Posts by Karin

Gnat Hatch 2010

Posted by admin on Apr 29, 2010 in My thoughts, Nature | 0 comments

E-GADS, the gnats have hatched!

Gnats are a staple of the lakefront food chain, and a prerequisite to breathing and owning a vehicle in this area. They are one of the very first insects of spring, withstanding the temperamental spells of the early season. They are one of the last insects remaining in fall, so that once they disappear, you know that winter is only a snowflake away.

Gnats aren’t a surprise. Gnats are a necessary evil. Gnats are why a person never leaves the house without windshield fluid in the car.

They are also why the earliest warblers, flycatchers, phoebes, and swallows are able to journey northward in April, and find something to eat to sustain their energetic, determined little bodies.

Happily, gnats don’t bite, so the most they’ll do is hitch a ride on your shoulder or car window, until you brush them off, or the gales of catapulting down the road at highway speeds are just too much, and they have no choice but to let go and discover where you have taken them. :)

This year though, is different. This year, we woke up one day to find dense clouds of these things hanging in the air, frankly like I have never seen them in my entire life, and I’m old enough to have teenagers.

You mean they’re not all Grackles??

Posted by admin on Apr 18, 2010 in Nature | 0 comments

It’s been a warm and windy spring so far. It was almost 80° on Wednesday (or so I was told; I slept through it). It’s been in the 50′s for the screaming majority of at least a month now. The honeysuckles have nearly exploded with leaves (my pics of the same bushes show they weren’t even at that point by May 1, last year) and the ospreys were back on the local nests almost 3 weeks earlier than last year.

And I found this year’s first blooming Forget-Me-Not already at Peninsula State Park, which is a solid 4 weeks early. (Yay!)

Despite all this, I have assumed that the modest flocks of blackbirds I’ve been seeing rushing around across fields & fencerows have just been Grackles. They first arrived about a month ago, and since I didn’t see anything unusual about the birds in these small flocks, and they sounded like Grackles, I just assumed they were Grackles.

Ha ha.

“Technical Issue” (Overloaded Tower?)

Posted by admin on Apr 16, 2010 in Geek & Tech | 0 comments

Turns out my cellular provider is aware of the molasses-like slow-downs on my tower. Interestingly, these slow-downs happen only during peak usage times — 4:15-6:00 PM, and 8:30-10:30 PM, which the technician concurred matches their reports from other customers.

The problem is due to a “technical issue” with my tower (he was extremely careful not to say anything like “the tower is overloaded” or “we failed to plan on having so many customers on that tower, so are woefully unprepared to handle the massive demand for data”) but let’s all be honest here… what other problem would happen at only peak usage times, than an overuse of available resources? Whether the throughput is maxed out, or there is a software issue having to do with allocation, whatever……. traffic is traffic, baby. Traffic sucks up resources. :)

Ahhhhh, the Information Superhighway……. I love it!!!  (Two words: JOB SECURITY)

So if you’re on the Gills Rock tower and experiencing mysterious and sudden slow-downs while surfing the internet, it’s not you or your PC. It’s Cellcom. And they can’t do anything about it.

Estimated repair time: 4-6 weeks. Yay, us!

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Snow Day in Cellville?

Posted by admin on Apr 8, 2010 in Geek & Tech | 0 comments

Apparently the snow is so heavy that this is the latency to the cell tower… less than 1500 ft. from my house.

12 36.63-135-156.netnet.net (63.135.156.36) 35.627 ms 36.198 ms 35.719 ms

13 36.63-135-156.netnet.net (63.135.156.36) 2521.303 ms 3795.809 ms 2900.099 ms

Nice.

You’ll never eat alone…

Posted by admin on Apr 8, 2010 in Ailments | 0 comments

Or is it “you’ll never be alone”?? In this case, it doesn’t matter. Both are true.

Bailey is eating 100% raw food now. Our last foray into canned food was disastrous (for her and the carpeting), and I have no intention of putting it anywhere near her again. She now gets raw duck, pork and/or beef 4x/day. Yes, four. times. every. day. I would feel a bit overbooked by this, except that she has IBD, and a common symptom of IBD is malabsorption. The poor thing is eating nearly as much as my 19# wonderboy and yet she is losing weight.

Incidentally, 19# wonderboy and his 13# wondersister are also 100% raw fed. Somewhere along the way, monkeys saw and now monkeys do. They’re a couple months ahead of schedule — we still have four 16# bags of kibble in the garage — but there are 3 other cats in the house who are still adamantly refusing raw. They are Professional Kibbleheads, capital P and capital K! :)

The 4x/day is fine with me. I suck it up when they awaken me in the middle of the night because they’re DYING. That’s alright. She’s losing weight, she can use every speck of food she can get.

What gets me is that I cannot be gone during a mealtime, because if I have someone else (Mom) give her her food, she hides under the bed. And let’s say, even if she didn’t hide under the bed, she now has this annoying habit where she won’t eat alone. She will walk away from her food dish and sit by the door, waiting for me to come back. Only once I am present, and preferably right next to her, only then will she eat.