since we have clay here and it was really compacted. I'm having a problems with one spot I can't get grass to grow under a big oak tree in the front yard. Any advice about that other cutting down my tree?
Steve, enjoy your weekend. I well remember those killer weeks in my younger days. Retirement is very nice.
I see the governor of Mississippi is already ordering evacuations of anyone still living in temporary housing along the coast. Nice to see a politician getting ahead of the game instead of New Orleans, which is still "thinking" about what to do. I find it both appalling and humorous that Ray Nagin, the guy who screwed up the evacuations three years ago, now says he doesn't want to start evacuations too early in case it's a false alarm. I wonder what he would do in a building if the fire alarm started going off? Maybe wait and see if his floor was on fire before he decided to do something.
Gustav is past Jamaica and has regained cat 1 status. There's nothing to stop him from getting to cat 2 before he hits the Cayman Islands and a small part of western Cuba. He will be weakened a bit but should pop out into the Gulf and develop into a cat 3 by early Sunday morning. All the forecast models want to move him further west, toward New Orleans and the Louisiana/Texas border. This is based on the high pressure system that's forecast to develop over the east coast but hasn't happened yet. Thus, we have one forecast based on the forecast of something that's supposed to happen but hasn't yet. I think the actual strike point of Gustav is still up in the air. If I lived in New Orleans, I would be getting out now. If Gustav maintains cat 3 status and hits near the mouth of the Mississippi, it will be first test of the levees that have supposedly been strengthened to withstand a cat 3 storm surge. If I lived 10 feet below sea level, I wouldn't want to stay behind as a tester. The next thee days will be critical for the Gulf Coast so we'll just have to wait and see. After that, folks on the east coast should start paying close attention to Hanna, who's following close behind.
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I'm thinking of selling carbon credits now!LOL's
