an account on the LAFD website <\/a>, firefighters arrived at the sinkhole and found one car upside down in rushing water. The occupant, a 48-year-old woman, was standing on the car about 10 feet below street level. <\/p>\nFirefighters lowered a 20-foot ladder to her, allowing her to climb out, and took her to a hospital in fair condition. En route, she said that while she was driving, she felt the car pitch to the left, then it tumbled into the sinkhole. The airbags deployed, water started coming in, and she tried to raise the windows. She was able to open the door and climb on top of the car, where she screamed for help. [snip]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The storm is over, and all\u2019s well. Some water built up faster than the drains could handle on one of the balconies, so we thought we had a roof leak, but there don\u2019t seem to be any. Chaos Manor, which is just about my age, seems to be holding up well. The dramatic sink hole was in the part of Studio City on the other side of the well-concreted \u201criver\u201d from where we live. The rivers are flowing again, and dangerous, but they are well fenced and concreted \u2013 the 1938 flood plus the need for jobs caused the Corps of Engineers to uglify the entire LA river system in preparation for a thousand year flood; maybe a million. The Freeways got flooded, many of the locally built streets were impassible, but there\u2019s no real problem for those who don\u2019t go out into the storm. This is California, after all. <\/p>\n
So all\u2019s reasonably well at Chaos Manor and with the neighbors. About twenty years ago a tall Lodgepole Pine decided to fall across Laurel Terrace, but it was three feet short of doing any damage to the house across the street from it. I don\u2019t think there are any trees in danger of falling and doing us any damage. A very long time ago when the kids were young I was persuaded to buy live Christmas trees and plant them after Christmas; but after a few years it became obvious that I was planting a rather dangerous forest that grew at an astounding rate, and twenty years ago I cleared the whole mess out while I could still afford to do it. This storm makes me glad I did that. Actually the winds did nothing in Studio City. Even the big outdoor umbrellas (furled of course) stayed in place; in a really high wind at least one ends up in the street if no one went out to lay it on the ground. <\/p>\n
Thanks for your concern. <\/p>\n
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One of the problems of stroke recovery is difficulties typing. I used to be a fast touch typist, but now I am confined to two finger, and as the lettering wears off the keys \u2013 it does, as hard as I pound them, and fairly fast \u2013 I get even sloppier. Also it is extremely easy to hit two keys at once; particularly the space bar and something else. If the something else is a c or a v \u2013 those are common \u2013 I get a string of words with extra letters at the beginning or the end, but if it\u2019s the alt key I hit with the space bar, then the next key I hit is critical: alt-space sets up for an amazing variety of functions, none of which I ever want; they include close window<\/strong>, which loses all your work since last saved, and various other window changes. Instant; or at least I never see any warning because of course I am staring at the keyboard. <\/p>\nA partial remedy to this is the ASUS Zen portables, which have a good keyboard: big keys, well separated. It doesn\u2019t hurt that the screen is sort of visible while two finger typing, too. Alas I am not set up to use an ASUS portable as the main machine, although I do use one upstairs in the Monk\u2019s Cell where I write fiction. I also have a big screen for editing. It works well. <\/p>\n
For down here I use a Logitech 360 wireless keyboard, which sometimes does things that surprise me; and almost always I have to correct about half the words in each sentence I type because I have hit multiple keys without noticing. I have a big ASUS screen which I can see well, but of course I am not looking at it when I type. Recently I activated a feature in my video software: it\u2019s called screen split, and I wasn\u2019t aware that it existed. It does the most infuriating things to any program you run at anything other than Full Screen. How it got activated I do not know. The icon for it is not obvious; in my case it is hidden in the ^ thing in the tray or whatever they call that icon bar at the bottom of the screen. Eric finally figured out what must be happening when my screen started changing the shapes of any windows I tried to move around. Clicking on the nondescript icon for \u201cScreen Split\u201d showed me a menu of incomprehensible tiny icons (I needed a magnifying glass) and even tinier labels, but one, I could see, was \u201cOFF\u201d. There was no indication of which configuration was \u201cON\u201d; anyway I clicked the \u201cOFF\u201d icon in the menu I got when I pressed the icon that gave me the label \u201cscreen split\u201d when I hovered over it; I found that by clicking the ^ icon in the tray and hovering over the dozen or so tiny and unlabeled icons that click produced. The OFF solved the problem; I have no idea what was \u201cON\u201d or how I turned it on. <\/p>\n
I find that sort of thing a lot lately: new features I didn\u2019t ask for, didn\u2019t decide to install, and probably don\u2019t want; only now I\u2019ve got them and they do things I definitely don\u2019t want when I\u2019m doing something else. Maybe I do want them but it sure would be nice to have some warning, and make it easier to turn them off. <\/p>\n
I use Word\u2019s spell checking \u2013 with my typing I really need it \u2013 but recently Microsoft \u201cimproved\u201d the spell checker, and there\u2019s no way to turn the \u201cimprovement\u201d off. It used to be that the spell checker put a wavy red line under words it didn\u2019t like, and right clicking the underlined word produced a simple list of words that it might be, plus the option of ignoring it or adding to the dictionary. Not any more. Now there are two menus, and it thinks it knows grammar better than I do. It also tries to present a sort of dictionary or maybe it\u2019s a thesaurus. Mostly it gets in the way and is useless. <\/p>\n
For example, Word helpfully wavy redlines \u201cdefinitely don\u2019t\u201d in the sentence above, suggesting \u201cconsider using concise language\u201d; that sort of advice I definitely don\u2019t want. I expect we\u2019d better start getting used to robot helpers giving us advice we don\u2019t need. <\/p>\n
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It\u2019s lunch time, and I have enough mail concerned about how I\u2019m doing in the storm that I\u2019ll get this up now. Back later. Thanks<\/strong> <\/p>\n <\/p> \n
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Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. <\/p>\n
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Saturday, February 18, 2017 \u201cThe wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.\u201d Donald Trump Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while the government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-view"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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