I got a lot of stuff done today, despite sleeping late.
Yep... I got a full eight hours last night. Didn't even get up during the night... not that I can remember, anyway.
So I got the porch light with the street numbers back up, it's now birdproofed... got the other big light hooked up to the proper socket... got the fascia repaired, now I need to get the rest of the trim ready to paint.
We got a very impressive thunderstorm this evening... most of it missed us, but we did get maybe a half-inch of rain. And lots of lightning. And even some wind, like 50MPH gusts. I stood out on the back deck watching it until I realized how close the lightning was getting... when the flash is followed within a half-second by the noise, it's time to get inside.
The chances of getting hit
And I have been frequenting a lot of atheist forums lately...
I talked to Tyler today... I was going to go visit him yesterday, but nobody answered the phone, so I didn't. Today someone did answer, and gave me his real phone number... I'm planning on going over there tomorrow evening.
Tyler and JD are going to be playing at a show this coming weekend in Dallas... for more information, email JD... I don't think that Tyler is back on the net yet, but he will be soon. If you want to hear what their music's like, go to mp3.com/shocktrauma. I think that's the address, but I'm not sure, since I can't get online right now...
Both of them boys have the ability and the time and the space to put up a web site of their own, but I can't get them to do it, dammit...
The cable service went out about an hour ago, during the halftime of the Chiefs game, and just when I was in the midst of an interesting forum discussion. I don't know if the outage was due to the storm or not, since it occurred about an hour after the storm was over...
And, speaking of storms, it seems like another one is coming up, more thunder getting closer the last few minutes. The last radar that I saw had a small storm following the larger one, but it looked like it would miss us, but maybe not.
It's really fun to watch the radar when storms are forming locally... the first one started building west of Manhattan, about 60 miles west of here, and just appeared out of nowhere. The second one, the one about to hit now, did the same thing only about 30 miles north and 50 miles west of the first one and showed up about an hour after the first one did.
I just went out and stood on the back deck, and this storm that coming in looks just as big as the last one was, but without the radar it's really hard to tell. Lightning all over the west, from the north to the south. There's a strong possibility that it grew into a big one too...
I think that I'll go take a shower and see if I have any more to say, since I can't put this up until the cable comes up again...
Ahhhh.... much better now. The storm appears to be dying before it got here (they frequently do that) or it's slid off to the north or south. And it's horrible outside... humidity in the high 90s and temp in the high 80s. And no breeze at all.
And still no connection, either. I called the cable company before taking my shower to see if it was just me or a whole section and the girl that answered the phone laughed and said that she wished it was just me... and that they were working on it and that there were a lot of people made at them because they were watching the Chiefs game.
I've been getting a lot of email lately from enthusiastic xians thinking that they can convert me with a quote from their book. Up until lately, I've been pretty gentle with them, but the last few I've lambasted. It's pretty obvious that they've just entered "atheist" into a search engine and sent unsolicited email to every site that they encounter. Not that I don't expect a little of that, but I'm really beginning to think that they don't care that they're being rude and obnoxious. They do not seem to be interested in a dialog, just rattling my cage.
I would never go to an xian site and do such a thing, or even enter into and xian forum and post atheistic messages... but every single atheist forum that I've been on, they're there, quoting from their babble and not listening to a single argument.
Actually, there's one atheist mail-list that I'm on where non-atheists are not allowed (potential members are screened, and there's a listmaster who can unsub people), and it's really nice and relaxed.
No, not really nice and relaxed... the only thing that atheists have in common is a disbelief in gods. There is a lot of discourse and discord on a large variety of other subjects besides living as an atheist in a xian society. But there is that singular commonality that makes it a community-like list and a nice place to be.
Well, unless the cable comes up in the next ten minutes, this will go up when I get up in the morning... it's 23:22 and I'm getting pretty damned sleepy, and there's a lot of stuff I want to get done tomorrow, and I have my first dentist's appointment in over a year...
by lightning while standing on the back deck are pretty negligible, but the chances of the tree that is over our deck getting hit are much higher. So I would get killed by a lightning-struck tree, which is just as stupid as getting hit by lightning.