Divemedic

Up until now, I have only owned two revolvers. One was an old RG revolver in .22LR that I traded my mother for. She actually thought it was a good home defense gun, and I traded with her so she could get a better one. I got rid of it a year later for a $100 gift card in a gun buyback. That was a good deal, since the thing was a piece of crap when it was new.

The second was my model 642 j frame Smith and Wesson. When I bought it, I discussed it with Marko, who afterwards actually wrote a blog post about it entitled “Carrying the mighty J frame,” but that was on the old Munchkin Wrangler blog which has since gone defunct.

During the lockdown, I rewatched all of the old “Dirty Harry” movies. Suddenly, I wanted a revolver, because reasons. I was at the LGS the other day and saw a model 686 in .357 magnum for a pretty good price, so I bought it. Now I am looking for recommendations for holsters to fit it. My normal leather guys don’t have what I am looking for. So, I would appreciate anyone who is familiar with custom leather makers: help me out here.

*** EDITED TO ADD: The shopping spree for ammo and a new gun were for shopping therapy. It always makes me happy to buy new toys, whether that be guns, radios, electronics, or other neat gadgets. I add this so some idiot doesn’t try to red flag me for saying that I have had enough so I went ammo shopping. ***

We had been having problems with devices dropping out of the network, so on Monday I updated us to a mesh network. There are now three repeaters around the house. It initially was pretty easy, but there were a few stubborn devices that would not make the switch. I finally got the last device to switch over- on Friday morning.

On Tuesday, we had a house fire.

On Wednesday, the TV in the living room stopped working. The picture and sound would cut out for about 20 seconds and then come on for 10. Over and over. Troubleshooting showed that the HDMI cable was bad. The TV is on the wall, with all of the wiring inside the wall. It had to come down. This required a trip to Best Buy, who won’t let you in the store- you have to order online and pick it up at the store, 30 minutes away. When we got there, they didn’t have it. So that required a trip to WalMart. That in itself was an adventure.

On Thursday, the electrician came by and looked at the wiring job.

Today, the estimate for $1600 came in for the electrical job. Then the dishwasher broke. It seems to be a water sensor that looks for leaks and shuts the washer down if it detects one. The good news is that it is relatively new, and the warranty people will be here on Wednesday. Until then, we will be hand washing. I also need to drain the hot tub, since it won’t have power for awhile.

I had enough. I went shopping for some more ammo and discovered that the ammo shelves are almost empty, despite a notice that there is a 1 box limit per person. 9mm FMJ is selling for $20 a box. Instead, I decided to buy a new Smith and Wesson  686 in .357 Magnum. They gave me a decent price, I think. I could have paid less from an online source, but by the time I paid transfer fees, the cost would have been the same. I blame the Dirty Harry movie I watched this weekend for my sudden desire to own a revolver.

The electrician came by yesterday to break the hot tub off on to its own circuit. He said the job looked easy. It is a 50 foot run from the load center to where the hot tub is located. The attic is large with s straight shot from the load center to the wall where the disconnect will go. He said it would take less than 3 hours in total, not counting time for inspections. I figured it would be near $500.

The quote came in. Holy cow.

They quoted $900 in labor, $600 in parts, and another $150 for a permit. 900 in labor for an “easy” job? I spoke with another electrician who said that no permit is needed to wire in an existing hot tub, only for new installations.

I priced out the parts at home depot:
45 amp breaker: $16.49
60 amp non fuse disconnect: $19.23
60 feet 6/3 romex: $130
40 amp gfi breaker: 12.67
conduit and fittings for the non-attic portion should be around $40.
So, total for parts is less than $250.

This quote looks heavily padded.

I will be getting more quotes.

When my wife and I first combined households, she had no problem with me installing my HF radio in the house. We have a bedroom that I can use, but the HOA won’t let me have a visible antenna, so I ran 2 pieces of coax up the wall and into the attic, where I mounted a dual band stick and a G5RV wire antenna. At 52 feet long, it stretches most of the way across the house, but this antenna allows me to transmit in all bands from 10 meters down to 40 meters.

Anyway, I transmitted on low power to check SWR, and once that was good, I began scanning the 20 meter band. I found a guy in Texas who wanted to talk, cranked it up to 50 watts, and hit the transmit key. Every light in the house went off.

My wife was cooking dinner at the time. She was not happy. I reset the breaker, and figured it was harmonics, so I moved to a different band and began to transmit. Lights out, again. Being a smart man, I decided to stop for the night and figure things out later.

It turns out that Eaton, the maker of the circuit breaker didn’t know that they needed to make sure their product was tolerant of stray radio transmissions. They had to go to the Amateur Radio Relay League for assistance. The really bad part in all of this is that Amateur (HAM) radio operators took a lot of blame for this. If you do a Google search for “HAM radio fault arc circuit breaker” you find out that contractors in Florida were blaming HAM radio operators for the issue in at least one Florida community.

So my house fire the other day has illustrated some issues. Titanium boy points out:

While this was wired to meet the National Electrical Code, it is still a terrible way to install electrical outlets. The way your outlet was wired is that ALL of the downstream outlets current draw is going through your crispy outlet. The nasty side effect of wiring outlets this way is that if you have a problem with one outlet, them all of the downstream outlets get FUBARed.
The proper way to wire outlets is to install pigtails so that current for downstream outlets goes through the pigtail connection and not through the outlet. The outlet is, so to speak, off to the side and out of the main roadway.
As terrible as your outlet installation is, it still could have been worse. Imagine your outlet being wired the way it is but instead of using the side screws they used the notorious “back stab” holes in the back of the outlet. These back holes are notorious for the internal spring to lose its springiness over time and the wire connection becomes wonky. Again, all of the downstream outlets get FUBARed.
More good news; all of the other outlets in your house were wired the same way.

I have been finding electrical issues in this place since I moved in. My wife was living here when I met her. She says that there were electrical problems (mostly breakers tripping) since she moved in and the builder had to come back a few times to rewire things.

Now I was an electrician for six years in the Navy. One of the things that I was always fond of telling my subordinates is that a fuse blowing or breaker tripping isn’t a problem, it is a symptom of a problem.

Here are a few of the problems that I have discovered since I moved in:

The most recent one was the fire. I rewired that receptacle with pigtails and wire nuts. The problem that caused it was that the electrician who installed power for the hot tub simply tapped it off of the same circuit as the plug that just failed. Not technically an overload, the hot tub should still be on its own circuit. The good news is that I have wanted to convert the tub to 220v, but the wife didn’t want to spend the money. She is OK with it now, and the electrician will be out this afternoon. I could do it myself, but this job looks like a PITA with the way that the wire has to be run, so I will pay someone the money to do it.

A few months ago, I did a project where I mounted the TV on the wall. While doing that, I had to install a plug in the wall 5 feet off the floor. I intended to just tap off of the plug that was below that spot. I turned off the power and then checked it with a voltage tester. It was still hot. It turns out that box was powered from more than one breaker. For obvious reasons, that is against code. One breaker supplied just that plug, the other breaker supplied 5 others. It was easy to split the circuit. Now the TV has its own breaker, and the other five has the second.

I have a good story about a set of faulty circuit breakers in the house, but I will save that to be its own post.

In 14 states, more than half of Wuhan virus deaths occurred from COVID infections acquired in nursing homes.

 In New York, 70 percent of deaths are people over 65; in ­Michigan, 79 percent; in Washington State, 92 percent. In Delaware, 58 percent of deaths have been nursing-home residents and their caregivers. In Massachusetts, 55 percent; in Pennsylvania, 51 percent; New Jersey, 40 percent.

Again, it seems to me that if we lock down those over 65, nursing homes, and establish a wing of the hospital for those over 65 and refuse visitation in that wing, we could control this virus to levels lower than the flu.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 58 people in the U.S. between ages 0-24 have died from COVID-19 as of May 6. As tragic as that is, for comparison, 250 people in the same age group have died this year from pneumonia and 126 from the flu, but our nation doesn’t close down those non-COVID cases. As I have been saying, fear is contagious:

This panic illustrates the real hazard with nCOV 19. The real hazard is fear induced panic, and the people demanding that the government (or the medical field) do something. It doesn’t matter if the something that is being done is actually effective- just that they are doing something. We see this all of the time, which is the reason why we have to suffer through the Kabuki Theater of security everywhere.

Over 92% of the people who have died in the US are over the age of 65, and more than half live in nursing homes. When I pointed this out over at Aesop’s place, he resorted to emotional argument:

What’s your point? Are older people expendable by fiat? Where is that principle in the Constitution, state law, or common law…? Should we also crash test cars with old people? Use them to clear minefields?

We can argue and quibble over things like infection rate and death rate, but the numbers aren’t there. Ignoring projections, which are as accurate as the ones declaring Hillary would be President, or that Hurricane Dorian was going to wipe out the state of Florida, the real numbers have been less than scary.

The entire US has had about 1.3 million confirmed cases and 82,200 deaths. A six percent fatality rate would be rough, but remember that the total confirmed cases is not a valid number.

New York metro area was hit the hardest with 490,000 cases and 36,000 deaths to date, which represent more than a third of all cases and nearly half of all Wuhan related deaths for the entire country. In fact, DNA sequencing of the virus has shown that New York was the source of most of the infections in the US.

During crucial weeks in March, New York’s political leaders waited to take aggressive action, even after identifying hundreds of cases, giving the virus a head start. And by mid-March, when President Trump restricted travel from Europe, the restrictions were essentially pointless, as the disease was already spreading widely within the country. Just as the restrictions are pointless now.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have been, and remain, a staunch advocate for taking the Wuhan virus seriously. In that same discussion, I said:

If you want to debate whether or not shutting down the economy is a wise method of preventing the spread of the virus, that’s one thing, but denying the existence or deadly nature of it is pure bullshit.

It’s time to have that discussion. The facts are showing us a few things:

1. New York caught the brunt of it, with other major cities seeing a lot of cases, but there appears to be some reasons for that related to population density.
2. Nursing homes also appear to be a focus, probably because of the fragile population and the fact that they are so close to each other. 
3. The younger a person is, the safer they are. 

No one should accept this lockdown as “the new normal.” Even New York City is not having many new cases lately. At its peak, the virus was claiming 800 lives a day in New York City alone, but the last few days show that the danger is receding. On Monday, the entire state of New York had 410 deaths. The data we have at this time simply doesn’t warrant maintaining a total lockdown. Of course, the pandemic is a fluid situation and things could change for better or worse in the coming months. Aesop, who is advocating an indefinite lockdown, has this to say:

Flattening the spread of COVID-19 using lockdowns allows health systems to cope with the disease, which then permits a resumption of economic activity. In this sense, there is no trade-off between saving lives and saving livelihoods. 

He is wrong, because there is, of course, a trade-off. The Wuhan virus has caused a lockdown of most of the countries that drive the world economy. The projection is for the world economy to recede by 3%, down from 6.3% annual growth. In other words, the global economy shrank ten percent from its pre-lockdown levels. This means a cumulative loss of over $9 trillion over the next two years.

It is easy for those in the health professions, those who are essential, and others who don’t need to work to sit there and demand that everyone else starve so they can continue to live in their homes in fear of getting a virus with a survival rate of at least 95%.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, said

The decision to reopen schools cannot be made based solely on trying to prevent transmission. I think we have to take a holistic view of the impact of school closures on kids and our families. I do worry at some point, the accumulated harms from the measures may exceed the harm to the kids from the virus.

The same goes for the rest of the country, not just the schools. We can’t let the cure be worse than the disease. If people don’t speak up and demand that the country reopen, that’s likely what will happen — regardless if a resurgence of the virus takes place or not. The stark reality is that the Wuhan virus may be with us indefinitely, just like the seasonal flu, and we must adapt to it rather than revamping the entire U.S. economy.

Perhaps the lockdown can be lifted, beginning with the sparsely populated counties and states. We could restrict access to nursing homes and hospitals, with screening of visitors. What the country should do is offer people a choice: For those who are afraid to be exposed, those people should stay home.

The rest of us need to get back to work.

Sound reasonable? If so, contact your local school officials today.

Note:

The problem with Aesop and his blog is that he has gotten a boner for every deadly disease outbreak for the better part of a decade. When Ebola came to the US in 2014, the guy was practically salivating at the thought of the disease killing thousands. He has this macabre fascination with disease that we see here in Florida with people who get excited every time a hurricane comes within a thousand miles of the state.