One year ago today: March 31, 2017, a ridey-horse.
Five years ago today: March 31, 2013, Easter in Coral Gables.
Nine years ago today: March 31, 2009, seven miles per gallon.
Random years ago today: March 31, 2014, this was written before Trump . . .
What happened to March, 2018? It was such a busy time I can barely remember individual events. Hey, that’s how blogs get started. This had to be one of the longest months yet, not that I want time to speed up in any way. And all of it running on empty, that is without ever having a single full meal, I lost 1.1 pounds. I played one gig, went on no trips, got a haircut, and was deficit spending by the 16th. To cheer us up, here is a picture of the bird misting setup. It’s the clearest shot I could get, but if you look at the branch furthest to the right, you can see that blue coil. It comes from a set of a dozen intended to mist outside seating areas like a café. Somehow, this single found its way into the local thrift.
Both birds and the squirrels center their activities around this mist. You see that hose on the ground? I’m going to run a tiny underground PVC system with a timer inside the master bedroom, which has a window on the side facing all this scenery. I’ll tell you more later, but first, blog rules say this is one of the days I have to describe the goings-on. Statistically, a third of my readers compare it to their own days. I don’t recommend that, but who am I?
[Author’s note: face it, god I miss Memphis, but I will never keep a bird in a cage again. Memphie-poo, I love you.]
Easter dinner will consist of asparagus on rye toast. Wow, huh? In March, I put in close to 70 hours work mostly on the front bedroom, took some 160 photographs, the best of which you see here, and finished seven new books over 300 pages each. No, make that eight, because I re-read another. Recreation? I completed 155 crossword puzzles, dated a waitress a third of my age, and wrote around 20 letters, based on how many postage stamps were used. (It is forbidden to keep copies or even records of personal letters in this household.) All month, my total calorie intake was 22,170. Less than half of normal. Yep, 1.1 pounds. Keeping those kind of records is fine, almost a specialty.
March took up a half-bag of birdseed, two (small) propane bottles, and due to conservation measures, just $100 in gasoline. But $290 repairs to the scooter, which I have not got back yet. Say, where is that jar full of gig money? Ah, it’s around here somewhere. The unusual expense of the month was sending 35 “email” credits to a guy in the Polk County jail so he could keep in contact with his family. While the robot club is not a benevolent society, we have an allocation for such measures. I drove to Winter Haven eleven times where the average is three. I spent $115 on coffee and $494 on entertainment. (It’s actually less by whatever is in that tip jar when I find it, because tips are always deemed spent the instant they materialize.)
Overall, the new band has been operating in arrears due to gas and travel to rehearsal. On average I still play or practice music around twelve hours per week, but this month closer to twice that. And a lot of it learning new material, a rare Florida activity indeed. To emphasize the renovation is mostly labor (mine), during March, I spent merely $62.43 in lumber and $71.81 in electrical. That’s all the excitement for this morning. Most of it I was just driving around in the car, unless you want to hear about that. Sure, I wish I could find a party, but once you get past thirty, you’ll find most parties are dependent on hired help, of which I do not partake. It’s the way of the world. The downside is, of course, if you don’t meet the right lady, you don’t get to party at all. But that’s another story.
Monument Rocks, Kansas
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As promised, here is more on the yard. How about a novelty feature, a history of a birdfeeder tale? This is the now heavily field-modified bird feeder. It began like most, with just that central piece that looks like a nesting box (see April 6, 2016). I had one of those pieces of fence wood left over and made this the shape that could be cut from what was available. This type of project is very common with my robot club. You can make out the plastic piece with the seeds falling out at the bottom. It is the toughest plastic I could find, the inner liner from a defunct computer flatscreen. I wanted the birds to see the seeds, which are now totally black sunflower to cater to the northern cardinal family. By the way, the kids are back for nearly a week now. Two juvenile females, they only feed after the parents are done.
The misting device is a few feet to the right side of this feeder and a few feet lower. However odd this feeder may look, the design is utterly pragmatic, based on continual observation until each part became functional. The west master bedroom window looks over this little playground. The renovations include a corner with 12 outlets (receptacles) custom designed for my home work desk. Pictures of that later, but the layout is such that sitting in a natural position in the office chair, I can see all movement in the front yard. Remember the scenes with eight squirrels and a dozen birds at once? That was all last summer before the bedroom renovation began. I intend to die in this house, so I want my time to be as quiet and luxurious as I can afford. That included turning the yard into a focal point for small birds. This is successful; the antics go on continually every day.
And did they take to it or what! I’m not trained in animal behavior, it is all observation. The red northern cardinal family are, I think by now, permanent residents. There are an indeterminate number of finches or wrens, but they seem to keep their own numbers sparse. The tallest trees in the neighborhood are in my yard and the postman’s yard directly across the road. This forms a tunnel down the street and it is always alive with birds, including the rarely seen but often heard woodpecker. It is not that beautiful red-headed bird, that one is gone, the one that went “thock thock thock”. This is the more common woodpecker than hammers like a machine gun.
The two trees I cut down, recall, I left the stumps nine feet high. Smart move. They are now overgrown as hosts to the natural decay processes and attract more birds. I’m going to build a couple of woodpecker nesting boxes to see if I can get that family closer. It should work because the best shade by far on hot days anywhere around here is the stand of trees on the north side of my property. For reasons unknown, the churches and parks all around here don’t have trees or cut them down.
The next real shade is that farm with the three tame cows a good half mile from here. Also, my trees form a continuous path front to back, the only forest-like tract in the neighborhood. That’s probably what attracted that huge flock of robins last winter. They migrated on. Everything shown here today is empirical, derived by experimentation and then selecting what worked best, a glacial process. Example, the birds ignore my store-bought feeders completely unless the one shown here is empty. Figure that one out. They also don’t like when I clean the birdbath either; I used to blast it with the garden hose. They would not become regulars again until it returned a little closer to nature. Tree seeds fall in there and at times I’ve had tiny sprouts of camphor and oak.
I read last week at the main library that some study team up north has discovered a trait in the elm trees that survived the Dutch elm virus. That wiped out almost every elm tree to the extent I don’t think I’ve seen one in my adult life. My intention is to find out if they have found or bred a resistant strain. If so, I shall be the first to plant them in my yard. Right after I finished that article, I mapped out four perfect places along my southern edge that still leaves space for Howie to drive his rider mower. What a treat that would be, to have elm trees outside my kitchen window.
Before I let you go, I want you to take a gander at this photograph of termite damage. This is not bad by Texas or Florida standards, but I left the worst repairs to last. Why? Because I started with zero experience and I needed some by the time I got to the really bad spots. I can completely tackle this type of foundation repair now with an ease and with efficiency I could not have imagined two years ago. That piece of new 2x6” is one that fell through the joists when I was examining the bathroom floor. It’s a huge disappointment that JZ never showed up as planned, because now I’ve learned to do this type of major repairs by myself. I have even raised and leveled 80% of the whole house by myself. Only the kitchen is left. Which is another reason I wanted you to see this photo.
Except for the kitchen. Look to the back of the picture and you can see daylight on the north edge of the structure. That was the first section I leveled in 2016 before I moved in. What you don’t want to see is that piece of electric cable hanging down. This is part of the Mickey Mouse wiring in the cabin when I bought it. It had obviously never been inspected, which means no way you can mortgage it. I paid cash. This cable feeds off that spider-web system I’ve commented on many a time. It is not only the wrong size of cable (14/2), it should be drilled through the joists.
It is run from a 20 amp breaker and was feeding the entire back wing of the house off that one circuit. If you’ve been following, you know that I’ve completely upgraded the bedrooms, again learning as I went along. They are now fed with two 15 amp circuits each, so a popped breaker doesn’t disable the whole room. The remainder of the house is proper 12/2 wiring from 20 amp breakers. Once again, I left the kitchen and this section last so I would know what’s going on when the day came. The inspector would be horrified to see a wire hanging down like that.
The kitchen is even worse, don’t even look at the wiring. But I have plans for that. Excellent plans, including the silent garbage disposal, the new 8,000 BTU A/C for just that one room, a dishwasher, and an upright freezer. I knocked out a wall to make room for these toys. Progress is slow, but darn rights I’ve been busy. I’ve got the specs done for the plumbing as well, including the new laundry room. My rule of thumb is simple, no matter how technically perfect the work is by the book, the job ain’t right until it looks right. I probably get that from the way I play the electric bass.
But I have to l leave you on a sad note. I knew a long time ago I needed help to get anywhere in life. I just was never talented or smart or handsome or tall or rich or tough enough to get anywhere on my own. I wasted half my life trying to find the right partner so isn’t it ironic that, in the end, I wound up doing it all myself anyway? Wait, change that, put it this way, every partner or woman I ever met that we could have gone to the top together eventually cheated on me, lied to me, or let me down. So the real irony is that by the time I wound up doing it all by myself anyway, it was too late to make a difference. I find out that I enjoy this renovation work only when it is too late to make a career out of it.
Ah, but what the hell? Last night again proved I’m the best damn dancer ever in Polk County. Seriously. I grabbed the first decent looking gal that walked in the door and pushed her around the floor like a ballerina. Read and weep: the crowd applauded me and not the band. Glen, it ain’t braggin’ if you done it.
ADDENDUM
It’s well-known that I dislike technical writers, particularly engineer-types, who leave out important aspects of their topic, use undefined lingo, or have that “you’re supposed to know” attitude. One of the worst is their description of moon phases. They’ll show you a series of photographs and say this is a crescent moon or something like that. You’re supposed to know the rest. Well, this is your lucky day. I’m going to describe the moon phases in the clearest language you’ve ever heard.
After you read this, you should be able to go outside any time it is visible and know what to call that phase of the moon. I’ll express myself so well, we won’t even need diagrams. Deal? Good, let’s get started.
The new moon is the dark moon. It’s not lit up on the side facing us, so that’s a logical place to start. Imagine you are standing facing the Moon at that phase. All you see is the faint reflected “earthlight”. Wherever it is visible in the sky doesn’t matter, but you will look at it over consecutive nights for the next week. You will begin to see the edge of the moon to your right begin to get more lit up each night. The visible part is shaped like a crescent. Take important notice the light is advancing from the right side toward the left until a week later, when the entire right half of the moon is bright. During that seven days, this is called the waxing crescent. My memory aid is easy. If you wax a floor, it keeps getting brighter, get it? The moon is getting brighter. How many of you always wondered about that?
[Author's note: here is a repost of the "Earth phases" as seen from the Moon as posted here April 6 last year. I cannot explain the many coincidences that similar topics pop up here almost exactly one, two, three, etc. years back. Since I do not make the yesteryear links until posting time, I have no idea what the post will say. Often, the link is created the following day, so it isn't even due to any influence while I'm writing the body of the post. Figure that one out.]
Note that while it is the right half of the visible Moon that is now lit up, this is called the first quarter. (Engineers again.) At that half-way point, the moon is no longer crescent because it becomes gibbous. You like that word? I don’t. I’ve dated women who I think were gibbous and I didn’t like them either, the way that arm flab jiggles and all. Anyway, for the next seven days the moon continues getting brighter, advancing from right to left and you guessed it. This is your waxing gibbous moon.
On or about the 14th day, the moon is fully lit on this side. Your full moon. Enter the next seven day sequence as the darkness begins to move in from your right toward your left. Memorize that right-to-left progression, it is going to be question one on the exam. More than half the moon is lit, so this phase is your waning gibbous moon. No memory aid needed, because since it ain’t waxing, it must be waning. Logic 101. On around night 21, the right half of the moon is dark and the left half is lit, and you guessed it. Your last quarter.
For the next seven days, the moon gets more and more crescent shaped again, the light gradually disappearing to the left. Come on, name that phase. Waning crescent. On day 28 (actually 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes), you are back to your new moon.
So let’s recap. From no moon, seven days starting on the right, you have a waxing crescent until the right half is lit up. The first quarter. From then, it is a waxing gibbous moon until day 14, with your full moon. Then the darkness begins increasing from the right side, it’s your waning gibbous. When the right half is dark, it is a waxing crescent.
Be mindful at some angles the advancing light can be diagonal, but mostly from right to left, so use your noggin. If you don’t have a month to go check this out, find a calendar that shows the moon phases. Aha, the little pictures are not arbitrary. You can see the passage from right to left. But now, thanks to this blog, you understand it perfectly. Beware it could be backwards on a Chinese map and the wife definitely does not want to cuddle.
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