Monday, 9/21/2020: Having decided to get down to the task of making more/better face coverings for Hunky Husband and me, I was disgusted with myself for having forgotten my lack of elastic for the ear pieces. Gah! I bought three yards of silk for the double inner layer of fabric, but failed to order the elastic. In case there is someone who missed the announcement: Walmart is trying to compete with Amazon as a "go to" online merchandise ordering website. However, there are items for which they have taken time to establish ordering capability. Such was the case with the elastic. It has, since, become available and I have ordered several yards of white and several of black. It is to be delivered during the first week ofOctober. [Added note: The wild bird seed that was ordered at the same time was delivered on the 22nd.]
I still seek a source of two types of light bulbs - and - sanitizing hand wipes.
Tuesday, 9/22/2020: The Wild Turkeys and I are having a contest. They try to see how much of the mulch around our new trees in back they can remove, and how quickly, while I attempt to rake the mulch back into place during my daily outdoor chores. The photo, below, was taken in July; but, it shows some of the turkeys and points out the mulch that they love to scatter.
Wednesday, 9/23/2020: As I stepped outside to gather in this morning's newspaper, there were a couple of bat-like flyers tumbling over our front yard. I could not imagine that we had bats as large as these two appeared to be and, by the time I had taken another step, I realized that there were a number of these tumbling flyers. Aha! It is September. The Common Nighthawks are migrating south with their more-or-less wheeling movement. As happened, it was early enough that it was nearly dark outside, and it was foggy; thus, the birds were flying a bit lower than normally they would have been observed to do. Their tumbling flight was to catch insects around the street light that is near our yard, fueling their long flight to South America. I did not/could not have captured their aerobatic flight; but, YouTube came to my rescue. I recommend full screen for viewing this video (under 2 minutes).
Several times since moving into this house, I've observed migrations of nighthawks - following the same track each year as far as I can tell. Otherwise, seeing nighthawks in our little town is so rare that I cannot, reliably, recall any instances. I do recall (1940s and early 1950s) watching nighthawks dart about in the even smaller town in which my great-grandparents lived. They lived on a relatively busy street, across from a small hotel. As I recall, some of the nighthawks nested atop that hotel - on its flat roof. Their in-flight squawks are unmistakable.
Did I mention it was foggy? Thirty minutes later, as I left for my walk, I found that the "perfectly dry" outdoor surfaces were then "perfectly wet". During my walk, within 0.4 mile of the house, I experienced a "Seattle rain". The rest of my walk was dry.
I continued my fall cleanup in the yard by yanking out another tomato vine (this is the 5th one, so far, this year.) You can see how huge the plant was in the photo, below. It was late producing ripe tomatoes and sparse in production. It's fruit were tasty, however.
The fall yard cleanup continued with my raking cottonwood tree leaves and sticks - for the ninth day in a row. It has been only a couple of hours since I raked and, in the next photo, it is obvious that tomorrow will be another raking day. Unfortunately, I failed to snap a photo "before". The splice of two photos to provide a wide-angle look isn't perfect; but, close enough for government work!
Thursday, 9/24/2020:
On this, my late mother's 106th birthday, News for Nerds led me to a report at The Guardian, concerning the effectivity of impermeable face shields in protecting against aerosol distribution of the novel coronavirus.
Simulation using world’s fastest supercomputer casts doubt on effectiveness in preventing spread of coronavirus
Obviously, my dentist is ahead of the curve since she insists that all staff working on patients wear a surgical mask under the transparent face shield. I would also point out that dentists have used the transparent face shields "forever". I had always understood it to guard them against droplets of spray.
A large garden spideris having her last fling of summer. It's to be in the low 90s (as high temperature of the day) over the weekend, then into the 60s during next week. It was in the mid 60s when I spotted this beauty, below. I never had the opportunity to show her back in a photo - only her front and side.
Friday, 9/25/2020: One of the items at News for Nerds, this morning, concerns helping people become addicted to Facebook. I understand that, just because one uses FB does not imply that they are addicted; but, there are frequently reports in the traditional media that might lead one to conclude that a non-trivial number of users are, indeed, addicted.
Posted by BeauHD from the engaging-analogies dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society. His analogy continued: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."
Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding -- at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."
The size of the eggs shown in Tidbits from naturewas under discussion in the comments to that posting. It reminded me of some photos from previous years that I liked. I may have posted some of the following photos, before; but, I cannot find those postings.
Wren nest - June 2012
The first photo is a closeup, revealing three eggs that later hatched. (Only the bare edges of two of the eggs show at the 5 o'clock position.)
The next photo is of the same nest, from a bit farther away...
...from farther, still...
...and from far enough away that it is undetectable.
Eastern bluebird nest - 2011
The first photo is a closeup of inside the nesting box showing three eggs that later hatched.
The last photo shows Eastern bluebird eggs found between layers of nests, in the box, at the end of the season. I don't know the story of why another nest was built atop these five eggs. Five seems to be the normal number of eggs in a hatch, as far as I've seen in our own nesting boxes. I've also observed that, in general, there are two successful broods each season with a third "incomplete" clutch of eggs abandoned in the heat of summer.
Looking out our kitchen window the other day, I saw a red-shouldered hawk in the grass acting strangely: It was trying to hold some type of critter down with its talons. I had the perfect perspective - head on - to watch until the critter came into view. Thinking it most likely a vole, small bird, or large grasshopper, I waited. It was a medium-sized garter snake, without which (as far as I could tell) the hawk eventually flew up into a tree. Not having had the opportunity to get my camera into play, I am pleased to include the following video from YouTube of a similar happening. The big difference is that the red-shouldered hawk in the video ate the snake. Also, in the current instance, the snake was larger and raised itself up ala one rising from the basket for a snake charmer.
Cleaning out most of the bird nests in our yard, the other day, I found some eggs. Unfortunately, I let them sit around so long that they eventually cracked from expanding gases, leaking onto the saucer into which I had put them. The only ones left in good enough shape for me to photograph were those in the photo, below. The speckled egg is the only Carolina wren egg left in the nest under the foliage of a house plant (spider/airplane plant). The other egg is one of three that were left in the Eastern bluebird nest inside our nesting box. I've not yet set up the ladder to retrieve the house finch nest in the miniature swing hanging from the ceiling of our front porch.
The only nest that I found/could reach in our yard that did not have left-over eggs seemed to be a small bird's nest - in the center of a holly bush. I cannot identify the bird species.
The first photo shows Benny and his crew at work (right-to-left): 1) grinding out the stump from the sugar maple, 2) dragging one of the trunks from the redbud clump to the chipper, and 3) inserting one of the redbud trunks into the chipper. The trunk of the sugar maple was too large to send through the chipper. It was cut into 8' lengths and stacked onto their flatbed trailer (attached to the white pickup, but not in view).
Below is a photo showing the front yard after Benny and his crew had left and after I had pulled up the flags. The guys were here for less than 30 minutes, including their cleanup. The neighbor across the street mentioned how efficient the crew had been - as opposed to the two or three crews of workers who had been working down the street from us, trimming up some of the ornamental pear and other trees that front three or four of the houses. Those crews were good guys, though. They had parked a pickup and trailer (hauling some of their heavy equipment) at our curb, just before lunch; but, happily moved their vehicle a couple of hours later when I told them that our own tree guys would need the space, please. We run a parking lot for the neighborhood since most of the houses have no more than 45' of curb.
ADDITION OF 8/16/2020 - 5:26AM - How the crew down the street accessed upper branches
OTOH, the next photo shows how Benny and his crew do it. It is from April, 2019, posting More activity in our woods.
To understand why the tree in Bogie's comment took so long in disposition, the explanation is clear in Bogie's posting Maple Down. A standing tree or a completely downed tree is far more quickly disposed of than is a tree that, as Bogie labels it, is a "widow maker".
In our woods reside some fairly old trees - mostly walnut and hackberry, with one cottonwood at the point in the woods that comes closest to the house. Any trees that we have planted are, by definition, young in my book as our house was built in 1999. Alas, I've had taken out two more of those young trees. This time, as was the case for a couple of other trees taken out a few years ago, one was dead; the other was wind damaged.
Farewell, Sugar Maple:
in 2020... and in it's youth (2006)....
As you can see, the poor tree did not ever reach its potential. During it's first few years, the wind blew the leader out of it. Another branch grew into that role. Over the years, it accumulated impact damage to its trunk and it became diseased until the bark sloughed off around nearly the entire circumference. Too, it probably didn't help that the siting was unfortunate, being too near underground utility lines, I believe. Well...we probably shant replace that tree but focus on the trees in back. It isn't as if the tree was/could have been situated to provide shade to our house. With the house canted at a 45-degree angle to cardinal directions (facing northwest) and the driveway situated to the southwest of the house, that just cannot happen.
The next two photos show how the tree looks with utility-marking flags dancing about it. As you can see, it is a very good thing to have utility line locations marked before taking out a tree that sits atop some of those lines.
Farewell, clump of Redbud Trees:
in 2020... and in January, 2017....
I just threw that photo in there to let me feel cooler than allowed by August weather; however, that ice storm was the genesis of problems with that clump. Since then, whenever we've had a stiff breeze (50 mph or faster) the clump lost large branches and/or a trunk. In addition, I've had to remove several large branches/trunks to allow clearance for Neighbor Adam and Hunky Husband when they are mowing. When it rained, the large leaves retained enough water to weigh the branches down to within a couple of feet of the grass.
Here is the clump, in March, 2019:
It just caught my attention: there are yellow and orange streaks of paint in the grass of the above photo, indicating that, although the flags had been removed, we had had the utilities lines marked within the past couple of weeks. The next photo shows the currently installed dancing flags near the redbud clump.
Every March, as I was growing up, my dad planted potatoes on or about St Patrick's Day. I have no idea when/how those potatoes were harvested - lost in the mists of my mind. Me? No, I've never planted potatoes. I often do find potatoes growing in our planting beds - from the green garbage that I have buried there. Each week, rotating locations, I so bury our green garbage. This morning, when my spade brought up a shovelful of dirt to leave a hole into which I should insert the week's green garbage, I espied a tiny potato. Several weeks earlier I had pulled the vine, but had not dug down to see what it was leaving behind.
When I came in from working in the woods, I took the handful of potatoes that I had unearthed to the kitchen sink, cupping the potatoes between my hands as the water ran over them. The photo, below shows the small pile of potatoes that I then deposited on the counter.
When the potatoes hit the counter, I heard a "clunk". See the funny-looking, tiny "potato" that is on the left, next to the potato that is nearest to the camera? It is a rock. I needed to have paid more attention to my harvesting!
When, first, Handyman Cecil came by, I gave him a list of things I wanted done around the house. I made sure that he understood I was seeking a long-term relationship, not just that he would do a job and disappear forever. He could work in my jobs around the jobs he had to do for other people because there was nothing urgent on the list. By the time Cecil could start on my list, COVID-19 had become a "thing" with which to contend. I told Cecil that he could do any/all of the outside jobs; but, he could not do any of the inside jobs - until a vaccine or a cure was developed.
Cecil started on the outside jobs by installing a permanent ladder (of which the bottom two rungs may be seen in the photo, below) in our basement escape window well.
A little later, Cecil installed a new storm door at the personnel door to the garage (photo, below), new gaskets around our three over-head garage doors (no photo), and a window well and bubble at one of my (basement) bedroom windows (no photo).
Cecil's next venture was painting the house - shown in thisposting. Unexpectedly, we needed a new dishwasher installed and Cecil came to the rescue - shown in thisposting.
This past week, Cecil and his son installed window wells and bubbles on the remaining seven, small, basement windows. I had wanted to try out the installation on one of my bedroom windows for a few months before committing to the time/effort/expense of having Cecil make installation at the other seven windows.
Photos (below) are with window wells, only, installed.(The one bubble is the "trial" installation.)
Photos (below) are with window wells & bubbles installed.
Advantages of having the window wells & bubbles installed: 1) The windows stay clean much longer (You know that I spent a lot of time cleaning those windows, don't you?) and 2) I can have the windows open - even while it is raining (There is an air gap between the wells and the bubbles.) Another thing that I've noticed is that I don't hear the nocturnal critters (voles?) or the early morning critters (usually, wild turkeys) rubbing up against the screen fabric that is the outer-most of the three layers (inner pane, storm pane, screen) of each window.
One last thing that Cecil wanted to do this week was to have a safety grid made for installation over the top of our basement escape window, intended to prevent someone's falling into the deep window well. He called me about it several times; but, I finally turned him "off" on that project - for now. I was getting too stressed over the whole thing. He was talking about a 50-pound welded steel grid which I thought would be a bit heavy since I would, while on the ladder, have to move the grid with one hand. Unfortunately, I had Cecil install the ladder at the end of the window well that would have provided me a clear space to slide the grid into. The other end has the gas meter and the sprinkler system's back-flow protection valve installation that prohibit sliding the grid that way - the shorter slide. (Cecil had wanted to put the ladder to that end, but he didn't give this as one of the reasons: he just wanted to put it opposite the stationary pane of the window.) My fault. I had told him to check into having welded aluminum, instead; but, that requires TIG welding, of course. So...I'll think it over for a while. It may have to wait until Cecil and I can sit at a table with pencil and paper for drawing sketches.
Cecil did have a point that I really needed to get that window well covered - its already having been uncovered for three years. In the meantime, I fished the old grid from under the compost pile, hosed it down, re-drove most of the nails (yes, our builder had used nails), and re-installed it over the window well (photo, below). After a few rains it will look a bit better even if it won't cure the slat that is slightly decomposed.(The grid was shown under a pile of masonry in this posting back in August, 2017.)
Handyman Cecil made it out, today, to install the dishwasher that had been hiding in the box in our garage. Now, to learn how to load the racks and work the controls. I would know more about either issue by reading the morning newspaper than by reading the owner's manual. Not at all informative!
Note that the design provides three racks, the middle one of which is adjustable vertically. I must say that two things about the machine please me: 1) The old dishwasher, like the refrigerator, gas range, and electric oven, was a baked on enamel finish in off-white. As far as I could tell from my online forays, no one offers that finish/color these days (nor do they offer the avocado, sunflower gold, or Coppertone enamel finishes of previous generations.) This dishwasher was offered in black stainless or satin stainless. Having opted for the satin stainless, I feared that the dishwasher might stick out like a sore thumb. It does not - probably because it blends in with the stainless steel that is above and to the right of the dishwasher. 2) As the dishwasher that I bought is middle-of-the-line in price, the apparent quality of the appliance is high and the machine is quiet (advertised as 44 db).
Hunky Husband and I hid in the basement while Cecil worked in the kitchen and I wore a mask to let him into the house and to pay him. I hope we didn't exchange any vital viruses.
ADDITION OF 7/26/2020 - 12:24PM - In response to Liz's comment
With 2.7 days' worth of dirty dishes loaded, this is how the three shelves appear.
Since we are waiting for Cecil to get out here to install our new dishwasher (item at bottom of page), I have been washing our daily dishes by hand - just before toddling off to bed. Last night I finished up a rather goodly batch and toddled down the stairs. Hmmm...what is the strange odor tinging the air as I reach the bottom of the basement stairs? I look around. Good grief! The kitchen sink had obviously met a clog, and taken the path of least resistance - flooding the bar sink, inundating the whole cabinet/drawers/doors/contents/carpeting with relatively clean water that had chunks of green floating about in it. Two hours later, the scene looked like that in the photo, above; but, my oh my what fun I had getting to that point - bailing with a quart measuring utensil into the waste basket that had been under the sink, moving stuff off and away, and sucking up water with the wet Shop Vac. I went over the wood and stainless steel parts with ammonia water, sopped more water out of the carpeting with towels, and set up a fan to (hopefully) blow away some moisture. And...oh, yes...I turned the air conditioner down to 76 degrees. It had been set to 78 degrees; but, the outside air temperature was 78 degrees (at midnight) and the humidity was about the same and I wanted the air conditioner to help dry out the area.
This (photo, below) is about 40% of the stuff I took out of the drawers and cabinets - stashed on a table at the other end of the room. (Bogie, is that your Monsster Energy Drink?)The only real use that the bar sink gets is when HH uses it to mix up a few quarts of Gatorade from powder every week or so. He keeps the Gatorade in pint-sized bottles in the basement refrigerator. When he goes for a run/jog/walk and/or works out with his weights, he re-hydrates with that Gatorade.
The one good thing to have come from all of this is that it convinced Hunky Husband to let me recycle a bunch of plastic bottles that he had been saving (forever) - photo, below - which comprised another 40% of what I removed from the cabinet.
What about the other 20% of the stuff I removed from the drawers and cabinets? It is in the sink or on the washing machine in the laundry room. I had neatly folded HH's bar towels and the towels with which I had soaked up the water from the carpeting after washing and drying them, last night. It was about 2:30am when I fell into bed. You can imagine my joy when, an hour later, I was awakened by HH standing at the top of the stairs yelling down to me, "[Cop Car!] Is everything all right?" He had been met with the sight in the photo, below, when he had gone into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. It was one of those mornings when he had awakened early. Not early enough to help with the cleanup, mind you - lol. At any rate, I had not wanted him to use the kitchen sink, causing another overflow of the bar sink. The plumber is due to be here between 4pm and 6pm, today. Just in time, since Cecil may install the dishwasher, tomorrow.
UPDATE of 7/17/2020- 3:12pm -
The Plumber arrived early. He had finished another job, early, so called to see if he could come on over. When I opened the front door to him, I asked him if he would like a mask (I was wearing one, of course). He cheerfully returned to his truck to retrieve his own mask, donned it, then used the hand sanitizer that I keep near the front door before donning his gloves. Thirty minutes later I paid him and sent him on his way. He did his job well and efficiently, and he was pleasant but not chatty. (I stayed upstairs while he worked in the basement, of course.)
Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation's largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the virus to others. But first, they must negotiate with the office fax machine. From a report: The machine at the Harris County Public Health department in Houston recently became overwhelmed when one laboratory sent a large batch of test results, spraying hundreds of pages all over the floor. "Picture the image of hundreds of faxes coming through, and the machine just shooting out paper," said Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of the department. The county has so far recorded more than 40,000 coronavirus cases. Some doctors fax coronavirus tests to Dr. Shah's personal number, too. Those papers are put in an envelope marked "confidential" and walked to the epidemiology department. As hard as the United States works to control coronavirus, it keeps running into problems caused by its fragmented health system, a jumble of old and new technology, and data standards that don't meet epidemiologists' needs. Public health officials and private laboratories have managed to expand testing to more than half a million performed daily, but they do not have a system that can smoothly handle that avalanche of results.
Today was interesting. Hunky Husband drove me to my appointment with an eye surgeon up in northwestern Wichita. My visit with the surgeon was delayed by my undergoing various types of scanning/photography of my eyes. Although it was my left eye that sent me there, every test/photo series was accomplished on both eyes. Having been given a heads up by Bogie, I asked to see the images of my floaters. The images were not at all what I expected: they were actually profiles of the retinas (see image, below, from Internet). There was a definite difference between the right and left retinas. In the image from the Internet, below, the "pinched" area at the center is a normal feature of one's retina; however, the other hills and valleys are peculiar to the individual eye.
The most interesting procedure was an eye angiogram (image, below, from Internet).
During an eye angiogram, the dye is injected into a vein in your arm. Once injected, it takes about 10 to 15 seconds to circulate through your body. As the dye enters the blood vessels in your eyes, a series of photos are taken to chart the dye's progress. More pictures are taken after most of the dye has passed through your eyes to see if any of it has leaked out of the blood vessels. Any dye that leaks out of the blood vessels will color the tissues and fluid in the eye. Filters in the camera allow the areas colored by the dye to show up in the photos.
Unlike other angiogram procedures, an eye angiogram is not an X-ray procedure, so you are not exposed to any radiation.
Fortunately, the technician warns her patients of an untoward side effect of the dye injection (other than 16 listed possible side effects). The technician said that the dye turns urine bright yellow. Had she not told me, especially since the effect lasted for at least 30 hours, I would have panicked - thinking that I had pancreatic cancer.
When I placed my online order for a dishwasher, on 7/2/2020, I shortly received notice that it would be delivered on 7/12/2020. I didn't even think about the 12th's being on a Sunday - especially since the email also mentioned that they were having a hard time filling all of the orders during these times (normally, I should have expected delivery within three days of placing the order.) This morning, I just happened to check my phone for voicemail - a rare occurrence. There was a message left yesterday that I should expect delivery after 3:00pm, today - perhaps as late as 6:00pm-7:00pm. Hmmm...
At about 2:00pm, as I was closing my eyes to take a nap, I heard a truck outside. Thinking that perhaps deliveries were running ahead of schedule, I peeked outside. A Lowe's truck was parked up-and-across the street - offloading a clothes washer and dryer. About 45 minutes later, when the two guys had loaded the old washer and dryer for hauling away and seemed to be ready to leave, I caught their attention, asking if they had a dishwasher for me. "I don't know. We do have a couple of dishwashers in there. I'll check."
They checked. They carried our dishwasher across the street and deposited it in our garage. I was happy to get the delivery and they were happy that they would save the extra driving that would have been required had they needed to come back. Who knew that the truck hadn't been loaded with an eye toward efficiency of travel. Amazingly unthoughtful of someone.
Last year I scattered some brown-eyed Susan seeds in my miniature meadow (mm) in the back yard and planted a few potted blanket flowers. Inexplicably, I can find no photos of last year's mm, despite my belief that I had posted such photos last year. Oh, well. This year, a crop of brown-eyed Susan popped up in my mm, by which I was pleased. Early on, the first couple of times that Hunky Husband mowed our grass this year, he avoided one plant out in the middle of our "out back" because he thought it might be a flower that I had planted. Hmmm...eventually, it became obvious that it was a displaced brown-eyed Susan. I happen to like brown-eyed Susans from the plants that grew wild in our cow pastures WIWAK. The photo, below, shows the lone plant in the foreground and my mm in the background.
Had the brown-eyed Susans not come up this year, my mm would have been pretty barren once the daffodils wound down. A few blanket flowers came up, but they were so stunted that one would not know they were there unless one did a close inspection. Those few have already gone to seed (photo, below). Other than the rose and tomatoes which I purchased earlier this year, I've not broken isolation to buy seeds/plants.
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