The Big Dipper . . .

It was a little warmish this morning so we didn’t have our coffee outside, but a little later in the morning I went outside to replace my leaking radiator overflow hose.

I had noticed that I kept having to add coolant a little often than I had expected, but never saw any obvious leakage. At least until I had to pull the tank to replace the ignition coils last week and found the overflow return hose was splitting apart at the bottom of the tank where it couldn’t be seen.

So yesterday I stopped off at O’Reilly’s yesterday to get a new section of hose. And, as it turned out, the hose was free. The guy said he found a scrap piece at the end of a reel, so he just gave it to me.

Radiator Hose Replacement You can see where the old hose on the bottom right is split apart.

It did take a little maneuvering to the new hose installed on the nozzle underneath the tank since I couldn’t see, and could just barely feel it. But finally getting it in places I topped off the tank with coolant and I was done.

Repaired Radiator Overflow Tank

However I will monitor the level over the next couple days to be sure any air has been worked out of the system, so I may have to top off the coolant level a couple of times.

While I was putting the coolant jug back in our Rubbermaid storage shed, I took a few minutes to look it over.

Rubbermaid Storage Shed 20210808

It’s about halfway through its 2nd Texas summer and I was happy to see that it still looks brand-new. What looks like a sag in the roof is normal. It’s caused by the fact that the front section is on rails so that it can slide back over the back part, allowing you to stand up in at least part of the shed.

About 2pm Jan and I headed over to the FM646 Denny’s for what seems to be our weekly Ultimate Omelets. Always delicious

After lunch our next stop was the Verizon Store across I-45 on the HEB side, but found this one closed on Sundays. I had want to get them to take a look at Jan’s Text Message problem.

Basically she can’t send or receive any.

I had originally thought it was a problem with her old S5 phone, and hoped the problem would go away when she moved up to my S8+, but the problem followed her account. But so far I haven’t been able to convince Verizon of that, so that they keep having me reset things on the phone. Saved for another day.

Then after an HEB stop for a few things it was home by about 4pm.


Well, after the Carnival Vista’s 100% vaccinated crew and passengers started coming down with the WuFlu on this first voyage from Galveston, it’s now back to pretty much All Masks, All The Time.

Carnival implements new mask policy after cruise out of Galveston reports COVID cases

All guests age 2 and older will be required to wear face masks in elevators and in designated indoor entertainment areas, all retail shops, and in the casino, except when eating or drinking.

All guests must wear masks during the entire embarkation and debarkation process (at the home port and ports of call, including the onboard pre-debarkation process), during water shuttle operations, any Carnival-approved shore excursions and while on any transportation vehicles.

 

And this doesn’t bode well.

COVID-19 variants could be named after constellations once Greek alphabet is used up, WHO official says

So after they run through all 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, they’ll start naming them after constellations. So you could get the Big Dipper variant, I guess,

But there’s some other interesting tidbits buried in the article.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, also warned it is “possible” new variants could emerge which evade vaccines.

Meanwhile, she claimed new variants which evade measures such as vaccines are a “real threat”.

And then there’s this one.

. . . after early analysis suggested coronavirus levels in people with the Delta strain may be similar regardless of whether or not they had the jab.

So it doesn’t make any difference whether you’ve had the shot or not?

  


Thought For The Day:

The other day I posted a photo of the new SpaceX Starship being mated with its Super Heavy booster. To give you some idea about the relative size, those are workers under there between the sections. Guess they really trust those cables and the big crane holding everything up.

SpaceX Starship Relative Size