The rape of the Earth continues

You'll remember the stories of our taking out a tree that wasn't especially happy and was a fire hazard growing too close to the house. It's not fun to remove trees but when they might cause problems they're not worth the risk.

We had a juniper growing just outside the family room (even closer than the pine). The pine tree we took out had grown over to the juniper so they they had been occupying the same space for a while. Junipers, like pines, are rather flammable and after last October we were getting nervous. So we said good-bye to the juniper.

Here's a little movie of Lumberjack Jerry taking one of its trunks down.

I don't like hearing my voice. My single word, "yeah," makes me cringe. Lordy, I sound like my father! Lordy!

Juniper trunks are solid. I worked on it with our little chainsaw. It took forever to get through it. I shredded the juniper. The green parts of the juniper went through the shredder like waste through Jasmin's trap.

And the rape continues...

We had some unsightly juniper bushes around the base of the pine. Those got taken out, too. (Hey, we've got most of the too flammable stuff away from the house!) Jerry cut them out and I put them through the shredder.

There was a concrete ring around the pine's base. Over the years as it leaned further and further away from the ash, it did some major demolition on the ring. Part got mashed into the ground. The other side was lifted out of the ground. We now have more debris that can't be put out for the weekly trash pickup. I suppose we can take this and the big pieces of the pine and juniper to the trash transfer station for recycling.

The base of the pine tree

We're going to have to fix this area up and have a nice place to sit and drink our mint juleps. There is a lot of dead ivy that liked living in the shade of the pine to clean up. And years of pine needles. What should we do with the area? AstroLawn?

Hey, man, ya got any acid?

Descaling an electric kettle
Some time ago I noticed that our ChefsChoice Hot Pot was taking much longer to boil water than it used to and boiled a long time before shutting off. And it was making a roaring noise as it was heating up. Finally, one day it made a "crack" noise and a chunk of the scale that was building up on the bottom of the pot had broken off. I thought that maybe all these things were related.

I put a cup of vinegar in the hot pot and turned it on, let it boil, and let it sit for a while. The scale dissolved. The funny noises while it was heating went away. The water boiled faster and the pot turned itself off soon after it got the water boiling. I had solved the problem.

If your hot pot exhibits any of these symptoms, perhaps it is time for a descaling. Vinegar, an acid, works wonders.

If it's yellow, let it mellow
Jerry and I are practitioners of the selective flush (is that a chorus of "ewwwwwww!!!" I hear?). Well, we live in a desert where water is imported from hundreds of miles away. (I never have understood the insistence on having a lush lawn where there isn't any local water to keep it lush.) And now we are in another year of below average precipitation in the areas we get our water from and we might be facing water use restrictions. Besides, our water goes into a septic tank and we might as well reserve its capacity for water we really need to use (especially in El Niño winters when the ground gets saturated).

Anyway, even though Jasmin is a low-flow toilet, it used to be that when we flushed, whatever was in the bowl was more than eager to leave. There was nothing that Jasmin couldn't handle. That gradually changed. Lately, we had to hold the flush handle down so that all of the water in the tank would be used to take care of business.

Something was wrong.

I thought that something might be clogging the pipe on the way to the septic tank but that really didn't seem likely since once things started moving, things left.

Over the years of mellowness, we would get a buildup of dark minerals on the bottom of the toilet bowl. I'd chip at it now an then and attack it with some vinegar. The minerals would loosen up and chip away more easily. What I didn't think of was parts of the toilet I couldn't see.

I finally thought that maybe there was mineral buildup somewhere I couldn't see and that was slowing down the operations. So I bailed most of the water out of the toilet and filled it with our Costco-sized jug of vinegar and let it sit.

I used an old toothbrush to probe in the toilet's trap and siphon jet. A lot of large chunks of minerals came out.

Jasmin now flushes like new! Vinegar rescues us again.

If you have minerals building up on the bottom of your biffy, you might be getting low performance. Vinegar, anyone?

Here's a diagram of a toilet I found on the Internet in case you want to see where my toothbrush went. (It's not going into my mouth!)

This isn't your stodgy old NCR!

We were given a Friday afternoon party at work. It was the first of quarterly fun afternoons to get together and let our hair down and celebrate being an agile, high-tech company unlike our former steady-as-she-goes NCR battleship. We had the opportunity to don inflatable Sumo wrestler suits and bump into our coworkers. We also got to drink smoothies.

They had a band singing Simon and Garfunkel, Beatles, Monkees and other 60s songs. At first I thought that the oldies were an odd choice for a forward-looking company's party but then I didn't see many young people. Most of the people working there grew up with the music the band was playing. I'd say they need to make an effort to get more young ideas in the company if they really want to be speeding into the future. We'll be hobbling there with our walkers pretty soon (and with very little hair to let down).

At this party they made a big announcement about new benefits that befit our dynamic workplace. First, they reminded us that we all got a second flat panel monitor. Now we have more than twice the space for our computers to show us stuff and get more stuff done faster. It really does help.

But the big, big announcement was that we're going to be getting free coffee, tea and soft drinks! They've brought back the coffee they were giving us years ago when we first moved into our new buildings. The machines are newer but the coffee is the same stuff people didn't like before.

They gave us Douwe Egberts machines that dispense freshly brewed coffee instantly at the touch of a button. What it does is add hot water to concentrated coffee syrup. They say that they brew coffee, extract the aromas, concentrate the coffee then add the aromas back to the concentrate and package it so that we get the freshest, most flavorful coffee possible. It's a reasonable facsimile.

Here's our new coffee machine.
It looks high-tech.

And here's a look inside at the coffee syrup boxes.

The soda will be installed next week. I can hardly contain my excitement.

A troublesome word

In a recent post on Quotidiana, P-Doobie made a common typo that I mentioned that I saw in an old Sherman's Lagoon strip. It must be that time of the year because it showed up again in today's La Cucaracha strip.

Happy Birthday, Peggers!

I guess it wasn't West Nile Virus

The latest San Diego County report about West Nile Virus cases still doesn't show any cases found in crows in Escondido. So I guess the poor little crow that died in our backyard died of something else.

Poor thing.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Our first Randy Chitto turtle.

It's a dry heat

We're moving out of our June Gloom and it's getting hot. Really hot. Yesterday, my weather station reported that we got up to 106.2°F/41.2°C. At least the humidity was down to 10% so we could get some cooling effect from our sweat evaporating.

The forecast for today says that it will be a bit cooler than yesterday. One degree cooler. And how often do they get that right?

If we're lucky, you can keep track of the weather here with the Weather Underground "sticker" of my weather station that I have put back on my sidebar.

Lately the sticker has been disabled now and then. It's been showing "NaN" or no value for the information. This is apparently because my Davis Vantage Pro Plus weather station has been sending bad data. The humidity sensor has gone wacko on me. Its measurements have been very erratic (though through this heat it has settled down and looks good). Bad data gets your station removed from their web site. I've ordered a new humidity sensor so I hope the station is no longer banned. I hope it gets here on Monday. If my sticker goes dead you can always check the map of the area to see what's going on. (You might have to zoom in to see my station on the map. If it hasn't been banned.)

Tangentially related to weather, here is a picture of our coral tree.

I'm not sure what species of coral tree it is. It's a miniature variety. It is supposed to be pruned to be kept small but we don't have to do any pruning. Except to cut off the dead stuff. Each year it freezes and dies down to the ground. So it gets severely pruned by the weather each year. But it grows back and blooms.

We're going down to San Diego today. It's much cooler closer to the coast so we might not swelter until we get home.

Good grief! It's already 91° and it's only 9:15.

---

Update: At 1:02PM it was 107.7°. I'm glad we missed it.

Pack up your swimsuit and go away already!

The San Diego Union-Tribune lets its readers participate in deciding what will be on the comics pages. When they're considering a change they let us vote on the choices by calling special numbers (not toll-free) and that records our votes. (Isn't that how American Idol works?)

The latest poll was to decide which comic strip was going away to make room for the return of Doonesbury. Doonesbury used to run in the Op-Ed pages and they didn't print reruns while it was on hiatus. Now that it's back they're putting it in the comics section.

The candidates for ouster were:

• Judge Parker
• The Wizard of Id
• Cathy

They thought that "Judge Parker" would be the one getting the boot. They were surprised to find out that "Cathy" was hated by everybody. Jerry and I both wasted some of our precious cell phone minutes on the poll in order to vote against Cathy. What an amusing strip that is! Two jokes: fat and swimsuits. Ha, ha! You can't get too much of those funny subjects, can you?

I have never read Judge Parker and haven't read the other two in years so I wasn't going to miss the loser. I'm just happy that the one that irritates me is gone.

Now I think I'll go try on swimsuits.

(ha ha!)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

The Real Beginning

Way back in the summer of 1986 when Jerry and I were just starting out together we would often be a little indecisive about what to do. Once we finally came up with something we'd be slow in getting going. Jerry would say "We're off! Like a herd of turtles!" The image of a herd of turtles was vivid and appropriate.

That summer I took one of my Santa Fe Opera trips and left Jerry behind. I needed to get him a present to make up for leaving him alone for a week. I got him a herd of turtles.

The herd was in three parts. The first part was touristy turtle souvenirs. These are little Oaxacan clay whistles. Jerry called them "blow-in-the-butt turtles."

The next turtles in the herd were colorful little Jemez pieces.

And I had to get him a real piece of art. I got him this turtle made by Kathy "Wan Povi" Sanchez, Maria's great-granddaughter.

Since then the herd has grown.

The Escondido Chainsaw Massacre

Here's a quick follow-up to the pine tree removal story.

My friend Ray lent me his 16" electric chainsaw. (Ray contributes to this blog in many ways. He lent me his projector and screen that let me record the movie that features Poss and the banana. Thanks, Ray!) Yesterday after work I took the chainsaw to the pine tree's trunk. In just a short time we no longer had a tree trunk stretching across the back yard. We had this instead:

This is the view of the back of the house that you can compare to the "before" and "during" pictures in the earlier post.

I will have to work on putting the branches out for the yard waste recycle pickup. The pieces of the trunk might be too large to put out for our curbside recycling so we might have to haul it to the transfer station and pay to have it recycled. We'll see.

I didn't cut my hand off. The only injury I got was when I walked under the trunk and smashed into the low-hanging branch with my shoulder. It's got a pretty, long bruise.

I saved a slice of the trunk from near its base. The top of the trunk is the top of the picture. It looks like the wood kind of hung loosely around the trunk as it formed and sagged...more grew on the bottom side of the trunk than the top. Interesting.


And to reward you for reading this far, here's a picture of a potted cactus that is blooming. Cactuses are so pretty.

Those wacky Amish!

Ten days ago one of our neighbors gave us a recipe and ziploc bag with a cup of starter for Amish Friendship Bread. Along with it she gave us a chunk of the cake she had just made. It isn't bread and it certainly isn't Amish. One of the ingredients is a box of instant vanilla pudding. (Do the Amish eat instant pudding?)

As the Wikipedia article on the recipe suggests, this is basically a chain letter with an ziploc attachment.

The recipe has us "mush the bag" of starter every day and feed it on the sixth day. On the tenth day (today!) we're to feed the starter again, measure out four new ziploc bags of it, and bake the bread with what's left of the starter. Bake we did! We're then to give the recipe and a bag of the starter to four of our friends. That's friendship for you!

It's a pleasant coffee cake. It certainly is not worth the trouble.

But we're each taking two bags of the starter and pieces of the cake to work tomorrow and foisting them upon unsuspecting colleagues. If anybody offers some to you, make up an excuse and pass it up (tell them that you have to wash your hair).

Amish Friendship Bread and bag of starter for the next victim

Poor little crow

A couple of days ago there was a crow moping around the birdbath seen in some of my movies. It got up on the birdbath for a drink then wandered around on the ground and the ash tree's roots. It didn't look happy. I stuck my head out the door and it hopped a little way away. It spent the evening hunkered down on the ground.

Yesterday morning when we got up it was dead.

The San Diego County Vector Control Program wants us to report dead birds so that they can test them for West Nile Virus. The newspaper this morning reported that 29 birds have tested positive for WNV while only 5 had by this time last year. None of this year's birds had been found in Escondido.

I filled out the county's online form and they called to make sure that the bird had been dead less than 24 hours. It was gone by the time we got home last night so I guess they picked it up.

I wonder if it was a victim of that disease. Or maybe it was just an youngster who hadn't learned to find food on its own and had been abandoned by its mom and dad.

Poor little bird.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Starting today is a regular posting of pictures of our turtle tchotchkes.

What better place to start than the beginning? That would be my own creations.

Here is a sculpture of three turtles I made when I was in Mountain School. The bottom shows I was in classroom A-4. Lordy, I'm pretty sure that would have been 5th grade. I didn't exhibit any artistic talent. I was thinking A-wing was where the first three grades were and it would have been a second grade project. I'm starting to feel embarrassed by this.




And here is another elementary school art project. The big turtle simply identifies it as being made by "C. E." and has no classroom so I don't have any idea when I made these.

(Things will be better now that we've gotten these treasures out of the way.)

You have to admire the teachers who take on the young. They must get great satisfaction when a student of theirs goes on to be a great in their field. But they mostly have to endure the utterly hopelessly untalented masses.

I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK!

First, I am very confused. I took the camera out and took several "before" pictures for this story but they are not on the camera's memory card and aren't in its internal memory. They just disappeared. So I had to find an old picture that shows some of the before state.

Interestingly, the picture I found is from last year when our cactus garden was in full bloom. What I thought I took pictures of this morning was the pine tree you see behind the cactus.
OK, I'm not so crazy. I found the before pictures. They were on my other computer in a folder with unrelated pictures. But I'm leaving last year's cactus picture for you to admire.

Here's a picture of the tree before I took the saw to it.
The poor pine tree was not growing where it should have been. First, it was in the shade of a large ash tree. It was stretching far to the side to find some sunlight. It was growing horizontally. Last winter was somewhat wetter than it had been for several years (though still below the average rainfall). The tree seemed to have lost some of its grip in the wet soil and had tilted even lower.

The second problem is that it was much too close to the house. After last year's firestorm we decided that we needed to enlarge the defensible space around the house. So we decided that the tree, pretty though it was, had to go.

Jerry took a clandestine picture of me hacking at the tree. I'm in my tuxedo T-shirt. It has long sleeves to protect me from sun, sap and bugs (I haven't heard of problems with deer ticks here but I'll try to protect myself from them, too).

After I got all the branches off the tree I cut the greenery and the branches less than a half inch off of them. I fed all of that to the chipper/shredder. It's amazing how quickly the shredder reduced the branches and needles to mulch. It took me longer to prepare the pile than for the machine to take care of it.

So after a couple of hours of sawing the branches off the tree and another four or so hours of dealing with the parts that could go through the shredder we have this naked tree trunk.

And a pile of branches that couldn't be shredded. (I'll feed the smaller branches to the chipper chute of the chipper/shredder next weekend.)

And a pile of shredded needles and small branches. Acid loving plants will appreciate this mulch. We probably have enough mulch to cover an acre but I don't think we have that many camellias (we have one camellia!).

Next week: The Escondido Chainsaw Massacre. I hope I don't cut my hand off when I work on taking down the trunk.

Cactus blossom

When we moved into this house there were some cacti growing in the front front yard (between the oleanders and the street). We moved them to a spot behind the family room where it has stayed put and multiplied. They sometimes break. The fallen pieces take root and make many more little cacti that don't stay little for long. We've gotten a small forest of the plants growing over the years.

We've moved into their blooming season. I don't know what kind of cactus they are. They bloom at night and their blossoms don't survive the next day. If one is about to open on a work night, you'd better remember to look at it before going to work or you'll come home to a sagging collection of petals.


The flower is about eight inches across. There are a lot of small buds on the other plants so we'll get to see some more of these in the next few weeks. (That's a Cleveland sage in the foreground of the bottom picture.)

Happy Birthday, Don!

Today the star of "The Roswell Incident" and a silly movie of people undoing things celebrates his birthday. (Why does his IMDB entry only mention the first movie?)

If you're lurking out there, Don, Happy Birthday!

What's in a nickname?

My father had a thing for giving people and things cutesy nicknames. I have no idea where it came from. Perhaps it was influenced by his family's use of nicknames.

• Herbie: Neva
  
• Bo: Florence
  
• Tuck: Margaret
  
• Nene: Anita
  
• Bill/Jack: The "B" word (I can understand not wanting to use that one!)
  

Why did they all use nicknames? Where did they come from? Why did they stick? It's a puzzlement to me since I don't go to the family reunions where these questions might be answered. Did their mom and dad have fun names or were they "Mom/Mother/Ma'am" and "Dad/Father/Sir" to the kids?

But what I am more interested in is his names for food. I know there are a lot more than these but here are some that are strange:

• su-zu: cereal
  
• no-ho-po: ice cream
  
• nummy: milk (I seem to recall that this came from declaring that milk is "mmmmm...nummy!" when trying to get Karen to drink it. Was there a problem getting her to swallow the stuff?)
• lick-lick: licorice
  

My aging brain is not coming up with more. Where in the world did "su-zu" and "no-ho-po" come from? What other things had odd names?

And why did he and his sisters all have nicknames but only a couple of his children wound up with nicknames that stuck?

• Shoe-shoe: Karen
• Poss: Beth
  

Did the rest of us get new names that just disappeared? (Names like "Pagrs," "Bobbers," "Chuckbert" don't count...they came late and are based on the real names.)

"No-ho-po"?

Backwards Movie, Take 2

Ray from work lent me a screen and a splicing kit so that I could try to improve on the little movie we shot in our High School days. The screen was to make a brighter image but I don't notice much more detail in this version. The splice kit let me add a couple feet of film that started the movie off. I get a bigger role in the creek scene!

I changed the movie a little. I flipped it left to right. Now it shows the world in its real spatial, but not temporal, orientation. Even the scenes where there is nothing that is obviously a mirror image bothered me. With that corrected I am much more comfortable.

I also left the scenes in the order they are in the film. The first times I tried to upload it to YouTube the movie would play at 78rpm and would end long before it was supposed to be finished. I tried to reedit it to try to get YouTube to keep from screwing it up but nothing worked till I rearranged the scenes.

I added a music track. I hope you like it.



No poll. Poss is still the winner!

You can expect one more update to this movie. To satisfy popular demand for restoring this film, I will be taking it to Costco to have them transfer it to some digital form. They apparently do a good job of fixing color and other defects from old film like this. Something to look forward to...