Episode 268 - The Gift of a False Fall

It's 88 degrees in Texas in August. It sure makes getting things done in the property easier!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good afternoon. This is Emma, and uh. Today is Sunday afternoon,
and I am on my way home from working out.
I thought I would go ahead and do a segment
today because tomorrow is Labor Day and I am off,
so I won't be going anywhere if I can help it.

(00:24):
And so right now I'm in my car. So that's
why I'm gonna talk. I think I said this on Friday,
but I'll reiterate it cause this is a historical event
in Texas. My course is eighty eight degrees and it
is five ten in the afternoon on August the thirty first.

(00:50):
That is amazing. This time last year and the year
before that, we were in the midst of triple digit
temperatures that we had had since about the middle of
July and continued to have on into September, and then
we were really excited when they went down to the

(01:10):
nineties in October. So this is what we effectionately refer
to as a false fall, and we don't get them
very often, but we have apparently gotten one this year,
and we are glad for the gift. So that it
is eighty eight degrees in the evening of August the

(01:33):
thirty first in Texas is a blessing and we're gonna
be glad to have it. But that lends itself to
start thinking about, oh, what should we get ready for? Well,
maybe wintertime now winter in Texas. Well, it depends on

(01:56):
what part of Texas you're in, because you know, we
have a bazillion growing zone in Texas because it is
a big state. So our friends in the Panhandle they
can see and have seen snow in October, and then
down in the Rio Grande Valley at the bottom tip
of Texas in Brownsville, you know, they can have one

(02:17):
hundred degree temperatures. In fact, one time I had been
to the valley, I went to Edinburgh and I was
coming back north, and I think I'm trying to remember
I didn't I didn't go the way of I didn't

(02:37):
go east so much as I went north and then
I went east, so I took a little bit of
I went a little different way. But the interesting thing
about the border patrol checkpoints is they are not at
the border. Now, maybe there are some at the border,
but I wasn't going across the border. But you you
will run across a border patrol check point way on

(03:01):
up into the state, and so that's what I did.
I encountered a border patrol checkpoint. And of course this
was in the early two thousand, so you know, things
were not all in a teazy as they have been
here for the last few years at the border, so
it was just a normal thing. But you know, obviously

(03:23):
as they're checking all the cars, you get backed up
and you're sitting there. And this was in either March
or April, and I think it was March, and the
temperature was over one hundred because I was gonna be
glad to be home. It was not quite that hot
at the house. But that kind of gives you an
idea of how diverse the climate is in Texas. So

(03:48):
in my part of the state, which is more along
the middle section, then it is less are We don't
have the the coal coal whether they have in the Panhandle.
We can't have the hot weather of the valley. But
we do get some winter. We don't get that much winter.

(04:09):
And in fact, today speaking of winter leads me to
power outages, and today we had one apparently a big
tree fell across a main line and it took two
substations down. These were not our substations, so Fortunately we
did have power. This morning was time to get ready
to go to church, but we did not have power

(04:32):
for a little while in the afternoon. Now again, it's
eighty eight degrees temperature, is not bad. We just sat
there and talked to each other. While we didn't have television.
It's in the daytime, so it's light. We didn't need
anything from the fridge, so we just left to close. So,
you know, lots of things. We're going to need a
longer power outage than thirty minutes for it to be

(04:53):
an issue, but we did have one, so we can
mark that down as a power outage of e twenty
five wasn't long, didn't take what didn't cause any kind
of traffic events, but we did have a power outage. Uh.
What I wanted to talk about is, well, obviously, here's

(05:14):
one thing we can talk about is that I was
gonna talk about preparing for winter, but this falls along
in that. I didn't realize this too until I had.
I was reading somebody's post online and I and I
had forgotten the month of September is National Preparedness Month,
So that's a really good time to spend time getting

(05:41):
things if you don't have them, or getting things ready,
or maybe learning a new skill. So I think what
we'll do is we'll put up a we'll use that
as kind of our theme for and all the preppers
are gonna do this. I guess use September, you know,
the National Month of Preparedness as a kind of a theme.

(06:02):
We're still gonna do our Tool of the Week on
Tuesday in Texas History on Thursday, but the other days
of the week we'll talk about the various and sundry
things that we can be doing for National Preparedness. Much Now,
sometime there's actually a time in the spring. I don't
know if they do it in the fall as well.
I'll have to check. In Texas we do not have

(06:23):
income tax. We have sales tax, and sometimes sales tax
is waived for purchases that qualify, like for example, there's
a sales tax holiday for school supplies in August, or

(06:45):
for school shopping. Let me rephrase that, because ironically, not
for school supplies themselves, closing that kind of stuff, but
not the school supplies, which makes no sense to me whatsoever.
If you're gonna do it for people with children, let
all the things that would buy all their school supplies.
Let those be tax free. I mean that due anyway,

(07:05):
but that happens in I know what happens in the
in spring or January. Somewhere in the early part of
the year, there is a tax free weekend for preparedness supplies.
And I don't know if Texas does that in September
or not, but I'm gonna check on that because that
might be a good time to make some purchases that

(07:28):
that I could, you know, like some extra things that
I might will have. One of the things that we
talked about when the electricity went off was that if
we have this issue and at last a while, then
I'm gonna going to set us up a cooler with
things that we would need to get, you know, like
bottles of water my case, dot Coke, maybe some cheese

(07:52):
and and lunch meat and you know mayo or what
you know, Condoma butter meal, you know, things that we're
gonna get on a you know we're gonna need to get.
We can leave the fridges closed and not mess with them.
If we can put the things that we would be

(08:12):
getting on a regular basis during the day out for
that sou and see, that would be a good time
to get an extra cooler. So I'm gonna be checking
on the tax free weekend if there is such a
thing for the month of September, because that would be
awfully nice. Now why is the month of September national

(08:35):
preparedness month? Well, mostly because it's the most active hurricane month.
Now we've already had Hurricane erin who didn't or which
did not make landfall, but still call some I will say,
at least some damage. There had to be some evacuations
from the islands off the coast of the Carolinas because

(08:56):
it kind of did a glancing blow. But it was
a very strong, powerful hurricane. If it had come, if
it had made landfall, it would have been pretty catastrophic.
And the Carolinas were beat up last year with a Leens,
only to be beat up again two years in a row.
That's like the year I want to say, this was
either twenty one or twenty two, when three hurricanes in

(09:19):
a row hit South Louisiana in the same area. I
think their center made landfall, all within a space of
just a few maybe like ten twenty thirty miles. I mean,
it was like thet They got a triple whammy. I
mean it was one blow after another blow after another blow.

(09:42):
And at one point I saw on the Cajun Navies
Post that seventeen hundred square miles of electrical grid had
been eliminated from South Louisiana and all of that stuff
is going to have to be built back. And so
they were in two painting at that point that some
of the people who live down there, and it's pretty

(10:03):
remote because it's it's very swampy down and we're not
talking about New Orleans. We're talking about basically between Baton
Rouge and Lake Charles in that area. Uh, that's pretty swampy.
That's real swampy. So you don't have you have some
little towns. Uh, so you don't have huge numbers of people. Uh.

(10:24):
That's probably why it was not very well reported on
by the news media because you know, it was one
a whole lot of people down there. You know, those
they they don't think of those as important as important
as people live in a city. Granted there's more people
in the city, but still humans are humans. It doesn't
matter where they live. But those people suffered a lot

(10:46):
from those three hurricanes that hit them, and they were
three major hurricanes that hit them. In a row, I
mean just just a few weeks to a month or so.
Apart it was they couldn't hardly get past one of
them that they got the next one. So that would
be a good reason for September to be national prepared
in this month is that it's a big hurricane month. Now, granted,

(11:10):
there's lots of places in the country that are not
affected by hurricanes, like you know, the vast majority of
the country is not. They can have other kinds of
storms or other kinds of natural disasters, but not so
much hurricanes. Those of us who live and I don't
even live on the coast, okay, but we can get
the residual effects from a hurricane. And you know, even

(11:33):
like Hurricane Katrina when it came when it hit Landfall,
because the ground zero was actually a town in Missouri,
not Missouri, in Mississippi called Waveland, and they had just
unbelievable storm search there was nothing left of the town.
I have a friend who has moved there, and she

(11:56):
posted on her Facebook page about going to the memorial
that they had set up for all the people who
died when Katrina actually hit Lambfall of Mississippi. But by
the time Katrina got up into Mississippi, you know, like
northern Mississippi and Alabama. As it turned to the ride

(12:20):
and went east, it was still a Category one or two.
I mean, you still have major hurricane winds inland. And
that's what happened with Helene. It turned west, which is
highly unusual for a hurricane, but we won't talk about that.
I guess they do it sometimes, but not often. And

(12:42):
you know, a part of the country that really doesn't
ever expect to be hit by a hurricane was actually
hit by torrential rains and hurricane force winds and they
were completely unprepared for that. So having said that, it's
a good time to start looking at things to prepare for.

(13:04):
One of the most important things to prepare for is
some kind of natural disaster or weather event. This is
a good example of today. This tree fell on the line.
In fact, they posted a picture of it. The electrical
people did, let's bring as us tree. It looked like

(13:28):
it was a dead tree. So that's gonna lead me
to believe why it fell. But yesterday we did have storms.
It rained off and on all day long in this area,
pretty heavy. We had quite a bit of rain. Some
parts of Texas in the last couple of days have
had like twelve inches. Okay, we are not on that list,

(13:49):
but some people are flash flooding in multiple places. In fact,
I have seen different parts of the country this weekend
had flash flooding, and flash flooding is a serious thing.
Consider now myself personally, I live on a hill. Technically
I live on the side of the hill, but that's
but I'm kind of if we have a flash flood
where I live, Noah is gonna have to come rescue us. Okay,

(14:13):
so we're a long way from There's never she says,
with confidence in her voice. There's never gonna be a
flash flood that's going to reach my house. I don't think,
because the rest of the county will be completely underwater.
I don't think we're in the We're not on the
tallest hill elevation in the county because that's where they

(14:34):
built the town, the county seat. But there are at
least maybe one or two other hills, but ours is
pretty close to it. Okay, so we we're not We're
not gonna again. Noah would have to come by with
the ARC if we get flooded. Now we can have
all kinds of other kinds of weather related issues, but

(14:57):
flash flood is not one of them. We can have.
We could have issues where trees were blown down and
maybe across the roads and we couldn't get anywhere. That's
a possibility we lost remember during the well, even if
you weren't listening to me back then, you might not know.

(15:18):
In June a year ago, we had a five day
power outage, long as power outage I've ever had, and
we lost massive trees on this property. We lost a
cedar tree that was basically we think about five cedar
trees grown up together. It was huge, It was mature.

(15:40):
When we moved here in nineteen sixty two and I
was six years old. We had a mature pecan tree
beside it that my parents planted in the sixties, so
that tree was sixty years old. And then both of
those went down in the wind. And then the big,

(16:02):
massive cedar tree hit at another pecan tree and took
it down. So we lost three big trees, and then
we lost pieces of other trees, and then I lost
my electricity for five days. So and that was from
a straight line wind event that wasn't even like a
tornado or anything. But so everybody can have some kind

(16:25):
of natural disaster, and of all the things that can
happen to us that we would need to prepare for,
whether it's probably the number one that's gonna affect anybody
anywhere and your and that would be that would be
somebody sitting, Oh, three texts, so let me get a
whole bunch of texts at one time. I will answer

(16:47):
these texts later, but just occasion you wonder what is
all that? Then at least it wasn't a phone call
that that was three texts from somebody. So I will
address us when home. But we all have some kind
of natural disaster. We have the possibility of wildfires. We've

(17:12):
had wildfire danger before. Usually during the summertime. We will
always go through a period when we're under a burn band.
Twenty eleven, we had a severe drought that was really brutal,
and every time you turn around, we were having a
wildfire somewhere in the county. So that was a particularly
bad year, but we've had others that were almost that bad.

(17:33):
Parts of West Texas, I mean the whole thing of
burn up, so huge fires that got started in isolated
towns that couldn't get out. I mean, there's all kinds
of things to consider, especially wildfires that could be something
where you would I mean, you can't stay for that.
You've got to evacuate. You don't have any options, you know.
So other parts of the country have earthquakes. There's just

(17:58):
all kinds of natural disase masters that we can have.
So that's the number one thing we can prepare for.
So September is really a good time to do that
and think about the things that you would need. One
of the things that I will try to do, I
try to do it in the fall. Sometimes usually like

(18:19):
the week of Thanksgiving, I will go through my The
only reason I do what the week of Thanksgiving is
I'm home the whole week, and that gives me the
opportunity to go through my pantry inventory and see what's
out of date. We do have a food pantry in
our area that will take things that the you know,

(18:42):
best by date is out of date, and so that's
a good you know, first of all, there's nothing wrong
with it's just out of date. Generally, there's nothing wrong
with the food. So therefore, if I can share it
with people who need it worse than I do, then
that's a good thing. And then it keeps my entry
stock rotated, so that's a good thing as well. So

(19:05):
I will do that and see if I can kind
of you know, regroup and reorganize and all that kind
of stuff. I did do a lot of work this
summer or some work on my storage building, and that
helped a lot. However, this is a good time in
the fall when the temperature is not right now it's
eighty five on my on my vehicle, when the temperature

(19:28):
is this low, and it you know, if we have
decent days in October whatever, then this is a time
when h it's easier for me to get things done
outside in the gardening building, which is also like a
storage building, and the in my storage building by the
house and all that kind of stuff. So, uh, these

(19:49):
are good times to work on that kind of thing
when you have better temperatures than you have in the
wintertime and the summertime. All this rain we've it made
my tomatoes come back even though I had abandoned them.
There's still there and they may still be growing. But
I have I still have gardening tasks that need to
be done. I need to prune the blackberries. I have

(20:11):
not done that they probably could use some fertilizer as well.
I need to spray the fruit trees. I think my
little peach tree has bitten the dust, so I'm gonna
need to get another one of those. All the other trees,
the citrus trees, the avocado trees, all of those are
doing fine here. Pretty soon, either the end of September

(20:33):
first of October, I'm going to walk to I bought
one of those green stalks, and I'm going to fill
that up with strawberry, with bear root strawberry plants, and
then I'm going to, you know, leave that It's gonna

(20:54):
be close to the house so that I can tend
to it in that zone one and it'll be easier
to deal with, I think. And then also I'll bring
it in during the wintertime into the back porch, which
is quickly filling up since we have a lemon tree
and orange tree to avocatas, and now we're gonna have greenstalk.

(21:17):
I'm gonna have to do some more work and get
some more stuff off the back porch to be able
to do that. Okay, I have arrived at home, and
I gonna figure out who all was texted me a
little while have a nice holiday tomorrow, and I will
talk to you on Tuesday.