Just need to vent...

Some cities and towns have sidewalk ground that is public property, but you have to pay for the sidewalk. So there are stretches of sidewalk, then no sidewalk, back to sidewalk.
I guess you will be required to have evidence of necessity to throw a snowball into the street. I can’t think of any, warning the elderly not to cross by hitting them with a snowball?

 

I don’t think many, if any, cia agents would have been installed as teachers in peace corps’s areas for two years. They have to work all day in those roles, no time for shenanigans.

 

Sometimes in a public area or a town square, you just need to throw a snowball.

Norman Rockwell will getcha if you don't.

 

I think I found a thermostat with no deadband at all.

I'm staying in a hotel for work and it's a pretty ordinary place with electric climate controls and a thermostat on the wall.

I've got the setpoint at 71°F and the heat runs for a few minutes, then a 30 second pause, then the A/C runs, and the loop starts fresh....

 

A dehumidify feature?

 

It certainly works as such, but it isn't labeled within the touchscreen ui. Not a brand I've ever seen before.

I travel a lot, so I'm used to using the hack codes to extend setpoint range and defeat occupancy sensors so that it doesn't cut off in the middle of the night upon noticing nobody moving in the room.

 

Hotel showers.

Back when I used to travel for Uncle, I carried my own shower head and a pair of channel-locks.
I also carried and STILL carry a small ceramic heater.
Good for white noise in the summer, and aux heat in the winter.
Fortunately, several hotel chains actually accept the fact that normal (*) showers are a draw.

I'll never be accepted as a son of America's South, having been born several hundred feet on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line.
However (comma!!) despite that deeply disadvantaged circumstance, I have spent most of my adult life in the US South. Owing to this happy fact AND being blessed with a post-menopausal spouse, AND working in telecommunications whose equipment spaces are kept at a crisp 79-degrees F I find that there are very VERY few locations that I routinely travel to whose rooms are too warm.

(*) FROM THE GOOGLES: - "Standard" shower heads use 2.5 gpm, but to earn the WaterSense label, a product must use no more than 2 gpm and still meet strict performance requirements. The EPA estimates that the average family could save 2,900 gallons of water per year by installing a WaterSense-labeled shower head.

I still own channel locks and a cordless drill.
ETC(SS) "standard" shower heads are drilled out or have their removable restrictors removed, and provide somewhat more than 2.5GPM.

 

Rooms only? No tower climber duties?

 

I do not get paid to climb towers but rather I just 'shine a little light at them.'
I can't speak for the folks out on the muscle end of the gig, but generally speaking we contract out all of the aerial work.
The closest I've come to 'going aloft' was the last time I was tasked to perform a building surveys following a hurricane for my (at the time) 7 offices.
I provided my boss with some pretty impressive photos, courtesy of a >250g drone.
This was several years ago before they became ubiquitous.
This caused quite the comotion up the food chain, because they were worried about me using a personal UAS without an FAA Part 107 license which I have studied for but have not been motivated to acquire.
I do have the trust certificate, and I am otherwise pretty careful to use my UAS non commercially.
Some military bases provide for free testing facilities but this required some deep scheduling coordination that became more complicated post-Covid.

I told them that they're free to continue to use contractors to do the surveys.

 

I had read that non-hollywood showers in submarines were pretty brutal; sounds like they left quite an impression!

I fixed the HVAC issue by just shutting the thing off until I left this morning.

Oh, almost forgot the vent: so-called luxury hotel where all the towels smell like fuel oil/mothballs or both

 

Shower durations aboard submarines were enforced by peer pressure.
Those using more than about 30 seconds worth of the pitifully inadequate dribbling from the shower heads were 'invited' to go aft on their 'off time' to stand an under-instruction watch as an evaporator operator until they caught their replacement or the COB deemed the lesson to have been learned.
Shower heads on USN ships are universally equipped with on/off switches to allow their victims time to soap/scrub between mistings.

If our water use was excessive without a sufficient number of miscreants to serve as 'shower monitors or evaporator watches' then the COB would simply RED (Danger) tag the breakers for the water heaters.
Once you get below about 600 feet (200m for developing nations) sea water gets COLD.
Like about 35 degrees (2-3°C)
Even at the equator.
Even with global warming.
Our personal water use would then drop to nearly zero.
We also employed 'peer pressure' for those who do not bathe often or thoroughly enough, involving 'Scotch-Brite' pads, called 'Greenie' pads, back in the day - but we live in a gentler time these days.


However (COMMA!)
This is not why I enjoy the occasional Hollywood shower today.

In addition to USN Dolphins I also earned an EXW badge, which much to the chagrin of some of my shipmates I used to wear below my ribbons and/or pocket flap.
( Enlisted Expeditionary Warfare Specialist - Wikipedia )
My CFO used to empty my seabag (or flight bag) out into the backyard for a few days before attempting to wash the contents following some of our exercises.

TO THIS DAY, I do not take hot showers for granted.

 

Never had me a kidney stone but I've heard tales of woe. Drinking water with too much calcium might be causative. I've been a steady consumer of reverse-osmosed water for decades. N=1 non-significant result. But it is my opinion that drinking tap water where calcium carbonate deposits form on faucet ... well, the thing is trying to tell you something.

==
Not a rant/vent, so I'll complain that in some places it is illegal to capture rain water from one's property. Or so I have read. I'm a water snob and sometimes collect rainwater for research. After the first centimeter or so (atmospheric washout), that's the best water you'll ever have. Illegal. Bah.

 

Sub surface seawater is cold, sure. But that situation is changing:
Ocean temperatures helped make 2023 the hotte | EurekAlert!

It occurs to me that military submarines operating in the upper 1000 m or so (3300 feet for scientifically suppressed nations) could add a lot of data to marine science. Put about 3 PTCs on the bow, and log depth and georeferenced data. For all I know, they already may do so. But that will never become public because it would reveal operational details of location and depth. Sub-buyers are not allowed to know that!

Fair enough. just buy enough Argo float bots to fill in the gaps.

(pre edit I almost wrote pubic instead of public. tee hee)

 

I do not recommend it.
The only reason I did not panic is that my brother described the symptoms in detail, and I pretty much KNEW what it had to be.
I had just come back from a one-year-long vacation in a very warm and sandy place, where one drank bottled water or no water.
I was trying to keep the building discomfort on the d/l because my sweet spouse was preparing to go out of town to visit friends.

She returned from shopping for road trip supplies to find me flopping around on the living room floor in impossible to disguise pain. She became understandably concerned and because of the predictable consequences of intense pain we drove our 'beater' to a nearby hospital.
I was exceedingly proud of myself for not screaming and crying, and I did make it to the trash can in the ER vastly accelerating my transition to a treatment room - by popular demand.

I can still vividly hear the nurse running hallway to bring me my toradol shot, often used as a diagnostic tool in ERs and urgent care facilities — if a person's flank pain subsides after taking Toradol, the pain is from a kidney stone.
Then one just has to decide on how to get the little bugger out of the kidney.
Mine was about the size of a BB, so no intervention for me.
I still have kidney stones, treated by diet, lemon water on occasion, and I keep toradol handy.

This is only true in places with horribly authoritarian governments.
Since I live where there is abundant rainfall our two rain barrels stay full pretty much all the time, with last year being the first time in 20 years that I had to water my lawn and other ornamental plants with potable water.

 

A BB? 4.5 millimeters? The survivors of 'sevens' after ultrasonic litholopaxies might not be impressed.

"... where one drank bottled water or no water" I remotely diagnose dehydration as causative. It'll mess you up.

"...nurse running hallway ..." Now there's a fine rant. ERs should store their items of most proximal need logically.

"... horribly authoritarian governments ..." I read Colorado, but OK, let's consider where rainwater collection is counter to the public good. Because once you taste the good stuff, you'll know...

==
(Non-rant in violation of local policy) I worked with (US) National Acid Deposition Program at a few of their (now 260) sites. Each has a fancy machine to keep 'the bucket' covered when it's not raining. Each week, site operators make a few measurements on that water and send few 100s ml to NADP Central. The remaining water, well, I drank it.

In attempt to make this a rant, OhMyGosh there are large Asian countries where acid rain remains important. That have not made their own NADPs and since I am in one, an opportunity is lost for me to drink what is often the finest water.

Blood blister or thereabouts.

 

Just curious but what about guano from roof runoff?

Leaching petrochemicals from asphalt shingles?

I had thought about ozone generators with apparently can be bought for swimming pools.

Bob Wilson

 

Between rains, roofs accumulate lots of garbage*, so (mixed) collections are for plant watering. Ultimate water snobs would drink from smaller collectors with gadgets to exclude 'first centimeter' containing sky garbage.

Rantwise, there are many expensive products sold to too-rich people, but not one that delivers super-good rainwater. I suppose few have tasted it. I imagine it has more oxygen that reverse-osmosed water, but ???

I speak Arduino and am capable of tinkering. But still busy with other things. Our Bob is retired and possibly interested? If history has taught little else, there are too-rich people not yet knowing they need an expensive rainwater drink machine.

*garbage from roofs includes magnetic particles possibly from meteors, but most are from coal combustion.

 

Got your mineral waters too.

Drink from Manitou’s 8 Mineral Springs | Self-Guided Water Fountain Tour