Well...not big; but, it beat not getting anything done!
Hunky Husband, it turns out, has been looking for a chronometer to replace his favorite (photo, below). I offered to do the research for him, which offer he gladly accepted. Not by skill, but by luck, I found an online video that told how to solve the problem he was having with his current piece, followed the simple directions, and restored his piece to full function. Note in the photo how the long, red hand (the timing, second hand) is pointing between 1 and 2. The reset indexed that hand back to the 12 position. That was all that HH needed - saving him $600.
About a month ago, the army worms hit our town - hard! Nearly everyone's lawns were hit. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to photographing the damage until this morning. In the photo (below), one can see that the army worms missed eating some of the roots of our fescue grass, and they have sprouted up. The part of our back yard that gets shaded by the cottonwood tree, was spared - something about trees seems to repel the army worms. Tendercare is to come slit seed the barren spots in back, and all of the front lawn, on October 11.
While the army worms readily devoured the fescue grass, they eschewed the native Bermuda that has, over the years, invaded the sunny area of the back yard. While Bermuda grass is much more suited to our current climatic conditions on the sunny side of the back yard, I won't have it, having fought it my whole life (starting at age 4 or 5 when Mom had Elder Brother and me pull the native Bermuda grass out of her rose beds). While the fescue grass is sparse is the ideal time to pull the Bermuda grass - which task I've been attempting since the mornings have cooled down during the past several days. Most days, I've been able to put in 30-60 minutes of work on that tasking, limited by when the sun starts hitting that area and/or my weariness.
In the photo, below, the yellow oval shows some of the Bermuda that has yet to be attacked while the yellow diamond encloses the visible part of the area on which I spent 55 minutes this morning. (The orange tubing running across the upper, right corner of the photo is part of the watering hose that I had out to water the newish trees in back.)
I had but one instance of performing IT services, this past week. It turns out that HH has been carrying a separate subscription to a Norton (Symantic) anti-virus suite that is installed on his laptop. I'm not sure that HH even knows his login for his laptop, these days, but I can state with confidence that the anti-virus suite on his laptop is not worth the $89.99 that he is paying each year - especially considering that he can have the coverage, free, from the up-to-5-machine subscription that I have from Norton, for which I pay $97.19 per year.
Currently, since removing Norton from the laptop that I've prepared to give to Elder Brother (Norton is a space hog and EB only accesses one website - to update his data on the stock market), there are only two machines using my subscription, HH's and my desktop machines. As I recall, at the time HH bought his laptop several years ago, my subscription was fully used on five machines; thus, HH had purchased a separate subscription.
You are way too devoted to wiping out the Bermuda grass :) I figure if it's green, and it looks decent after mowing, I'm fine with whatever grows there. Of course if I wiped out everything in the yard that was weeds or a grass other than Bluegrass, my yard would be barren (and I would have poisoned most of the town with the amount of control I would have to put down). I keep my efforts to minimum by keeping control of Poison Ivy and the invasive roses - I'm a slacker :D
Does HH not have Norton's on his phone?
Posted by: bogie | September 25, 2021 at 07:03 AM
Bogie--Under no circumstances would I agree that you are a slacker. You get to choose the activities into which you put your efforts. Never, before this house, have we had enough lawn that your dad cared about the grass. He now does.
Bermuda grass will take over the world, eventually. I recall that when we lived on Park Lane, Bermuda grew under the (guessing) 16-foot-wide driveway to infest the opposite side where your dad & I had toiled plugging in Zoyzia grass. When I asked Kevin about putting in Zoyzia, here, he laughed at me - said that I wouldn't want to have them put in the time (at our expense) to dethatch it each spring. We weren't in the house on Park Lane long enough (under 2 years) for thatch to become an issue. Kevin also said that, anymore, no one around here plants bluegrass. The newer strains of fescue have hardly any clumping, as did the older strains, and do better in our sunny locale.
Had I been more diligent in catching the Bermuda grass before it had gained such a stand, instead of idly pulling out a runner here-and-there, I wouldn't be having to put in so much labor, now. It's my own fault. I'm more than willing to jump onto the opportunity of pulling Bermuda while it is less intermixed with the fescue grass. I just came in from putting in 50 minutes at it. When I went out to work at 7:30am, it was too dry; so, I ran that one station of the sprinkler system for 20 minutes and then loosened around the intended area with your Grandmother S's little spade. In all, I cleared about twice as much area in 50 minutes, today, as did I yesterday in 55 minutes!
No, HH does not have Norton on his phone (an iPhone SE) nor is installation advised. "Antivirus for iPhone: Apps that claim to scan your phone for viruses will not work on iPhones. That's because Apple's operating system, called iOS, doesn't permit any one app to see what any other app is doing, or even to 'know' of another app's existence. That means you don't have to worry about your fitness app ever gaining access to your banking records. The only way one app can ever communicate with another is if you enable permissions, like allowing a journaling app to access your photos, for example. With this 'sandboxed' approach, there's no way a security app could possibly scan other apps on your phone for malware.
"Apple takes additional measures to protect users from adware, spyware, and other types of malware lurking in third-party apps. 'Apple designed their operating system to restrict the applications a user can place on their phone,' says Tom Kirkham, founder and CEO of IronTech Security. Users can only install applications downloaded from the official App Store, and Apple closely reviews each app for malware before approving it. One of the few ways a malicious app could be installed is if a user jailbreaks their iPhone, a practice most experts caution against."
Posted by: Cop Car | September 25, 2021 at 10:00 AM