Murphy Strikes Again!

The Engineer went out of town this weekend. Poor fellow has to go to a Houston Astros game and sit in a corporate box. He's been getting a chuckle out of his ticket which specifies his seat as "barstool." And, of course, the box has its own private waiter to pour the beer and serve the food. Don't we feel sooooo sorry for him.

As soon as his plane took off it started to snow. First if was big globs of snow like loose snowballs going splat, splat, splat on my windshield, then it got down to business and snowed for real.

I had taken the frost blankets off the garden Monday, so I ran out and put them back on. It was lots of fun. I used an 8 foot garden stake as an arm extension to hook the fabric up and over the supporting poles and plants. It took me an hour working on my own and by the time I was done I was soaked and cold.

Since I'm a red head, I have no naturally visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Every morning, I goop myself up thoroughly with mascara to look like I have a face. Running around in soggy snow is not good for mascara. By the time I was finished with the plants, I looked like Alice Cooper.

I came in, pealed my dripping clothes off - amazing how hard it is to pull clothes off when they're that wet - and took a long, hot shower.

Aaaah!

A couple hours later, I realized that the warm and toasty after shower feeling was wearing off way too quickly, so I went to bump up the thermostat. It said 63, so I pushed it up to 68. No heat. Pushed it up to 70. No heat. I went to the basement and stared at the big furnace box and the ductwork and pipes and had no idea what to do.

Evil Language!

Called the Engineer to see if he had any ideas.

He said to turn the thermostat up.

Well duh! Like that's not the first thing I tried.

He had no ideas beyond that and, besides, the waiter was serving his dinner.

I found the power switch for the furnace and decided, what the heck, if rebooting works for computers, maybe it will work for a furnace. I turned it off and listened to funny noises. I turned it back on and listened to more funny noises, including water gurgling.

Water gurgling?

So I called the heating and air company that had been out last week to install a whole house humidifier and had left the job half done because of a faulty motor on the unit. After about an hour, the on-call guy called me back and we went through a bunch of diagnostics. The water gurgling turned out to be the clue he needed to diagnose the problem over the phone. The condensate drain was plugged - which needed a part from Lennox to fix and Lennox isn't open until Monday...

He suggested I try to blow out the obstruction. I blew until my cheeks popped to no avail.

To heck with that! Let's go postal on it!

I got out my trusty keyhole saw and cut a hole in the condensate drain trap. Smart girl that I am, I had a bucket ready for the spurting water.

Heat's back on and I've put in an order for a new drain trap cap that's spring loaded for easy clean-out to be installed when the motor for the humidifier blower comes in.

The bucket will work until then.

Beauty

It's an old saw, but very true: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you and I think is beautiful more than likely differs considerably.

I think spiders are gloriously beautiful; so many arthropods are. Snakes and lizards are lithe and lovely. Almost anything imaged by a scanning electron microscope is marvelous.



I think big noses are magnificent. Had I been Roxanne, Cyrano would have had no need for de Neuvillette to front for him.





On 9-26 Cicada, of Bioephemera fame, posted this painting and speculated upon the live girl's size and lack of cellulite.

My first impressions were "cool skeleton" and "beautiful hands." Hands are darn hard to paint. I suspect (looking at her perky bosom) that the live model was probably a teenager which would explain the lack of dimples and ripples on her glowing flesh.

Being less than svelte myself, I've done a good bit of thinking about size and beauty. Except for the slender figures in Egyptian art, seems to me that historically most Western females have been pretty robust. I would suspect that, back when food was harder to come by, a "strapping" figure was not only a sign of health, but also a sign of wealth. And what could be more attractive than that combination?

It hasn't been so terribly long since tastes in this country changed. These women were, and still are, considered some of the sexiest, loveliest ever to have lived.

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Even today, Japanese men hyperventilate with lust at the thought of Marilyn Monroe.

These ladies could hardly be called thin, but they surely are all woman.

Then in 1967 a British model called Twiggy arrived on the scene, and it hasn't been the same since.
Darn it all!

The dust mite micrograph was downloaded at http://www.housedustmite.org/ , the picture is courtesy of Electron Microscopy and Audio Visual unit of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Autumn in the Foothills

Fall can be a lovely time of year with brisk breezes, colorful leaves and fall flowers. The colors probably won't be as good as usual this year because of the lack of rain, and the leaves will fall off the trees quickly. Fall still has it charms, however. And dangers.

I have a friend who sells geraniums as a fund raiser every spring and she wanted some pictures of the flowers' colors to help her sell them next year, so I went up to her house with my trusty Canon to oblige.

We got a bit of a surprise on her driveway, Crotalus viridis viridis, alias the Prairie Rattlesnake. It was just a little bugger, but practically invisible against the concrete.

This is why, when we garden in the spring and fall, we carry a tomato stake with us and let it probe a path ahead of our feet.

If you feel like reading a longer poison snake story, click here.

Contractor Hell

That's were I've been residing for the last 16 months. When the roof remodel began in June of 2006, Murphy moved in to stay. If it could go wrong, it has gone wrong and usually at the worst possible time.

I've been trying to get the electrician out to finish the job since May. In 4+ months his crew has been out for a total of about six hours. I truly appreciate that the boss pulled Pete off installing new Austrian crystal chandeliers in the Governor's mansion (second set in a year - my tax dollars at work) to rough in my swamp cooler when it was over 100 out, but I really would like to get the new service and panels installed before the snow flies. Pete and RePete do a good job when they're here, but, geeze, I wish their boss would send them on a regular basis.

I drew this totem pole to show where I figure I exist in the pecking order...

Two Cats in the Yard

Kitsu is overjoyed that her humans put the ladder up outside for her. The better to spy birdies!

Sachi supervising the female human digging in the big outdoor litter box. (Makes me very glad I didn't plant potatoes or carrots.)

Picky

The Engineer says I'm picky because I don't like rare pork.

Right.

I don't like rare pork or beer, he doesn't like chicken or fruit. Which, of course, means I'm the picky one since it's entirely reasonable to not like chicken or fruit and insane to not like beer or rare pork. (As a Latvian, it's beyond his comprehension that life could exist without beer. He shudders at the very thought.)

I made Runge pickles, which he loves, out of my overgrown Armenian cucumbers, but he won't eat them unless I dry them off with paper towels first.

And he calls me picky.

Girding the Garden for Frost

It's amazing how quickly the weather can go from short sleeves to wooly jacket as it's done over the last couple of days here. Poor Kate lost all of her tomatoes last week and had snow Sunday night. Brrr!

We have frost warnings for my neck o' the woods tonight and I still have a bizillion green tomatoes on the vines. Which just happen to be more than seven feet high! (No, I did not feed them steroids.)

Unfortunately, I do not like fried green tomatoes -- though I did once make a pretty tasty green tomato pie...

So this afternoon, I went down to Mill Creek Nursery and bought three 10'x12' "frost blankets."

It was quite a job getting them up and over the tomatoes. I had to wait for the Engineer to get home to help me with it. I did the front bed myself. I'm tall enough to get the fabric over the eggplant bushes - they're only about 4 feet tall.

Cross your fingers for my veggies. The Ghost Garden, all dressed up for Halloween.