sorta back on the horse

Today I couldn't get to the sudoku puzzle without seeing all the headlines about Rep. Foley resigning over creepy emails (pdf), so in fine broken physicist tradition, I'm going to focus entirely on minor details so I don't have to think about anything yucky.

It says here that some people aren't sure why Rep. Foley would resign over the emails he sent to a page. Never mind the IMs you can find in other articles; anyone who writes email with that many ellipses should be soundly beaten with a sack full of all his extra periods.

Also people who write 'shoe-in' when they mean 'shoo-in,' but I guess you'd need some shoes.

stale news

Everybody else learned this two or three days ago, but today I learned that Jon Stewart offered the Pakistani President a Twinkie on Tuesday night. Mr. Stewart described the Twinkie as made out of things that aren't food, but you can eat it.

In other two-day-old news, this blog is a year old, and I'm still thinking about wildlife and flooring. You could take that as not much progress, but I'm feeling much better while doing it.

trade-offs and t-shirts

Today I learned that if you paint your floor and have to open some windows to put exhaust fans in them, you can keep the floor sealer smell out of the rest of the house, but the pollen trade-off is almost not worth it. However, the concrete we sealed is starting to smell a whole lot better than it did before.

In other news (sort of), I was aware of teenagers' propensity to wear t-shirts with messages on them that make grown-ups nuts, but I was not aware that some schools don't let kids wear un-messaged t-shirts, which I think I learned from the following comment*:

man a shirt is just a shirt rather you have words on it or not. my school doesn't allow plain shirts. and now they want us to stop wearing shirt with sexual or other type of shirts.

I hesitate to step on any kind of self-expression (this would be emailese, which is easier to read than textese), but, um, what?


* I can't get to the comments anymore - either the site isn't working right or I got more pollen than I thought.

paint drying and squirrels

I appear to have had too much fun yesterday, so today my job as paint drying supervisor is just the thing. Not too challenging, not too boring.

Today we're sealing the concrete floor in one room. We kept thinking we wouldn't have to because it always smelled so much better after we mopped it, but we aren't going to be taking up the floor once a week to mop the concrete, so I'm supervising paint drying.

Since I'm still not reading real news, everything else I've learned so far has been wildlife-related, but not Arizona wildlife. It says here and here that aggressive squirrels are coming to get everybody, so if you're considering going to the park, you may want to borrow a large dog with a taste for squirrel.

small business and weirdness in Seattle

Today I was surprised to learn that going out and talking to a SCORE volunteer is really entertaining. I learned a bunch of things about how to start a small business, but really I gotta get out more.

Since the flooring is arriving tomorrow and we had some work to do, the only other thing I learned today is that you can mosey into City Hall in Seattle with a bunch of pot-laced cookies and no one will do anything about it, even if you eat some of them are are clearly high. Maybe it helps if you're a minor celebrity, but wow.

young spiny lizard: not the brightest bulb in the box

As the election approaches (slowly), my local newspaper has switched to an all-border-all-the-time format. As you might imagine, people an hour's drive from the border are pretty worked up about it, as evidenced by the 311 comments elicited by this article about a woman who lost part of one finger climbing a border fence. While I think I learned in those comments that there are some Mexicans who believe California, Arizona, and Texas rightfully belong to them, the upshot is that I think it's about time for me to stop reading the news again for a while. Thus I will likely be heaping bloggerly scorn elsewhere, such as the local wildlife.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit that there is a short border fence around my back yard, so in my anti-border-fence stance, I'm a huge hypocrit. Anyway, the metal parts of my fence have chicken wire threaded through them so as to contain a previous resident, who I believe was a Boston terrier. Anyway, I expect it would probably stop a javelina, and maybe a cottontail rabbit, but I was pretty sure everything else could go over or through it without much difficulty until we spotted this beastie:


Based on the picture at the bottom of this page, I'm pretty sure that's a juvenile desert spiny lizard. It appeared to be well and truly stuck with its spiny scales lifted to catch on the wire if it tried to back up, but it turns out all we had to do was let it rest a bit so it could yank itself out, run down the fence a little, and stuff itself into a different hole. It eventually moved far enough along the fence that it got to cinderblocks, which it just climbed over.


I can't say for sure, but I think I'm not the only one who learned something today.

good toys and tourist attractions

Today I learned that if you're 20 months old, besides gravel, good toys include CD cases, bright-colored, otherwise-useless CDs (with or without clothespins), and accordion-pleated scrap paper. It also appears that the best way to get a 20-month-old to nap in an unfamiliar place is to announce that we're going to the park, put said youngster in the car, and drive for two minutes.

In other news, there's a sign outside the hummingbird aviary at the Desert Museum that says to be careful not to hit the hummingbirds because they're curious and they hover. It turns out that if you get distracted for a second in there, when you look around again, there very well could be a hummingbird eyeing you at a range of less than two feet (0.7 m). Hummingbirds are nuts.

If you want to be picky about it, I learned that yesterday but forgot to report it. Today I learned that you can't buy milk at the snack bar at the Tucson zoo. They only have juice from concentrate in funny-looking cartons or junk food, so keep it in mind if all anybody wants is milk at the zoo.

Here's the quote of the day from a snack bar employee when asked if they had milk: "What's that?"

back yards and small children

Today I think I learned that I have an African sumac tree in my back yard. I also learned that my niece likes small rocks. Fortunately, my back yard is filled with them, and they're fascinating.

In more back yard news, I learned that if you break one of those eggs I fished out of the mourning dove nest, it doesn't smell bad. I know I'm supposed to be sorry I don't have a matched set anymore, but that was really interesting.

cockroaches, smog, and food

Today I learned that by eating a live Madagascar hissing cockroach, you can get a pass that allows you and three friends to cut to the front of lines at an amusement park in Illinois. I remember reading that some people voluntarily eat cicadas, but they cook them, so I got to wondering about these cockroaches. It says here (warning: graphic bug pictures) that people keep Madagascar hissing cockroaches as pets, and they are described as docile and good at being handled by groups of school children.

Believe it or not, I used up all my controversy energy yesterday attempting (poorly) to imitate vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the worthiness of snacking on live cockroaches.

I'm also not going to tell you what I learned about the fog in London in 1952 because that's not good news either. This site listing supposedly edible products that were popular in the 1980s is probably a better bet.

Happy New Year to all of you who have your computers off because it's Rosh Hashanah.

vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left

Today the weather is back to the non-monsoon pattern, so for me the world is a better place. Thus I went out (figuratively) and learned that people think bloggers just talk about politics, when in fact, about 37% of us just talk about ourselves, and 11% talk about politics. I recognize that my politics ("Ban synthetic chemicals now!") are not exactly achievable in the near future since I'm up against giant corporations that make products like Tide,* which has its own website where, if you are seriously laundry-obsessed, you can sign up to be a member and have a personalized Tide page. Now I'm mad because I learned they're introducing a bunch of mood-smell Tides, and those kinds of things are always more fragrant than the original product, which is bad enough.

Ok, back to bloggers and politics. This nifty op-ed piece discusses how we're developing a bunch of politicians who, for the greater good, fail to follow the party line. Politicians who listen to 'the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left' or 'the doctrinaire religious extremists on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents' are getting left in the dust.

I freely admit that I don't read any vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left, but I'm feeling a little obstreperous today, so I have to try it out:

It says here that the US government has chosen Boeing, which, as a large corporation is by definition $#!@% evil, to contruct a huge, science-fiction fence across the Mexican and Canadian borders. It'll have towers, motion detectors, seismic detectors, heat sensors, cameras, and a computer network, not to mention the ten-pound (4.5 kg), camera-equipped, flying, truck-mounted** tracking drones. So here are some ^&%#$& important details that the idiots who thought this up have overlooked:

1. The fence will have to go all the way around the country unless we want everybody to arrive on floating products of oil-industry collaborators like the Cubans.
2. The whole project is going to cost more than wallpapering every inch of the Pentagon in $100 bills, even if it's only asking for $130 million, which it may not get. Right now drug- and people-smugglers aren't exactly love-your-neighbor types. Put some high-tech tower in their way, and they will shoot the &%^%#$ out of it, and then you'll have repair bills.

It is my considered opinion as an extremely well-read science fiction nerd that the only way to keep a fence like that running (if it ever runs at all, which from the article is not clear) is to, ahem, set it to 'kill' so it can protect itself, and I think everyone here knows how that kind of thing turns out. Since we don't have the technology to do that yet, and I really, really don't want to live in one of those futuristic countries with a deadly force field around it, I will positively declare this fence to be as stupid an idea as that whole star wars thing during the Reagan administration. Also that thing where we were just going to go to Iraq for a little while and everybody would love us. What a bunch of &^%#$@ morons.

Y'know, what I think I learned here is that when it comes to politics, I'm going to need some practice if I want to get anywhere near vituperative. Also, I could delete any one of the cartoon swear words without losing anything, so clearly I'm doing it wrong. This, folks, was a @*&^$* pathetic effort.


* Disclaimer: before she got sick, Miss Molly used Unscented Tide, which besides having a bunch of petroleum-based chemicals in it, has a bunch of masking chemicals to fix it so your nose doesn't detect their smell. As a result of constant exposure from her clothing and bedding, Miss Molly is now hugely sensitive to Tide. Also Bounce, which - here's a little known fact - is made by Satan.

** I'm not clear on how, exactly, the flying, truck-mounted drone works. I bet they meant truck-transported. Oh, wait a minute - I mean, what a bunch of !@%#^&$ incompetent morons.

dove eggs and scorpion venom

Today I learned that dove eggs are much smaller than they look in that picture I posted a few days ago. I kid you not - they look like Easter candy.

The reason I was fiddling with dove eggs is that there might be enough time left in the nesting season for one more set of eggs, and the way birds handle abandoned eggs is by kicking them out of the nest and making eggy splatters on your patio, so I thought I'd just head that off at the pass.

Also, giant yellow Israeli scorpion venom is good for something. In case you needed to know.

birdy and mold

Today the bird nesting in the vine announced, by not coming back, that its eggs had gotten too cold and were not going to hatch. Single parenthood is never an easy thing.

In other news, we completely freaked ourselves out by finding about 3 square inches (19 cm²) of mold behind a piece of baseboard in a room we don't use. We cut it off the wallboard and expect there is another 3 square inches inside the wall someplace, but we won't know until we cut it open. This is a ten-year-old house in one of the driest states in the country, and we still have mold. Ok, not much mold, but still.

We definitely detect it, and mold on top of the exposure I got yesterday is not too good, but we've concluded that the mold won't kill us. Since we were injured by mold, we detect it really well, so we'd know if there were a lot. Except for feeling lousy sometimes, this ESP thing is kind of handy.

the ceiling fan

Today my husband finished caulking around the outlet boxes in the walls in one of the bedrooms. Before he started, I did ok in that room, but I couldn't stick around without an air cleaner. After he finished, I was fine in there.

Just to be thorough, he wanted to caulk around the box for the ceiling fan, too, so I held the fan while he took it down. I recognized early on that I was in trouble with whatever came out of the attic, so we got me out of there as quickly as we could. I have been good for nothing ever since then.

I really wanted to go to a meeting about the proposed incinerator near Fantasy Island tonight. It started at 7, and I appear to still be sitting in my kitchen. The good news is that I used to get this knocked out by going to the grocery store, so probably the reason I'm whining about it today is that I'm not used to it anymore.

the Bush administration and distractions

Today I learned that the Bush administration sent Republicans to rebuild Iraq instead of qualified people. I recognize that I could have phrased that differently, but I don't take bad news very well.

I had to go looking for a distraction after that, but about all I learned is that Tom Cruise has a big nose. I will instead take comfort in the fact that I learned how to sleep through the night with the new pollen concentration outside leaking in at dawn and dusk: you point your portable air cleaner at the head of the bed. You have to position it just right so you aren't sleeping in gale-force winds but you still get filtered air. I love my air cleaner.

In other news, at Fantasy Island this afternoon, the only creepy mountain biker I've ever seen told me that I have aquatred tires on my aged BMW in Arizona, as though no one would put those on a BMW, particularly one in Arizona. Now, since the guys at the shop picked those out, and they are major BMW nuts, I am confident they knew what they were doing. It's a rear-wheel drive car, and we do periodically drive it in the rain. Sometimes we have to drive to California to find rain, but still.

Having written that, I think I learned that I am not so much concerned about my tires; I am mostly totally creeped out by that guy, so ick. It's a good thing that, sick or not, I can still outride most of the mountain bikers I see on the bunny loop on a weekend afternoon.

single parent nest

We spent a bunch of time staring at the nest in the vine yesterday and have concluded that there is, indeed, only one bird looking after the eggs. That means that no one is sitting on those eggs while this bird looks after itself, and they could get cold, which is bad.

Ok, we're total nerds and noticed as the sun rose this morning that no one was on the nest, and it's been getting down into the low 60s (about 16 C) at night. Eggs are supposed to incubate at around 99 F (37 C), so things aren't looking so good.

Here's what else I learned while looking that stuff up:

1. The stages of birdiness are: egg, squab, fledgling, adult.
2. It says here that eggs hatch after about 14 days, and it takes about another 14 before they fledge. In the wild, doves typically live 7 to 11 years. It also says that if you live in a state that allows hunting, they only live 1 to 1 1/2 years, and dove hunters are evil. (Ok, so I read that between the lines, but it wasn't hard.)
3. It says here that doves are yummy.
4. Dove clutches contain two eggs. If researchers move eggs around (pdf) to make some one-egg clutches and some three-egg clutches, the three-eggers end up scrawny. I suppose that if they'd learned that doves could handle three eggs, that would have been interesting and potentially useful for fostering (I guess), but since they just made a bunch of scrawny birds, in retrospect, it seems kind of mean. I know, I know - 20/20 hindsight, but if you're a physicist and try something that doesn't work, usually no one ends up scrawny.
5. A single parent can successfully raise two little birds (pdf) from eggs to fledglings, but it's not all that likely, and if they make it, they'll be scrawny.
6. No one knows what happens to scrawny fledglings because they're kind of hard to keep track of once they leave the nest.

So it's kind of hard not to get attached to somebody who lives on your patio, but since there's not a lot we can do to help, we'll just see what happens and let you know.

chip sealing, caterpillars, and doves

Today I learned that all the paved parts of my route to Saguaro National Park are going to be chip sealed in the next two weeks, so I'm going to have to wait a while before I can ride out there again. The good news is that it should be outgassed by the time the park opens again in October, so I'll be able to go check out their new road, assuming it's outgassed.

In other outdoor news:

• I picked something close to fifty caterpillars off this one bush that is apparently the only tasty thing in my front yard. So ick, and I hope the bush grows some more leaves soon.
• We may have a single parent in the nest in the vine on the patio. (Either that or a really irresponsible daddy bird.) The nest fends for itself for a couple of hours every day, so this morning when I saw the bird get up and fly off, we nosy humans went and took a paparazzi-type picture, where you hold the camera up over your head and hope for the best:

We may be nosy humans, but we may well be better neighbors than, say, a bobcat.

jamb saws and bike helmets

Today I learned that you can't rent a power jamb saw, aka an undercut saw, in Tucson. A jamb saw is the kind of saw you use to cut the bottom off door jambs so you can slide your new wood floor under them, and you want to rent one because who the heck, besides a contractor, or, say, a rental shop, is ever going to need one of those again? Also, they cost $250 to $300. The upshot is that you can buy a manual one for $20 and steady it carefully on an extra piece of flooring and hope for the best. Maybe it's not that hard - I'll let you know.

In other news, there is such a thing as a traffic psychologist. One rode his distance-sensor equipped bike around a lot of cars and learned that if you're wearing a helmet, cars pass closer than they do if you look irresponsible. Also, the ladies (for purposes of this study, him in a wig) get more room. He only got hit twice.

security screening, pot, and celebrities

Today I learned that stuffing a whole lot of kapok into a mattress casing is really, really tiring. You'd think I'd have learned that when we made the mattresses for the driveway camping trip, but my husband stuffed those.

I still have enough energy to be surprised by things, so here are some things that surprised me:

• Security screening at airports seems to be mostly for show. One of the ladies interviewed for that article carried a $300 container of facial cleanser on an airplane on purpose, and she got away with it. She also carried perfume, and you know I think perfume should only be handled by a hazmat team, so I hope she gets eaten by those bug-eyed monsters (BEMs) I mentioned yesterday.
• There's a treatment for hepatitis C, but it's so unpleasant that not that many people complete it, even under the threat of death. Smoking pot counteracts some of the side effects, so a greater proportion of pot smokers complete the treatment, thereby kicking hepatitis C.
• Not all articles about celebrity behavior are rehashed press releases. I only wish I could write like this.

I also learned that the practically see-through scorpions, like this dead one, are the most poisonous, and that if you catch a live one, your favorite biology teacher may ask that you preserve it in alcohol and ship it on over. When I admitted some squeamishness, every Arizonan I talked to came in completely in favor of drowning that sucker in alcohol.

I'm going to put that off until tomorrow.

voting and studies on homework and Gulf War Syndrome

Today I went to vote and learned that the closest branch of the local community college has indoor/outdoor carpeting in it. Also felt-tip pens with their caps off for filling in circles on the ballot, but those were all the way over in the little voting booths, and I couldn't smell them anyway because I had to wear my big, serious mask on account of the carpet. It was entertaining to get out and stir up the eight bored volunteers (it was 1:30 pm, and the place was empty), but I'm going to be all organized for November and get a mail-in ballot.

Onward to the news. It says here and here that studies show elementary school kids' test scores don't go up if they're given homework except for maybe a little reading. Middle schoolers' scores top out with between 60 and 90 minutes of homework per day, and high school students' scores with two hours. Despite this sort of information, teachers are frequently required to pile it on, so they do. Here's a quote from the author of "The Homework Myth," who is famous for harping about standardized tests:

"I am always fascinated when research says one thing and we are all rushing in the other direction," [Alfie] Kohn said.

I am not fascinated. Learning one thing and doing something else annoys the [bad word] out of me, unless it's a study reporting that some food or other will protect/kill you. Those I learned to take with a grain of salt. (Sorry.)

On to the last quote in the Post article, this one from a 16-year-old 11th grader:

"I feel like I'm learning more when I'm reading than when I'm filling out math sheets," she said. "If homework were eliminated? I'd read anyway."

What the heck kind of math do 11th graders learn that can be done on math sheets? Beginning algebra? Ok, I'm just bitter - I was forced to read literature in high school, but I have no real feel for it, so if I hadn't had homework, I would have stuck to the good stuff, aka science fiction, fantasy, and Dick Francis.

I learned one more thing today. A panel that studied a bunch of studies on Gulf War Syndrome recognized that affected vets are clearly sicker than they should be but concluded that since vets don't all have exactly the same symptoms, Gulf War Syndrome doesn't exist. If they had read any science fiction at all as students, it's possible that they could wrap their tiny brains around the concept of a new kind of illness, but, since fellow EIs' health and treatment is affected by their decision, I hope they all get eaten by bug-eyed monsters.

the floor, Netflix, a bird, and a lizard

Today we thought a lot about the floor, so mostly what I learned today is that Netflix has all 15 of the Sharpe videos, which, if you needed to know, are much more compelling when they aren't all cut up by BBC America.

Other than that, we had another potential nest occupant drop by today, and a lizard cornered itself up high on the inside of the sliding glass door screen:


I'm pleased to report that it figured out how to get back off the screen all by itself.

wasabi, things that'll kill you, and weight conversions

Today I'm pretty sure I learned that wasabi gives me a headache. And I can hear you laughing from here: she tried wasabi?? Well, you never know until you try, right?

So I have a headache. It's not really bad, but it's inhibiting my creativity, so today I'm only going to cover things that'll kill you:

1. honey
2. lakes in Arizona, and
3. fashion, but it's improving.

For those of you reading the fashion link, 1 stone = 14 pounds = 6.35 kg. In case you needed to know.

herbicide and a little plastic car

Herbicide makes your pants blow up! Ok, it happened back in the '30s, but it still made people's pants blow up. New Zealanders were using potassium chlorate, which is unstable, to get rid of recently-introduced ragwort, and the dust collected on their clothing. Then, being unstable, there were problems.

Speaking of things that don't work quite like they're supposed to, there's a new electric car on the market, so here's the quote of the day:

"We're trying to be pioneers," Tarazi said. "We're testing the lower limits of what the public wants."

small birds

Every now and then I get a 'cute' attack to make up for the dead scorpions and sarcasm, so here's a picture of the latest crop of little birds, who, after taking off for parts unknown this morning, have returned and tucked themselves in for the night:

body sprays

Today we have a two-for-the-price-of-one quote of the day, all about Axe and Tag, the highly-fragrant body sprays 'for men,' that are used by middle schoolers:

Nathan says the trick to applying body spray is to keep moving: "If you stand in one spot, you'll choke."

And Kyle cautions, "If you spray too much, you get a headache."

Homework questions:

1. How much money will teens likely be spending on synthetic chemicals, uh, I mean fragrant products, by 2008?
2. What is the vice principal's name?

fluoride and fluoridation

Today I got to reading another article about how hygiene products will kill you (ok, give you a headache, or maybe cancer). When it got to toothpaste, I was ready for the sodium lauryl sulfate; that stuff makes the inside of my husband's mouth fall apart, and then I don't get to kiss him until it heals, and that happened before we got really sick from mold. The article then went on to say that fluoride'll kill you, too.

That reminded me of an alarmist handout I read from an anti-fluoridation group in the '90s sometime, back before I could look everything up on the internet. It listed all sorts terrible effects from fluoride poisoning and explained that we shouldn't put poison in the water supply. I was on vacation visiting my parents, so I could turn to the local biology teacher and discuss (1) how people didn't seem to understand that high doses of anything would kill you but low doses could be helpful, (2) that the benefits of fluoridation outweighed those ridiculous poison claims, and (3) how unconvincing their handout was.

So today I figured I'd look up the anti-fluoridation arguments on the web, thinking, surely they can't have gotten less convincing, right? Well, they didn't. What with all the easily-confirmable references, they're really convincing. These two were most impressive:

• Not the (US) EPA, but the EPA Headquarters Professionals' Union's statement on why they oppose fluoridation. As a nerd, the second-to-last paragraph made a 'holy s**t' level impression on me:

  We have also taken a direct step to protect the employees we represent from the risks of drinking fluoridated water. We applied EPA's risk control methodology, the Reference Dose, to the recent neurotoxicity data. The Reference Dose is the daily dose, expressed in milligrams of chemical per kilogram of body weight, that a person can receive over the long term with reasonable assurance of safety from adverse effects. Application of this methodology to the Varner et al.(4) data leads to a Reference Dose for fluoride of 0.000007 mg/kg-day. Persons who drink about one quart of fluoridated water from the public drinking water supply of the District of Columbia while at work receive about 0.01mg/kg-day from that source alone. This amount of fluoride is more than 100 times the Reference Dose. On the basis of these results the union filed a grievance, asking that EPA provide un-fluoridated drinking water to its employees.

  I expect their grievance got blown off because the EPA's limit is, ahem, a lot higher than their employees would like, but that kind of thing isn't hanging around on the web where I can find it.


• "Why I changed my mind about water fluoridation." Colquhoun, J., Perspectives in Biology And Medicine 1997 Autumn;41(1):29-44. Mr. Colquhoun is a New Zealand dentist and was a very good fluoridation proponent, so good that he was put in charge of collecting data across the globe to be used to convince recalcitrant parts of New Zealand to fluoridate their water. He ended up writing that article after learning that swallowing fluoride just doesn't help, and in some cases, really hurts. He writes quite well and persuasively, as you might imagine a good proponent of anything would. I find it highly impressive that a serious advocate of anything could not only do a 180, but go out and tell people about it afterward. I mean, how many people in a position of power have you ever heard say they were wrong?

So, um, what does any of this have to do with fluoride in toothpaste? The EPA union statement says that people have to decide whether or not they want fluoride toothpaste exposures to go along with their water, pesticide, and pollution exposures. Although, if you live in Tucson and don't have a filter, you don't have to worry about fluoride in the water anyway.

technology

Today I learned that there is a sunken cement ship from WWI leaking oil near the state beach in Aptos, CA. It was sunk in 1930 on purpose so it could be a resort, but it went bust after a couple years, and now birds get into it and get all oily from its ancient Roman fuel tanks.

In other news, William Shatner's response when asked if he wanted to go on the first space tourist flight is the quote of the day:

I'm interested in man's march into the unknown, but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me.

potbellied pigs and entrepreneurs

Today I learned that potbellied pigs, if raised in the house with no other pigs around, develop dominance issues with their people as they mature, and they aren't particular about who they fight to get higher in the pecking order. If they're around other pigs and don't regard the house as part of their territory, it sounds like they pretty much stop worrying about the humans and properly use them for mooching treats and getting their tummies rubbed, which works much better for all concerned. However, since neighbors have conniption fits over much more common pets like cats, it's not hard to imagine somebody having a cow (sorry) over a small herd of pigs.

In other news, entrepreneurs aren't more risk-tolerant than the rest of us. They're just more confident, as stated in the following quote from the article:

For example, look at the airline industry. There's much uncertainty, and it's volatile. Still, we see a lot of entrants into it because they think they understand the industry. They think they have a higher ability then [sic] the other guys. They say, "I will be the next Southwest Airlines."

That statement leads us directly to this article about a German entrepreneur who is starting an airline that caters to smokers traveling between Germany and Japan, both of which have relatively large populations of smokers. So, maybe he'll make a million bucks.

nylon, rain, and local wildlife

Today I learned that:

• If you need 20 yards (20 m) of ripstop nylon to make a dome tent, and you have a coupon that only gives you 40% off on one piece of fabric, the only colors available in 20 yard lengths will be the unpopular ones. I am now the proud owner of 20 yards of the brightest bluish teal I've ever seen, but it was better than black.
• If your husband is working on a computer he doesn't tolerate, and it is therefore sitting outside on the patio with the keyboard, mouse, and ethernet cables snaked in through the sliding glass door, the pollen and mold from the outdoors blow in through the cable-width gap during thunderstorms and make me pretty sick. But the computer stays dry.
• My carpet is so evil it kills scorpions.

Ok, that last one I'm not so sure about, but a scorpion crawled in around the cables and was dead when I found it on my sewing machine plug:


That was a little more excitement than I was looking for, wildlife-wise, so tomorrow or the next day I'll try to get some pictures of the latest pair of baby birds leaving the nest in the vine. Well, keeping in mind that the way things have been going around here, they'll probably get eaten by a hawk or something.

small towns, oil changes, and air quality

Today I confirmed (again) that we live in the biggest small town in the country. We have a population around here of upwards of a million people, counting outlying areas, and you can't buy replacement parts for your Waterpik for a million bucks. You have to order them online, same as the people who live deep in the heart of the middle of nowhere. I mean, here I finally get the ability to go in stores, and then I learn that they don't even have what I want.

In other news, if you live in Southern California and are a journalist, it sounds like you can get a good story out of dishonest Jiffy Lubes every year or so.

Onward to our Labor Day weekend entertainment: figuring out what's wrong with the air in the master bedroom. So far we've tracked the problem to one corner of the room, and since the sealant we put on the carpet should have expired six months ago, we suspect something in the carpet. Based on an extremely faint odor, the problem could be the previous resident's beauty-product chemicals. If that is, indeed, the problem, I am hugely impressed by the AFM carpet sealer.

'Beech Cambridge' and a rainstorm

Today I learned that I can go in the Color Tile near Swan on Speedway without a mask and that if you and your husband put three flooring samples down near the door in the real light and in less than fifteen seconds agree on which one you like best, you shock the heck out of the nice saleslady. We put three more down a few minutes later, and those took maybe two minutes, but we both really like the first one we picked. Between that and the stories they told about bamboo problems when we asked, this is turning out to be soooooo much easier than picking tile.

In other news, today we had a thunderstorm over the house, and the wind blew the correct direction so we didn't get any water in the ceiling. So, have a picture of a rainbow:


a wet bird (if you enlarge it, you can see the shiny drops of water):


and a 2 inch (5 cm) long beetle that passed away some time ago but I find too interesting to sweep off the patio:


If it looks like it's missing some legs, that's because I stepped on it last week.

more flooring, the national park, and toads

Today I learned that you can get snap-together EI-safe hardwood flooring for a little less than the glue-together bamboo I was considering. Also, Lumber Liquidators sold some really, really bad cheap bamboo that was very soft and easily scratched. Apparently the trick to bamboo is to pay as much as possible, so I'm probably ok with what I was looking at, but if the the hardwood passes the sniff test, it may be a better bet.

In other news, I rode over to the national park this afternoon and learned from the ranger that they hope to finish the construction over there by the middle of October. They're repaving the loop, and the termite damage at the ranger station was worse than they thought. They also found a pack rat skeleton under there, but I don't know if they kept it.

Speaking of small animals that live in the desert, besides having poisonous snakes, this time of year we have poisonous toads. You move to the desert, and suddenly everything is all spines and poison.