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.