Fogbow

Our former Texas city was hard hit by Beryl. Power and Internet and 911 outages. Coastal flooding. River flooding.

Today is Wednesday. The day of their weekly emergency siren test. The city just sent out a notice reminding residents of this so that people wouldn't panic fearing something else was happening.

I loved siren testing on the coast. It was one of my annual contracts and I really enjoyed it. It was your basic inspection, preventative maintenance, and report writing function that I would accomplish in October after the tourist high season had passed. I'd visit every siren pole, run the weed whacker around the pole, set up a ladder, climb to the equipment box, take the covers off, check for rust, wasp nests, spiders, bullet damage, dust them out, scrub and rattle can minor rust, and finish with a full siren cycle.

They like the mechanical sirens. An electric motor drives a squirrel cage fan in a tuned cavity that generates two tones simultaneously making the classic air raid sound. The siren mechanism was at the top of the pole. The controller and contactor were in a box mounted around the 12ft level. Straight forward work. The idea is get as much done as possible in one day - siren test day - so people don't wonder what's going on. I always ended up meeting a lot of people, their kids, their dogs, their cows, horses and various other curious creatures. Little ones always loved to push The Button that would trigger the test. Then everyone ran away because it was so loud.

I miss that.

It cooled off significantly yesterday, and today is looking nice as well. We are not used to triple digit temps around here.
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Much cooler in Seattle this morning. I think I'm going to sneak out of work early and get the windows open wide for kitty to get some cooler air. She's been miserable.

My sister from Seattle had been visiting for the past two weeks and flew home Tuesday. The pilot, as they neared Seattle, announced that it was 97°in Seattle. Fortunately my sister has a nice finished bedroom downstairs which allowed her to sleep.

My sister has also used the trick of putting a fan at the bottom of the stairs to blow cooler air up and that really helped on the hot days before she flew to the Midwest.

The next few days are supposed to be hotter here in the Twin Cities so I'll put a fan at the bottom of the stairs and a fan at the top of the stairs to redirect the cooler air into the living room.

Edited to add: The insulation in the attic was pretty basic for when the house was built in 1957. I had the asbestos tainted insulation removed in 2019 and replaced with R-50 blown-in insulation. I'm sure that helps keep my heating and cooling bills down.

Tomorrow I'll mow the lawn, before the weekend heat sets in. I'll set the lawn sprinklers to turn on early Saturday morning. This is the latest date I've ever fired those up. Weekend highs are predicted to be in the 90s with heat indexes of 100++. Coupled with leftover flood waters, the mosquitoes are horrible this year.

zekeb wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2024 1:49 pm Tomorrow I'll mow the lawn, before the weekend heat sets in. I'll set the lawn sprinklers to turn on early Saturday morning. This is the latest date I've ever fired those up. Weekend highs are predicted to be in the 90s with heat indexes of 100++. Coupled with leftover flood waters, the mosquitoes are horrible this year.

Your lawn needs watering with all the rain we've been having?