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...