Out of The PIT

We had birds make a mess of MJNL's car earlier this week so we took it out for a car wash on Tuesday. It was also an opportunity for the whole family to go out and do something and gave EYS something entertaining to watch. Yesterday, we woke up to find that the birds had struck the car again. Even though it was raining, MJNL wanted to have the car washed so we went for yet another car wash to clean up the guano, which interestingly enough happened on the same spot as before. EYS enjoyed the car wash again. Today, the same thing happened. This time, I noticed that my car too was covered in guano. The birds had pooped mostly on the parts of the car near the side mirrors. It was only today that I pieced the puzzle together: We had noticed that there were a lot of birds roosting in our yard and driveway. Every time we came out of the house I would hear the flutter of wings as robins would fly away from wherever they were perched. I assumed that it was from the new nest that was b...

We started the process of transferring the mini-van from my dad to me. Since it is a transfer to a family member, we can bypass sales tax, but you still have to fill out forms and sign things in front of a commissioner, etc. This is a little difficult during a pandemic, especially since we don't want my dad to leave the house. (Or at least not to come close to anybody.) Fortunately, we have the technology and things like this have become a lot easier to deal with not in person. There are still more hoops to go through, but it's mostly on my dime now so I don't have to worry about getting my dad to places where he should not be going..

MJNL wanted me to test out the adapter for the car seat on our stroller. It took me a while to find the adapter because I remembered moving the box, but forgot what the (brown) box looked like. Just looking at the pieces, I would never have been able to figure out what pieces went where if it were not for the instruction booklet. For our particular car seat, the adapter only used four of the six pieces. It fit perfectly, but without that knowledge, I would have been hard pressed to figure out how to put it all together. This normally would not have been an issue if I could look up the instructions on line, but without looking up specific text on the manual itself, I do not think I would have been able to find it. There are so many adapters out there, and this one was old enough that I could have spent many hours, if not days, fruitlessly searching for assembly instructions that did exist (I did find it eventually), but was so hard to find that it would have been nigh-impossible to comp...

So far I only used one of the ant baits and it seems to be working. When I set the traps on Friday, the ants had mostly disappeared from the area as I had removed the food that had been on the floor. By Saturday, the area was again full of ants, mostly going through the stores of food within the baits. Now today I noticed a number of dead ants lying around the trap area, their carcasses dry and crumbling. I will clean them out tomorrow and should give the area a nice wipe down. I do not want them coming back in again! Also, I made pie!

One of the best features of our new house is the ravine. I had never even realized that there was a ravine in this part of the city! We have been trying to take advantage of it ever since the weather started turning warmer (pandemic or not). One area I wanted to really wanted to check in on was the grove of cherry trees to see if they were cordoned off (as were the ones in High Park) and if they were blooming yet. Fortunately the first answer was a no, but the second answer was a no as well. I guess I will check them out next week!

I got a splinter in my foot this morning. I may have gotten a couple actually. These are not wood splinters, no. These were most likely hair splinters. I never vacuumed after my hair cut earlier this week and although I did wash out the bathroom, I did not clean up the rest of the house, and some strands of hair could have potentially gotten tracked out of the cutting area. As such, the long strands will do nothing more than potentially stick to my socks, but the really short ones.. In any case, MJNL helped extract one from my foot. The other took a while to work it's way out, but I was hobbling for part of the morning. So this is the lead up to why I was vacuuming the house in the morning. As I made my way to the living room, I discovered an army of ants swarming over some leftover popcorn that was sitting on the floor near the door. Oh crap. I quickly sucked them up into the vacuum cleaner, and started sucking up the rest of the ants in the area. More came. I sucked them ...

I found in one of my older archives, my old photo album. I had removed it when I moved my photos over to Picasa, but now that all of those links are broken, I decided to put up the old album again. I removed a bunch of the code that was used by the album after I removed it so it has taken me a while to get it up and running again, but I basically removed the comments on the code and voila! That still does not preclude the fact that I still have to fix all of those broken links.. Also, the Pictures section is incomplete. There are lots of photos with no captions or descriptions. I'm tempted to leave them as is, but my sense of completion may drive me to fill in the blanks one day.. Also, my Nest camera started showing garbage this afternoon. I could not easily get out to reboot the device, but fortunately I did recently figure out the breaker circuits at my house so I was able to reboot it (along with all of my other cameras) that way. Seems to be working now but I will be kee...

Toilet paper is on sale this month and I wanted to pick up at least one pack before the sale was over. This time I called ahead to confirm that the store had some (as they were sold out online) and found out that yes, there was stock in store. So I grabbed my mask, and headed out the door. Now I have not been detailing my grocery runs, but they usually involve going through a long shopping list, loading all of the goods into the car, sometimes going to another store, and filling the trunk to the brim. All the while wiping down anything and everything that might get contaminated. Once I get home, we wipe down everything. We don't go as far as washing our vegetables with soap, but when you are dealing with hundreds of dollars of groceries, it is a lot of wiping and a lot of cleaning (as the door handles, surfaces, floor, etc. all need to be disinfected). I also have to throw all of my clothes into the wash immediately and shower. So my grocery runs usually last three to four hour...

Gah! I can't stop reading my old entries! Where did I find the time to post all of this.. this stuff? I have to admit, there is a lot more on The PIT that was more interesting (to me) than not, and I know that my life now has way more interesting events that I ever did that decade I spent blogging. It's just that I want to experience it more than to document it, but I know I will forget these experiences and if I want to relive them, the only way is to chronicle my life in as much detail as I did before.. I don't have the time. Once number two shows up, how will I even find the time to reminisce?

Holy crap, I was looking at how much work it would be to fix the broken photo links (there are about 70 of them) and started sifting through some of my old entries on The PIT . I kept clicking and reading, and clicking and reading, and clicking.. and ended up on the entry where I first met Dangerman . I realized that I needed to stop. The community that I had there seemed so.. alive to me now. Well, back then too. It's something I kind of miss, since most of the people who posted there I have not spoken to for quite some time now. Most of us are just too busy with our own lives..

Okay, I noticed that most of my picture links are broken. I thought I only had pictures from my trip in 1999 but.. I posted a lot more pictures than that. The original pictures and captions still exist, but after Picasa got moved to Google Photos, all of my links got broken. There does not seem to be an easy way to relink the images. So I am doing it by hand.. Should take me an hour or so. Just not this hour. Or the next.

I've relocated my websites again. My last hosting site was still working, technically. However, I lost access to the maintenance site due to some shenanigans with the hosting company and I quickly decided to look for a backup hosting site for my stuff. I spent a few days doing some research before recalling that my NAS had some advanced features so I looked into it. Boy am I glad I did. A fully featured web server with a lot of support and enough extensions to host all of my websites, including not just the static version of The PIT , but I am able to bring The PIT back to life.. kinda. I'm not going to get the perl scripts back up and running. Getting the PHP working again took longer than I had planned, and this is really a make work kind of project so I don't want to waste more time on this than I have to (considering that I have a garden, and children, to take care of now). But I am happy with how it turned out, after hours of cleanup that is.

I had been thinking of getting a hair cut for quite some time now. I was actually going to get my hair cut before everything got locked down but MJNL told me not to go to the salon because of fear of transmission. That was a month ago. My hair has not been this long now for.. quite some time. I have heard of some people growing pandemic beards. I'm sure pandemic hair is a thing now. I have been transitioning fairly well throughout this crisis, but I was already working from home so my routine has not changed much. The toughest part is keeping EYS entertained throughout this whole ordeal. Well, that and sanitizing everything and everywhere anytime I go shopping but I don't want to be the reason we got infected. I do feel a need to move more regularly, but it's tough when you have others with you with whom you need to move with, but I'm glad we live in a neighborhood that allows for that type of activity. Also, I need to work in the garden more. The weeds have already arr...