I’m sitting here mid Saturday morning in our home office once again waiting for Mother Nature to empty her chamber pot on my head. We were to get more serious storms and heavy rain starting at about 1 PM yesterday with a round of T-storms, hail, high winds and a rain fall of up to 2”/hr. Then the start was pushed back until 3 Pm, then 8 PM. Our ‘significant weather event’ as they took to calling it had yet to start by the 10 PM news when I turned everything off and sought out the land of nod.

Come this morning about 7 AM I feel the urge to to momentarily surround myself with porcelain and pretend to be a downpour. As I sit up I notice that it is raining finally and at a fairly heavy rate. While this is inking in the power flickers several times before going out entirely. This sort of thing is not unusual for us and generally does last. Still, grumbling over Wednesdays 4 hour loss I reach for my nightstand drawer and extract a mini Maglite for the trip to the head as our Master Bath has no windows. The second I turn it on the power comes on. I turn it off and stand up, bang power is out again. Grab the Maglite and head now somewhat urgently for the head lights are back on. By this time I’m not taking chances, flashlight and I go into the Master Bath complete our mission and return. In that space of time the power has gone on and off 3 more time.

Over the course of the next hour the power would go out a total of 12 times (Molly was keeping score), before finally and thankfully remaining on as the storm cell over us moved on.

As I finish writing this on Monday I’m happy to report that our ‘significant weather event’ turned out to basically be a non event. Mother Nature decide to vent her bladder to the North of us due to some warm air that remained stubbornly entrenched over us making most of Houston look, feel and smell like a bayou swamp. Allegedly this is supposed to move out soon and we’re supposed to return to our normal seasonal temps of about 10 degrees cooler though so far I can’t say I see it happening in the forecast.

So while you start the issue, I’m off to put away my rain and flood gear again. Enjoy.

Science just found another good reason to drink six cups of coffee a day

Swilling down six steaming cups of espresso a day doesn’t just bring you incredible good times – it’s good for your health, too.

Researchers found that swilling down the hefty dose of coffee improved liver health in mice – reversing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease – and meant that mice gained less weight.

Last year, Harvard researchers found that drinking up to five cups of coffee a day had various big health benefits.

Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that people who drank three to five cups per day (decaf or not) had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases, type 2 diabetes, and suicide.

‘Previous studies have confirmed how coffee can reverse the damage of NAFLD but this is the first to demonstrate that it can influence the permeability of the intestine,’ said Vincenzo Lembo, at the University of Napoli, Italy and study author.

‘The results also show that coffee can reverse NAFLD-related problems such as ballooning degeneration, a form of liver cell degeneration.’

Over Six Feet of Rain Has Swamped Parts of the South the Past 12 Months

[Just incase you think I’ve been relating Texas sized tales about our weather]

Over the past 12 months, parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama and the Florida panhandle have picked up over six feet of precipitation, and there’s more heavy rain on the way for some of these waterlogged locations.

Through April 26, 2016, just over one dozen locations in the South had picked up over 72 inches of precipitation since late April 2015, including:

• League City, Texas (NWS-Houston office): 82.86 inches [part of SW Greater Houston]
• Mobile, Alabama: 82.10 inches
• Baton Rouge, Louisiana: 80.41 inches
• Pensacola, Florida: 75.76 inches
• Monroe, Louisiana: 74.11 inches

Certainly the Gulf Coast and Deep South see spells of locally heavy rain every year, thanks to slow-moving thunderstorm clusters and landfalling tropical cyclones.

But these 12-month totals are on par with average yearly rainfall in wetter parts of Puerto Rico, not the southern mainland United States.

Some precipitation surpluses in the southern Plains, Lower Mississippi Valley, and Southeast over the past 12 months are over 20 inches.

Precipitation departure from average, in inches, over the 12-month period ending April 26, 2016 in the southern U.S. Pink-shaded areas have at least 20-inch precipitation surpluses since late April 2015. (HPRCC)

According to the Southeast Regional Climate Center, a number of locations in the central U.S. had their wettest “12-month period ending April 26” on record, not just restricted to the Deep South:

Some Cities With Record Wet “12-Month Periods Ending April 26”

12-month rainfall ending April 26, 2016 (inches)  Departure from average (inches)

Austin (Bergstrom), Texas  58.21  +26.06

Dallas-Ft. Worth    59.26  +23.12

Houston (Bush)  74.32  +24.55  [that would be me folks]

Monroe, Louisiana  74.11  +20.09

Okla. City, Oklahoma  57.15  +20.68

Rapid City, South Dakota  27.47  +11.18

St. Louis  56.63  +15.76

Topeka, Kansas  53.21  +16.75

It’s no wonder we’ve seen a number of flood events since last spring, including most recently, a massive Houston flash flood swamping at least 3,500 homes and, a small-scale but destructive flash flood in Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi.

[This took place about 4 miles from me and rapidly grew dicey as the waters quickly surged to the limits of the capabilities of the rescue vehicles to ford.]

Daughtry At: Guitar Center “Long Live Rock & Roll”

President Trump

A big earthquake with the strength of 8.1 on the Richter scale hits the Middle East.Two million Muslims die and over a million are injured.

Iraq, Iran and Syria are totally ruined and the governments don’t know where to start with providing help to rebuild.The rest of the world is in shock.

Britain is sending troops to help keep the peace.

Saudi Arabia is sending oil & monetary assistance.

Latin American countries are sending clothing.

New Zealand and Australia are sending sheep, cattle and food crops.

  The Asian countries are sending labor to assist in rebuilding the infrastructure.

Canada is sending medical teams and supplies.

President Trump, not to be outdone, is sending back two million replacement Muslims.

What a guy!

Johnny Rivers – Slow Dancing

Never mind the mirror! Objects in the window are closer than they appear!!

Stranger leaves a giant tip and changes a single mom’s life

Earlier this month a mysterious man paid for a meals of 7 families and left a $1,500 tip for his waitress who was a single mother at a Denny’s in Utah. The Facebook page Love What Matters shared the story and lots of people were wonder who that man was.

NBC News was able to track the man down and apparently, he does this pretty often saying, “I’ve done this many times, but this is the one that got out.”

When asked why he specifically wanted to help out a single mother, he responded, “I grew up with a single mother of six. We were poor and homeless a lot. I watched and suffered for years as I watched her work her hands to the bone to give us a good life. She raised us to be kind and help others. Many years down the road, I was facing prison and getting in trouble. It ended up causing me to lose my family because I was a really terrible person.”

The man has since turned his life around and now runs a successful business. He says it is time to “pay it back.”

EASY – Hardrock Comes Easy

Il Padrino – (The Godfather original song)

Impish Dragon finds out that his bookkeeper has cheated him out of $10 million bucks. His bookkeeper is deaf. That was the reason he got the job in the first place. It was assumed that a deaf bookkeeper would not hear anything that he might have to testify about in court.

When the Godfather goes to confront the bookkeeper about his missing $10 million, he brings along his attorney, Lethal Leprechaun who knows sign language. The Godfather tells the lawyer ‘Ask him where the $10 million bucks he embezzled from me is‘. The attorney, using sign language, asks the bookkeeper: “Where is the money?”

The bookkeeper signs back: ‘I don’t know what you are talking about‘. The Lethal tells Impish: ‘He says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about‘.  Impish incensed goes all Big Blue in front of the bookkeeper, licks bookkeeper’s temple as if tasting him and says, ‘Ask him again!‘ The Lethal signs to the bookkeeper: ‘He’ll eat you if you don’t tell him!‘ The bookkeeper signs back: ‘OK! OK! You win! The money is in a brown briefcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Ginny’s backyard in Jersey!‘

Impish asks the Lethal: ‘Well, what’d he say?‘

The attorney replies: ‘He says you don’t have the scales to do it and if you do, he hopes you choke on him and die‘.