Spider Shower

This morning when I checked out the comics, I got an unexpected laugh.

I admit this is stupid, but for some reason I find it hilarious.

On one hand, it reminds me of my shower. I've had spiders up near the ceiling that I sometimes see when I'm taking a shower. I like spiders, so it's not a big deal, but now I associate spiders with the shower. Just not in a horrifying way like this cartoon.

Are the spiders stunned, asleep, or dead? It seems to me that they'd be webbed out and suspended, not actually flowing out and falling. Unless they were demon spiders intent on inflicting maximum psychological damage.

The other thing I think about is plumbing design. That was my job when I first got out of the military for a few years. I see the delivery of spiders through a shower head as a real plumbing challenge. Someone must have really wanted to prank that soapy shower dude to come up with that kind of plumbing genius.

The Strangest Echo of Childhood

When cleaning out the basement, we came across an old love seat style couch. This old couch smelled really bad. I can't really describe it, "musty" does not do it justice. Musty is usually a mildly offensive smell, like a little of the oxygen is missing and something bad has replaced it.

This was much worse than that. It wasn't like something had died, but it was like the couch had to die.

The problem is that Andrea loves the little love seat. So we planned to re-upholster it "some day".

In the meantime, we were cleaning out the basement, to take the aged smell out, and the couch needed some work. I took it outside and started stripping the old cloth off. There was as strange stuffing that looks like the bird's nest material you see in the bottom of hanging plant baskets and a batting that looked like a cross between a rat's nest and fiberglass insulation.

As I was stripping this material off, I found these deep pockets on the sides where things that come out of your pockets can really find a good hiding place.

Out of this hiding place came a dog-chewed block from my childhood, and a 1967 stamp and 1966 dime, as well as three of the dextroamphetimine pills I used to take for hyperactivity when I was a kid. One was in good enough condition to pull the code off and figure out what they were. I'd wondered that for years.

Sister Golden Cat Delight

The picture does not do justice to this scene.

At the right time in the fall, the sweet gums turn bright yellow. When the sun shines through them just right, the room lights up in a golden glow.

Speedy likes to sit on a fleece pad and look out the window in the bright light.

Election Day

This picture was taken with one hand, while I voted for President with the other.

Golden Arches

There usually comes a time in the fall where the sweet gum trees make a golden yellow canopy over our driveway.

It is usually way too short.

Foggy Fall Foliage

We had thick fog last weekend. It took until mid day before it finally lifted.

A Flash of Fall

Here is a picture I took while driving, trying to document the fall colors.

This driveway has a long line of red oaks on either side of it, but with digital cameras, you don't always get what you want. I tried to time it so the camera would take the picture straight down the driveway, but it fired off early.

I don't understand how the fountain grass is in focus, but the background is a blur. The blur is not focal, it's from motion. It must be a trick of panning the camera perfectly through the motion so the center stays in frame while the outside moves in or out of center.

I like the result.

Environmental Emissions

When the trash truck came up to our office's dumpster last week, it started to leak some kind of fluid while it was stopped in our parking lot.

This stuff was jet black and nasty looking. Nick opened his window right as it started and yelled at them to make it stop. The two guys working the trash truck didn't seem overly concerned or excited. "It's whatever is in your trash" was the response to pointing it out. While this was not true, they hadn't even begun dumping when the fluid started shooting out.

The fluid that came out was mostly oil, along with some really nasty residue. I looked inside of our dumpster, which did not have anything like this in it. The dumpster is new and handles mostly paper, so it's not nasty at all.

The trash company says they are going to come out and power wash the oil off the parking lot, but they haven't done it yet. This just puts the problem into the grass, so I'm not sure if it solves the problem, or just pushes it into the weeds.

Mold & Mildew Nightmare

We knew we had problems in the basement.

Andrea could smell it, even more so once she got pregnant, that dank disturbing basement scent.

We had two forms of mold and some mildew, as confirmed by a professional nastiness investigator, who also tried to scare the hell out of us about radon (his score there was 1&1).

The basement was covered with paneling and stucco almost 30 years ago, when my father had dreams of finishing the basement. The redecoration did not get completed, and the walls sat for years, condensing moisture. The perfect environment for growing mold.

So we stripped all the panelling off the walls and got rid of it. The smell is gone.

Slug Migrates for Winter

For some reason, this reminds me of a Far Side Cartoon. Something about "Look Mommy, the slugs are going south for the winter!"

Slugs are in the same family as snails, they seem to have evolved past snails, because some have internal or vestigial shells (around the part on their back called a mantle). They are made up mostly of water and need to secrete mucus in order to hold in their water and move over the terrain without injury. Sometimes they go over the windows on our sliding glass doors and leave little trails.

They have little feelers that look like antennae on their heads. These are called tentacles, and the upper pair are optical, while the lower pair is for smell/taste.

Slugs are hermaphrodites, meaning they are both male and female. They mate by curling in a ball around each other and lay eggs in the ground. Sometimes they crawl underground to get through the winter, but often they die in the winter. They also have problems in the heat of summer, if it's too dry and they have to find a dark, cool, moist place to seek refuge to get through the dry spell.

I was once with a friend when her cat walked in, working its jaw like a little franken-cat. His muzzle was covered with what we thought at first was foam (from drooling), but we soon discovered was a rubbery substance. The cat allowed me to peel the material out of his mouth, and somewhat off his face. However, it was like rubber cement, and I could not get it all out of the fur around his mouth. When the biggest plug came out of his mouth (I think it went into his throat and he was close to choking on it), the cat was back to normal and ran off to do more cat mischief.

I described the scene later to my brother, who is a veterinarian and he believes that the cat tried to eat a slug. The slug probably secreted some protective mucus when the cat started biting on it, and the mucus quickly congealed and became stuck on the cat's snout and in his mouth.

That's a hell of a defense mechanism.