Getting Antsy About This

Most of us here have ants and
there is probably widespread agreement that they are challenging adversaries. Some of them seem to be attracted to the sugar water that is in the hummingbird feeders as you can see in this photo and the feeder soon becomes overrun to the point where the humbirds just don't frequent the place anymore. How hard can it be to avoid this? They're ants for godsake.

So here they are trying to climb down the chain we use to hang the humbird feeder. The red cup-like device is full of water and intended to be a moat. Ants can't swim so therefore the path to the food is broken. The concept is simple and involves no chemicals. What could be easier?

Until it freezes at night. I spotted the little eskimos creeping across the circular ice field and down to the bonanza the next frozen morning. So out with the ice, refill the cup and wait for the next move like you do in chess.

Note the tiny raft of dead ants to the left side of the moat. The next development was that a mat of drowned ants forms and the living ones cross the moat to savage the sugar water again. This is not going to be as easy as I thought. Maybe I should take up chess.

Beginning to feel a little like the gopher-obsessed caddy in Caddy Shack I figure I will divert the deadly swarm BEFORE they reach the chain by parking a cap full of liquid Terro (poison they drink and carry back to the nest WHICH IS IN OUR ROOF !) and kill all the young. Here is what this clever idea looks like in action:
Note the pine needle connecting the chain to the CUP OF DEATH. This needle was soaked with Terro and intended to do just what you see . . . the little devils are going to drink their way to eternity!

Later I noticed a trail of ants moseying along our lawn border wood. They were coming from the house and the trail ended at a pine tree in our yard. So there is another colony in a different part of the house because right below where they enter there is a small accumulation of debris that appeared to be ground-up insulation. After a little checking it seems that they might be a velvet tree ant which either nests in the tree and vacations inside the walls of the house or vice-versa.

But once again the trail is the key so when I followed it to the tree it was a simple thing to encircle it with ant powder. Ortho, Terro and others all make it and the idea is that it clings to the ant and when they rub antenna to greet eachother and share directions to the food, it contaminates the rubee as well and the two spread the good news until everybody is feeling poorly. There was in fact a pile of bodies right where I had dusted before but the stuff must wear off and allowed more to come in.

Standard treatment is to sprinkle all around the perimeter of a home and if you find a trail to a tree, encircle the tree as well.

Computer Whining Rights

We recently purchased two new Compaq PC's loaded with the new, improved Windows 7. We thought, great! Newer is better! And to be fair W7 does have some cute features. But we had forgotten the lessons we failed to learn when we upgraded to the newer versions of Internet Explorer.

We had moved from IE 6 to 7 without too much trauma, just a hiccup here and there and this I think was the planting of the evil seed of confidence. Then came IE 8. Some gurgling now, indigestion even, because some of the programs we use had not been tested on IE 7 and they suffered something like organ rejection.

Bruised and a little worse for the (enormous) time spent / wasted, we still managed to get through it and return to an acceptable level of functionality.

IE 8 should have been the Grim Teacher. But when our 10 year old PC's began squeaking and groaning we thought well, new towers, new operating system, new Microsoft Office 2007, new email system (Outlook instead of Express). . . we need to get some speed and efficiency implants.

We even realized some savings when the tech who spent the day transferring our files and configuring the new devices, suggested a service pack that would allow us to scan pages directly into pdf, thus avoiding the need to buy Adobe Acrobat ($299).
So far so good.

Leaving the warm, comfy XP operating system did not seem hard to us at this juncture. How much different could Windows 7 be anyway? And as I said, it isn't that different. Better in many ways in fact than XP.

But the other programs we depend on did not concur. Quicken for one. We had the 2008 version which immediately locked up the report printing function when it saw W7. It's a little beyond impossible to do real estate, property management, and manage your own personal finances without printing. Intuit charges $24.99 for support calls so we chose the free online chat solution. I use "free" and "solution" advisedly though because the experience took over four hours and somewhere in the process we completely misplaced our entire property management account.

This happened I think because when you do live chat you must be exceedingly clear with questions and the answers must be carefully constructed to insure that you do not skip any steps in the solution. However this chat worker was not the sharpest knife in the kitchen in terms of his command of English and making the situation worse he was working perhaps a dozen other callers along with me. Can you imagine jumping back and forth between 12 different technical conversations all day long? No wonder his answers were brief and short on detail.

He said he would give us a free 2009 version of Quicken which would work fine with Windows 7 but when I followed his directions and downloaded the file it said it had to uninstall the earlier version in order to install itself. That's where that business acount went sideways I think. We back up Quicken online plus we have an external hard drive which backs up both our PC's so it's really not "lost". It's just that we have to hire a tech to come out here and find it.

So I'm not whining. Not really. We have faster PC's and we can do pdf. files now after all and we hope to find that Quicken account sometime before the end of the month.

Duh

For literally years now these signs welcoming travelers to our community have annoyed my grammatical nerves. The word "would" is missing you see, and all this time I thought we must be making a hayseed impression on visitors who must think we can't put a decent sentence together.

So now I'm there at the Hi-Lo Cafe making conversation with our waitress over this important issue and suddenly taking note of the cocked head look she and Sally are giving me, a great burst of understanding flashes across my dim mind. "Weed like to welcome you" isn't missing a word at all, it's missing an apostrophe !

Both of these divine women took my faux pas in stride when ruder people would have broken out in hysterical and humiliating laughter being as the cafe is jammed with Sunday morning brunchers and all.

Spoken as "We'd like to welcome you", it finally dawned on me that instead of a sign painter's slip of hand, some great wit went into the phrase. And it took me, practically a native by now, almost three decades to pick up on it. Oh boy.

Upgrading

So you've been here, right? The computer is getting slow. You can't do X, Y, or Z which (of course) MUST be done in order to "complete the transaction". In our line of work it is becoming necessary for example to scan documents and email them to clients. So we learned how to do that. Took awhile, but we got there.

But it turns out that some companies don't want you to send each page as a separate attachment. There is a format called PDF which allows the sender to save a bunch of scanned pages into ONE document so that the recipient can just scroll down and see (and print) all pages in one view.

This (of course) requires special software called Adobe Acrobat . . . $399 per at last look.

So since we have 8 year old (and cheap) PC's let's get up to speed, right? We already have perfectly functional flat screens and wireless keyboards so all we needed was new towers. Off we go into the nah-nah land of computer-speak. Fortunately we tied in with a local company which helped us research what model to buy and what software (Microsoft Office 2007) to add.

The PC's came on Thursday and we have been learning Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2007 ever since. Trying to match our existing programs (not to mention email) has been . . . hmmm . . . challenging. Very little is similar and I get the feeling the little uber-nerds who invent this stuff are playing at being clever rather than looking for simple ways to do things.

Now we are faster and capable of more cyber gymnastics than ever. Of course the screen resolution is tiny now so as to accommodate all those new icons and our eyes get worn out sooner. Sigh.

The Trouble With Watching Oprah

The other day Sally tuned in to hear a guy on Oprah's show talking about how we should be avoiding processed foods. He is a college professor who wrote "Food Rules" (which Sally immediately bought) and is apparently wildly popular __ I mean, he's on Oprah, right?

Basically his deal is that if you can't pronounce any of the ingredients on the lable, don't buy it. In other words, most stuff is processed and full of nasty things. What you should really do is ignore the floorplan in your local supermarket ___ meats and veggies around the permimeter, processed stuff in the middle ___ and do your shopping around the outside, where the healthy, unprocessed food is.

This doesn't work out as a vegan thing but mac and cheese did not make the cut. Or cookies, either (I [snuck,sneaked?] a box of maple cookies into the basket at Trader Joe's last week and they are the most luscious cream-filled cookies I've EVER had. I'm really going to miss them).

As you might imagine this led to a flurry of label-reading activity and the results were not good. Food we previously thought was healthy did not fare well. Even basics like chicken broth for example hit the wall because not only did the can have 970 mg of sodium (40% of the daily limit) but, hold your breath ___ MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE ! That's right, a tongue-tangler in the flesh.

As it happens though I can pronounce this one because I used to work for the company that made it when I was in high school. so we're going to continue to use chicken broth. I mean, the label also brags that it's 99% fat free so there you go.

There were a couple other words that gave me pause too: does anybody know what "autolyzed yeast extract" is? Or "invert sugar"? Upside down sugar maybe? But at least I can pronounce them so I'll ignore them and sleep soundly after a delicious meal of chicken broth.

Geezing

A humorist once wrote that the word was first used by Chaucer who said that (of some obscure Danish king) "he geezeth", which meant he was dishing out stupid and unwanted advice and annoying eveyone. Thus older people often are called "geezers" and this book (given anonymously to me by some family member whom I will deal with later) shares some hilarious ways we geezers can get even with the young whippersnappers who call us that.

For example one chapter is called "How to mess with the minds of younger people" and offers tips like a) ask the same questions and tell the same stories and anecdotes over and over again, or b) pretend to fall asleep in mid-sentence and watch their reaction.

The reason the author makes the title a question is that geezing is not for everyone. Here are some qualifying test questions:
1. can you engineer every conversation into a description of your last surgery?
2. can you nap three times each day and still fall asleep during dinner?
3. can you get up three or four times a night to go to the bathroom and still keep awake after breakfast until your morning nap?
4. can you get good fragments of conversations by reading lips and body language?

Another venue is to capitalize on the infamous memory loss that is associated with old age by using it to free yourself from the humdrum obligations of people who actually DO remember what they promise to do. Say you'll of course be happy to go to a Tupperware party and then go golfing instead. Oops! I forgot! Or when you see yourself getting into a rant and about to put your foot in your mouth just stop mid-sentence and claim you forgot what you were about to say. They you can pretend to remember and go off in a completely different direction avoiding the faux pas.

People ask "when will I know I am old enough to geeze?" and the author has a perfect answer; when the government names things after you. However since this requires two additional ingredients beyond age namely, fame and wealth this makes it hard to qualify. To dodge this pitfall just name things after yourself. By yourself. For example the corridor to the bathroom in our home is tasefully called the Batchelder Hallway. Soon you can graduate to whole buildings and even mountain ranges.

Like most books, the back cover is filled with praise: "I'm buying this book to help support his wife Robyn. She deserves it after all she's had to put up with while being married to him all these years." And "My hope is that if enough of us buy this book he will retire and quit writing this drivel."

It's a smallish paperback from Apricot Press whose motto reads "Working hard to get big enough for the government to bail us out". My kind of book.

Comfort Food

Winter is the perfect time for this kind of food and in fact we own a crock pot for this purpose . . . something is leaking that mom's-cooking aroma into the house all day long. There are endless choices but my call (after mac and cheese) is a chicken pot pie.

Which is of course bad for you in multiple ways ___ the pastry crust alone is probably illegal in some countries ___ but anything that tastes this good just defies the definition of 'bad'.

I mean look at England where the idea started. Their meat pies are world-renown and for good reason. When the weather is cold and drippy who wants avocado and sprouts in a sandwich? Or in a salad for that matter. Give me a break.

You can even buy microwavable pot pies in the grocery for as little as a buck. Now, in these hard times shouldn't we perhaps cut a little slack with the nutrition obsession thing? I mean, where can you get a hot meal with meat, veggies, cereal grains, and gravy of uncertain origin for a measly buck?

And even more importantly, factor in how neat it smells and feels on a cold winter day! Yes, my loyal readers, Swanson should rank right up there with Pasteur and Edison, for we have at last a portable, affordable tummy-warmer to ward off the uncertainties and chill of winter days. Not to mention the uncertain economy.

(Chicken soup is good, too. Costco makes it out of their unsold rotisserie chicken for $9 something a quart (maybe more, not sure). It'll feed you for a week.)

Posted by a hopelessly lazy cook.

Giggling on the Social Network With My Strawberry, Tongue in Cheek

This could also be considered twitting, skooching, inkling or any of a remarkably long list of silly "noun-verbs" that seem to appear without warning or reason, or even any particular need. We are being urged to 'connect' with each other whether we really want to or not because somebody out there thinks this is good for us and evidently we should be grateful and get busy.

Well, I'm out. Please don't ask me to tweet, schmeet, or otherwise bother your pleasant day. If I want to socialize I'll walk across the street and say hi. Or I'll call you. Or visit you with any number of other archaic social contact methods like writing a letter. Who wrote this script anyway?

The more observant reader will notice that blogging is a form of social networking and that I appear to be contradicting myself, however this is not technically so. You see, true networking is two-way communication. You write something and get an answer from somebody, somewhere. Letters sent in the blind so to speak; you don't address a particular person.

This blog is like that but with a singular exception. Nobody ever writes back in the form of comments and thus I am not social networking here and am free to make fun.

We go to real estate classes all the time in order to stay up with current developments and a recurring theme in all these classes is to get onboard the social networking train if you want to be successful. Tweet. Zing. Bleep. Whatever. Try to be "social" in the hopes that somebody out there with nothing else to fill their day will connect with you and buy a home.

Please.

Doing real estate for us anyway doesn't work like that. How people find you on the web means you need a website, sure. But once they connect with us we go to the hands-on mode right away. I'm a big believer in good first impressions when I meet someone....eye contact, firm shake, listening a lot. Chirping on the internet just doesn't come close to doing this.

Whoa the marketing gurus say, DID YOU KNOW THAT 87% OF ALL BUYERS SEARCH THE INTERNET FIRST ? ? Well, okay. That's fine. What's that got to do with frittering? WELL GOOD HEAVENS, YOU'RE NOT OUT THERE ! ! Uh huh, well I'm not convinced a buyer is surfing around for an agent. He or she is looking for a home. That's why most buyers call the listing agent first, the guy or gal who has that home advertised on the internet.

So we are fans of the tried and true Word Of Mouth method. Do a good job. Communicate with your clients. Treat everybody the way you would like to be treated. You can spend all the keyboard hours you want but nothing works as well as WOM.

Raking Pine Needles and Other Obsessions

It's that time of year again and piles of black trash bags full of pine needles are lining the streets. Personally I don't favor raking. First of all it's work ___ physical effort which I oppose on principle. Then there is the overwhelming likelihood that another storm is right on the heels of this one which will dump as much or probably even more needles. This is one of the corrolaries of Murphy's Law, a related topic which I will not go into here for lack of room. Whole books have been written about this bundle of natural laws which are so germane to our everyday lives.

Finally, with the above two predispositions in mind, it is extremely comfortable to believe that pine needles SHOULD carpet the ground. They were here well before Lake Shastina was and what harm did they do then, hmmm?

Well, some skeptics would say, they pose a fire hazard to homes and bare dirt is much safer. To this blatantly sensible argument I say, humbug. Wildfires are nature's way of cleaning out the underbrush and frankly, some yards around here are pretty trashy and need clearing out.

Of course I rake the lawn. I mean, if one didn't do that we'd look like savages. What self-respecting homeowner has a brown yard? Besides, removing those needles allows the grass to grow more aggressively which in turn requires mowing which I do just to illustrate that I'm not completely against physical work.

Despite all of this rationality, Sally thinks I suffer from another sort of obsessive behavior other than the clean-yard variety. On occasion (and this is not every trip, no sireee) when I'm out and about I will load up the car with garbage cans' full of grass clippings or sawdust. These go onto large piles in our side yard next to an equally impressive mound of composted (meaning odorless) horse manure.

I try and try to explain the concept of stockpiling but Sally isn't buying any of it. The idea of course is that these organic materials are components of a healthy vegetable garden. And when you do the lasagna thing of layering stuff like this, you feed them onto the basic bed each season and avoid rototilling.

On top of all this flawless logic we hope to develop an area next to the existing garden for berries and perhaps fruit trees next year. Where, I ask Sally, could we possibly find time to go fetch such demanding quantities of these ingredients when the pressing task of planting is upon us?

My final grabbing line is that the car always smells like pine needles.

The Other Two Buck Chuck

Trader Joes in Redding had this label over their $1.99/lb hamburger. Get it? Two dollars per pound = two bucks for ground chuck. These people are good.

Regular Trader Joe shoppers know that "Two Buck Chuck" is the Charles Shaw wine which they sell for $1.99 so this play on words is cute and fits right in with the whole store's theme.

This is not a place one goes to for dish soap ___ I tried just to be sure and no luck. Nor mundane margarines. It's more a shopping experience where there is huge selection of good stuff at good prices. Popular lines and each pricing, not per pound.

I inquired if Weed was in their expansion plans but the manager just chuckled. Maybe he thought I meant the product.

Helicopters VS Optimism

Brooders vs extroverts is the title of an article in the August Air & Space Smithsonian magazine. Here is a verbatim part:

"The thing is, helicopters are different from airplanes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly and, if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly.

A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in the delicate balance, the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

This is why a helicopter pilot is so different from an airplane pilot, and why in general, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble.

They know if anything bad has not happened, it is about to."

"We are experiencing an unusually . . . "

I was trying to reach a local office of a fuel business the other (week)day but kept getting routed to some national emergency hotline which, unless you pressed "1" for a fuel leak or explosion, said "We are experiencing a heavier than normal volume of calls . . . " but went on to say "We pride ourselves in providing the highest standard of customer service in the industry and your call is VERY important to us" (pause) "Your estimated waiting time is ten minutes".

I'm glad I wasn't reporting an explosion or fire.

Forensic Gardening

Andrew, the ever-alert guard dog / sheltie was the first to see them. He dashed to the bedroom door and danced around barking. The two does who were grazing Sally's flowers down to roots bolted right through the netting we had put up around the back yard as soon as I opened the door to go out. I couldn't believe the mesh didn't even slow them down although one arched her head back gracefully as she passed through the fabric.

They of course had been there for some time and had visited our precious vegetable garden at length, taking out row after row of lettuce, radishes, and corn. Mark Carion tells me they are pregnant this time of year and thus more choosy, wanting to feed their babies only the best. Shastina becomes a drive-thru deli under these circumstances, my Armor-All garden notwithstanding.

During the post mortem Sally and I discovered two places they might have slipped in. One is a tree that I went around with the netting which was so close to our existing 3 foot fence that I didn't feel it was necessary to bring the netting down to the ground. That (see photo at top) is now remedied.

The other possible point of entry is this gate which, before its medieval makeover, was actually presentable and is by the way almost exactly 13 feet from our bed. Surely we'd hear these heavy does launch over it, right?

I have never been a hunter myself but the motto "If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em" is suddenly becoming more relevant at this moment in my life. Sally drew this to my attention when I noticed her browsing the web for venison recipes yesterday.

But out in the woods the other day I almost stepped on this fawn and well, jeez.

Ten Dollar Lettuce

I've done this before and should know better. We used to live on some acreage outside Mt. Shasta city. We had horses, the predictable lineup of farm animals, and garden areas. During our 33 years of "farming" there I learned why people buy food at stores. We had laying hens for example that produced eggs for something just shy of $5 a dozen. I can't remember the exact dollar figure but it proved to be similar for all the rest of our agricultural production . . . rabbits, pigs, beef, and yes. Lettuce.

We are at it again however, hoping against the odds that reality has somehow changed in the intervening years. Perhaps some things that were actual then weren't really, really true. There may have been some fundamental changes to Einstein's laws that will make garden produce actually affordable now.

We built our garden on the cheap, using scrap lumber and old hardware wherever possible. The only hard expenses were 25 metal stakes at $6.75 each and two rolls of deer netting at $69.95 each. Not counting gas, our time, the water, and various bags of manure & fertilizers I need to reap around $300 worth of radishes, lettuce, and zuchinni to break even.

It is obvious right here that we're never going to make that. But as purist gardeners would counsel at this point, building the garden was the costly part. It will last decades with annual and inexpensive additions of fertilizer, water, and seed.

Not only that of course but the produce will be fresh and infinitely better that what you get in the store. Not to mention the contribution, albeit tiny, that this makes toward improving the environment (less fertilizer to grow the lettuce in Texas, less diesel to haul it here, etc. etc.).

And then there is the emotional payback out little plot gives to us. The weeding. The watering. The thinning. Just knowing it's there is comfort to the soul and the sore back. Maybe my back would ache MORE if I didn't exercise it this way. How's that for a good spin?

Oh, and we get to give away the surplus lettuce et al that is all but certain. Of course we first have to buy more netting to stop the so far invisible creatures who are nibbling away the leaves of our ten dollar heads of lettuce.

The Grabber

I have a weak back that gets sore if I'm bent over for any length of time. Which is what is required if you have to double over and pick things up repeatedly. We have lots of pine cones on the lawn and falling in our newly-planted garden and you can twist an ankle or fall if you step on one.

So I plan to carry a pail in one hand and use a grabber with the other so as to minimize the wear and tear. Like the guy in the picture, although I don't plan to wear a badge or funny-looking shorts.

Enter age denial, stage right in wifely form. "It makes you look old" she says.
I am old my darling, I just turned 69 I reply. Besides, it's for my back. Surely you don't want me to hurt my back again, do you?

"Oh don't be silly, how can picking up things hurt your back?" I mumble the last incident which I think put me in traction and she says "But it didn't require surgery, did it?"

Getting back on my feet I said, Look at all that dirt I'm wheelbarrowing into YOUR garden, my little butterfly. That takes a toll on my back too, you know.

"But using THAT THING makes you look like those people in jumpsuits you see along the highway for heaven's sake. Besides, exercise is good for you.

I'm certain that phrase will eventually be on my tombstone. I can't count the number of times when cardiac arrest was just around the corner because I'm being urged forward with those charming words. Sally used to say them to Andrew our aging sheltie too, until the vet told us he had heart disease. Boy, did she feel bad about having dragged him around after that.

So I tried logic, probably not one of my better decisions. I said, Precious, I can gather MORE pine cones in LESS time thereby giving me more time to do chores for you. "Chores?!?" she says. "You. Doing. Chores. For. Me?" She has this way with words.

The only way I "won" this round (ed. note: "winning" is relative in the context of spousal disagreements) is because I was returning about 40 bucks' worth of stuff to the store at the time. Since the grabber was $19.95 I cried See? We just MADE 20 bucks by getting this!

Having Fun

This is great. We have room to plant a garden and don't want to spend a month's wages to do it. Raised beds seem smart so I grabbed some useless 2 x 6 cedar T & G that we had "saved" from our home in Mt. Shasta and stacked them. No nails needed. Adding some old angle iron stakes to stabilize we filled the boxes with 1/4 native dirt, 1/4 from our compost pile, 1/4 top soil that we had hauled in, and 1/4 soil conditioner from the mill.

How good can it get? So the next issue is deer, of which we have plenty. We found a vinyl net at Ace in Mt. Shasta . . . 7 feet tall by 100 feet long. So we bought some six foot U-shaped metal stakes which we pounded in 18 inches. Then, ripping some trash 2x4's that I got free at the landfill, I screwed them into the metal stakes to achieve a seven foot tall structure for our netting.

I tied the netting onto the wood stakes with string and added orange flagging tape to the netting between the (8 foot spaced) stakes so the deer could see it more clearly.

The neat thing about this garden arena is that we can run rope or baling wire from post to post around the perimeter and across the area from which we can hang bird feeders or flowering plants. Since the upmost parts of the "fence" are wood members we can also hang things from them using brackets.

It's nice to do stuff like this without spending much money. Which is good because the lettuce will come in at $3 a head if I factor in all the parts and labor . . .

Significant Household Cleaning Discovery

I have recently discovered a revolutionary floor care system which, until I patent the concept, I will call "Shuffle Cleaning". I stumbled upon this marvelous concept when, after injuring my knee in an embarrassing athletic maneuver which will go unexplained, I was unable to get down on my knees to clean the floor in the traditional way. ("getting down" as used here bears no resemblance to the use of this phrase during the disco 70's).

Anyway, happily bearing the husbandly duty of sharing the burden of maintaining our home I had previously been granted the tasks of vacuuming and mopping. These of course are relative terms. Rather than "vacuuming" for instance I favor bending over and picking up the offending object (strand of hair, dust mote, etc.). This is green thinking in the purest sense. Why waste coal-fired electricity by turning on a polluting vacuum cleaner when you can just dib and dab up those offensive motes?

But I digress. The revelation of "shuffling" came when, as I said, my knee prevented the regular application of traditional floor cleaning techniques. I probably should hire an agent and go global with this but hey, I'm not after money here so here's the secret ..... don't tell, okay?

Wet two facecloth-size rags with cleaner and shuffle across the floor. One under each foot. Most men can do this easily because we spend significant amounts of time looking at our feet. But the advantage is that it appears to others as if we are intent on staring down those nasty spots on the laminate and thus we accumulate praise for our perspicacity. Win-win.

I can do our entire home in under ten minutes. Sure, I might miss a splat or two but I can always put that off to my bad eyes.

Editor.

12 to 1

Sally and I recently were in San Francisco as you can see (this shot is at Fort Baker at the north end of the bridge, before you get into the city) and we walked nearly everywhere. Our hotel was in the Marina district, within striking distance of the shops on Union and Chestnut. Lombard is a major bus route so we rode to and from Golden Gate park and the bridge for a cheap 50 cents.

I bring up the shopping because of a mileage disparity Sally and I share. We had driven down on Sunday which took about 4-1/2 hours, three of which were mine and from Interstate 80 onward it was white-knuckle work.

I had gotten up that morning around 6 and so I was a little beat by the time we got to our room at the Cow Hollow Inn on Lombard. Normally by two o'clock most days I try to grab 20 winks so that I won't doze off during dinner and put my face into the spaghetti.

"Nap? DID YOU SAY NAP!?!?", Sally said. "We are in the cosmic center of the retail universe, the cosmic core of fashion and culture in all of western civilization and you want to SLEEP!!??"

I hadn't expected it to go quite this smoothly and then she followed this up with the brisk almost rude "suggestion" that we exit the comfortable, inviting, sleepy confines of the motel room and walk around the 'hood.

"Walk" is Sally's term. Mine is more along the lines of long-distance-endurance marching. Where Sally sees one mile of "walking" I on the other hand calculate twelve. With the #28 bus stop a block away for example she nonetheless wanted to "walk" from the hotel to the Golden Gate Bridge.

And then across it.

Now it had taken about ten minutes on that bus the day before to reach the bridge. And that was at speeds I felt were impossible for a vehicle that big in traffic that tight. So, what, five miles maybe? I also discovered the main span of the bridge is 4,200 feet with the approaches at each end adding another 2,500 feet. Each. That makes the bridge 9,200 feet or 1.7424 miles long. Not counting getting to it.

One way.

So let's do the math here: 5 miles times 2 = ten miles to and from the bridge. Across and back is 1.7424 times 2 or 3.484 miles. Add it all up and you get 13.484 miles and the reason we measure 12 to one (approximately). . . Sally pretty much always claims "it is just a mile or two" regardless of where we are or what time / space warp we are in at the moment.

Oh, I forgot to mention the serious bicyclists in Spandex who were flying along the bridge sidewalk. No horns, no bells, not even "On your left!" to warn the unwary tourist. These sleek, intense-looking people threaded through the many globs of people with perfect aplomb, and good aim, too. No one was even brushed that I could see although there were a whole lot of potential deadly encounters of the first kind that somehow just never happened. These guys are the type you probably don't want to meet on a tennis court, either. Or across a chess board for that matter. WAY serious.

And finally, the painters. The bridge is a suspension span, the roadway suspended from huge cables that swoop down from the towers on each end by wires. Sadly we reached a paint crew that was just quitting for the day because I would love to have seen them at work.

We looked upward at one four-wire set and then at the two halves of the paint cabinet the guy clamps together around them and rides up to paint downward. Gad. It had windows of course but it might be better if it hadn't. Can you imagine winching up who-knows how many hundreds of feet, swaying in the wind (and usually fog or rain), and WANTING to do it every day of the week?

I learned later the riggers who work this bridge fight for their jobs. It is evidently very prideful and competitive because of the prestige and glory.

I think I'll stick to plodding a mile a day here in Lake Shastina.

Squirrel Stew

This is a European red squirrel. Note the distinctive tuffed ears. I ran across this creature while researching yet another improvement on my already improved bird feeder designs. There was an article in the dining section of the New York Times reporting that squirrel meat was becoming very popular in Britain. It seems that the American gray squirrel has invaded the British Isles and is crowding out the native (and cherished) red variety.

As a result gamekeepers and huntsmen are culling the grays and selling them to restaurants and meat markets where they are turned into pies, stew meat, and even pate'. A popular marketing theme reads "Eat a gray, save a red!" according to the story.

Even environmentalists are on board saying how important it is to save the red and how sensible it is that the culled animals are put to good use rather than just killed and discarded as pests.

My next birdfeeder design won't go this far although some readers have already called with remarks varying from "why are you feeding wildlife in the first place?" to "do you have a .22?" which leans more toward the British experience. Gray squirrels were indeed hunted here in the past, both for meat and fur so this Brit thing is understandable.

But I'm going to make Plan # 6.2a with an inverted cone, like the ones vets use to keep a dog from scratching his ears and face. I've decided to build the cones in an environmentally friendly way too, by cutting up one of those ugly black pots you get plants in from the nursery.

Hah. Let's see them shinney that! (Report to follow for those readers sturdy enough to follow this drivel. With photos.)

My Ultimate, Rodent-Proof Bird Feeder

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I think I have finally done it. As you can see it's not especially pretty, but how can I not love it having taken me so long? It is not a particularly smart design either, but rather one resulting from trial and error. A lot of trial and even more error.

This is how it started.

Attempt number one was this feeder suspended from the wire it came with on a shepherd's hook (bent rebar) that I had affixed to a fence post about six feet off the ground. Silly me. HDL (my shorthand for Huey, Dewey, and Louie the mischievous nephews of Donald Duck [note that I'm naming them now, this is a sign of something]) just simply jumped straight up onto the feeder from the fence. I learned later the longest recorded jump is 12 horizontal feet recorded by a similarly obsessed English observer.

The deer also got into the act and pawed them to pieces.

After gluing everything back together effort #2 was slinging them from wire I had strung between two large trees in our yard. Besides nearly beheading myself as I walked head-down behind my lawnmower this idea only stopped the squirrels. The deer still had their way with them and the few birds that did eat on them made a serious mess on my lawn.

More glue and nails.

Design #3 was an engineered approach. I bought some white PVC pipe in three different diameters so the pieces would sleeve into themselves allowing me to telescope the pole upwards to eight feet, above deer-pawing range. Clever, I thought. how could a retarded rodent possibly shinney up such a slick pole?

How I could have felt so confident I don't know. I had overlooked a tiny flaw in the design which was immediately apparent to the little cuties . . . the through-bolts that keep the sections from collapsing into eachother were handy grips for their little claws. I visualize this as their version of rodent rock climbing.

Creation #4 was crude but well-intended. A platform nailed to the base of the feeder (see photo) so they can't reach beyond the overhanging plate to raise themselves up. And no, no, don't use wood. They'd be able to grip that surface. I instead recycled a sign I had bought from a defunct real estate office made out of Corex which is like cardboard but made out of plastic. Yes, that's right, waterproof, claw-resistant, and stiff (I mention that because design #3-1/2 used a flexible plastic sign thinking as I did that it would bend and they would slide off. But it broke where the screws affixed it after too much bending).

But not wide enough. I didn't see them actually do it which would have been a treat in itself but they somehow reached clear around the plate from the already-slippery pole to defeat me yet again. I must confess that the feeling of being outwitted by a 12 ounce rodent was beginning to bother me at this point. Sally said I was beginning to mutter to myself and walk into and out of the shop with no apparent purpose.

Number 5 (pictured at top) is the last try. A bigger Corex platform. Thus far it is working but we haven't had a good blow yet, a factor I ignored entirely now that I write this.

I did in fact google this topic near the end of the design attempts and one of the advice articles said to build squirrel feeders to keep them from raiding the bird cafes. This is the age-old "if you can't beat 'em joing 'em" mantra.

And why not? I've got enough left over material.


PostscriptI give up. These rodents are driving in from the 'burbs to play with these feeders. With their tree-top telegraph system they're saying stuff like "Hey guys, check this out! This dude thinks he's smarter than WE are! Let's go rough up his ego a little."

Here are two shots of them doing that.