Venus Fly Traps

Venus Fly Traps...  They spent a grand Summer out on the deck.  Caught all kinds of small bugs.  And I helped.  Many of those large ants that decided my kitchen compost bin collection bucket was a great buffet came to sad ends.  

I loved watched the traps close on them.  But to be fair, they caught most insects on their own.  I just added a small amount for the pleasure of seeing the traps close.

It's not like insects have much self-awareness.  I once watched a grasshopper caught by a praying mantis and it just kept eating the leaf it had until the mantis finally got to the head.  It didn't seem to know it was being eaten.  So I don't worry about the insects the VFTs catch or are fed.  

And, yeah, I have a certain lethal admiration for plants that can catch and eat insects, since it is usually the other way around.

But it is getting too cold for them outside for the year.  So I brought them into the garage to adjust for the Winter.  By keeping them dark and cold for a few months, they live longer.  Next year, they will grow stronger and send up more traps.

Love them!

Why The Washington Nationals Won The World Series

I caused it.  Yes really...  

Yoy know how some people think that if they root for the home team and wear all the team stuff, it helps the team win?  Even if you just watch the team on TV?

I'm the opposite.  If I wear team stuff, they lose.  If I watch the game, they lose.  If they are winning 4-1 went I'm not watching, they get to losing 5-4 if I watch.  The same thing happens with mens or womens Univ of MD basketball.  If I watch, they lose.  If I come back, they are winning.  If I keep watching, they get behind again.

I know that is all rubbish logically, but the pattern persists.

At the beginning of the last year season, I bought a team hat.

The Nationals went to 19-31.  I stopped wearing it, and they won the World Series.  Is that evidence or what?  OK, it isn't, but the hat sat off my head all after and they won...

And as the announcer says "and another curly W is in the books"!

I will continue to not wear the hat next year...

3 Shots

I never used to worry about getting sick.  I haven't had the flu or even the common cold since I was a teenager.  But I started getting a flu shot when Dad was here because, just because I didn't get sick,  I could carry it.

Now I'm at an age when several things might get past my natural defenses.  So 3 weeks ago, I got the flu shot, a newer shingles shot, and a pneumococcal shot.  All on the same day.

I normally have no reaction to shots, but the 3 combined left my shoulders stiff for several days.  I felt like a baseball pitcher who threw too many pitches.  That's gone now, but OUCH!

I need a 2nd shingles shot in 2 months and another pneumococcal shot next year.  Which is fine.

But I think I won't accept 3 shots in one day again, LOL!

Aquarium

I've had aquariums since I was 20.  My first was built of scrap plastic I found at college.  I kept a few guppies in there.  Then, one day, I visited a department store with a fish area and was offended by all the dead fish in the tanks.  The department manager was drunk.  He asked if I wanted a job.

I should have said "no".  It messed up my college work.  But I was SO broke I accepted.  I cleaned the tanks of dead fish for a few days, started changing the water, read up on fish a bit, and made other improvements.

The company fired the manager and the Assistant Manager was promoted.  She saw what I was doing and asked me to do more.  I set up display tanks, breeding tanks, and even a self-maintaining guppy tank in a 2 gallon "brandy snifter" (I stole it from elsewhere in the store).

I set up Betta breeding tanks, kept the regular tanks perfectly clean.  And flunked out of college (I went back and aced all the classes later).  I had a job and focussed on that.  Bad decision but it made sense at the time.  I was starving and sharing an bad apartment with 5 other guys at the time.

Sadly, the department store closed.  The fish company offerred me a job as manager of their top store location, but I didn't want to move to New Jersey.  I left .

But I've always had an aquarium or two.  50 years of fish that come and go in their short lifespans.  I have sometimes become too casual about them.  I'm down to a couple corydorus, a red-tail shark, an algae-eater, 1 tiger barb and a dwarf gourami.

But I have a glorious amount of live anachris plants so the water is good.  Time to replenish the tank.

I want high fin red minor tetras, cherry barbs, and swordtails.

So I went to Petsmart 2 days ago.  They had fish on sale.  I wait for sales; I'm sensibly cheap.  If waiting a few weeks gets me something I want for less, why not wait.  The freshwater fish only live a few years at best anyway.

I got 5 highfin red minor tetras and 2 painted platys.  They were sold out on the swordtails.  And apparently no one sells cherry barbs anymore.  Which seems odd because even *I* have bred them (decades ago), but who knows the economics of breeding small fish for sale...





I just like to see something moving around in the aquarium.  And they give me something easy to be responsible for...

If you are worried that my hobby is depleting the natural population, my understanding is that these small community fish are bred and raised commercially en masse.  I would stop buying them otherwise.  Just saying...

Veterans Day

Missing Pictures

I posted about some things I've done recently.  But I didn't add pictures the way I usually do.  I was lazy, I admit it.

But here they are...

The broom:

The painted blue planter pots:

I don't recall where I bought them, but they were orange.  The blue is much nicer.  I just hope it lasts.

The old rusted smoker:

It was mostly rusting after many years (even though I mostly kept it covered).  In fact, it is so old, the manufacturer doesn't even sell a cover that fits right.  I will guess 20 years.  It still works.  Partly because I bought 2 specifically shaped metal bases for the charcoal burner offset.  Those are starting to get burnt through and becoming brittle.  Which is why I found a metal roasting pan to set above them and below the charcoal grate.

Cleaning the charcoal burner offset was easy.  Cleaning the cooking area was not.  I had to scrape accumulated meat fat and burnt ashes all inside it.  I have a metal cutting board scooper than worked great for that.  And I have to say that a cleaning product called Kaboom



is a fantastic cleaner.

But back to the smoker...

It looks great, is completely cleaned, and I found a generic cover that fits OK.  I'm leaving the wood platform for Ayla to claw on.  She loves it more than I need it to look perfect.

The Hibachi:

I referred to a "delmonico" to be cooked on the refurbished cast iron Lodge hibachi.  Those those for whom the term is unfamiliar, it is basically a ribeye cut.

"A rib steak is a beef steak sliced from the rib primal of a beef animal, with rib bone attached. In the United States, the term rib eye steak or Spencer steak is used for a rib steak with the bone removed; however in some areas, and outside the U.S., the terms are often used interchangeably. The rib eye or "ribeye" was originally, as the name implies, the center best portion of the rib steak, without the bone.
In Australia and New Zealand, "ribeye" is used when this cut is served with the bone in. With the bone removed, it is called "Scotch fillet".
It is both flavorful and tender, coming from the lightly worked upper rib cage area. Its marbling of fat makes it very good for fast and hot cooking."  ~ Wikipedia

A "hibachi" (in the US) is generally a small charcoal container suited to a single steak or anything of similar size.  I used to have a nice small one but it vanished somewhere along the years.  My current one is larger than I wanted but things get bigger over the years.  My current one is a 2 steak size, but I can live with that.

I painted all of it but the top grate with the 1200F Rustoleum paint after wirebrushing the rust away as best I could.  The Rustoleum instructions said not to paint the cooking surface.  So I oiled it and baked it in the oven the way you would any new cast iron pan.  I mostly use cast iron pans for most of my cooking (and they all have wonderful black patinas inside and are nearly non-stick), so doing that was just a routine matter.  I had planned to use it yesterday, but it was so cold and windy (and the hibachi is open on top) that I decided to postpone the re-use.

Mailbox flag repair:

No picture, nothing to see.  It was a bit of wedging here, a pliers pull there, and some axle grease the rain won't wash away (really thick stuff).  But a "hard to move mailbox flag" became an "easy to move flag".

Hope the pictures helped make the past few posts make more sense.  Pictures are good.

Mailbox

I have the same mailbox I set up when I first moved here 33 years ago.  It had a thing on the top to put the street number in.  Sleek, cool...

Someone kept knocking the top off.  I would find it a few yards away and reinstall it.  Apparently, that really annoyed the vandal.  That person finally tossed it in the drainage easement once.  I found it there and reinstalled.

Finally, it was no longer "findable".  OK, I gave up.  I figured it was someone who would get older and lose interest.  After a few years, I made a fish shape to hold brass letters.  It remained.

But after enough years, the flag assembly began to stick.  I realized the mailperson couldn't lower it easily.  Well, I like my mailperson, so I went out to fix it.  I discovered it wasn't really a good design (it needed to be lifted slightly to lower it).

Nothing like a challenge...

I went at it with a screwdriver, pliers, and axle grease.  By the time I was done, it slid from up to down to up to down smooth as silk.

The next day, I stood by the mailbox as the mailperson came by.  I said "check out the flag".  She did and pronounced it "perfect".

So I also painted the flag a brighter red.  Might as well overdo it, LOL!

Yet Even More Stuff

When you get starting painting, everything looks like a paintable surface.  So I just had to paint the cast iron Lodge Hibachi.

I set it under the smoker a few years ago and it rusted from the humidity.  So I spent a day going over all the surfaces with a wire brush.  I brought the top grill inside and oiled it and set it in the oven to season it as you would any new cast iron pan.

The rest got painted nook and cranny with 1200F rustoleum paint.

I can't wait to cook a steak on it...  Well, OK, I can.  It's night now.  But I have a  DelMonico waiting to go in the evening!

Even More Stuff

Well, as long as I'm in painting mode, why not paint the rusting BBQ smoker?   I had a can of Rustoleum high temperature black.  So I opened it and went to stir it up.

Bad!  It was like tar.  I ruined a shirt and jeans from the splashes.  The stuff CANNOT be cleaned off

Off to the DIY store...

Back with new stuff (and shaken in their machine) I went about painting the smoker.  Its not like a good paint job inside the house, but will serve.

And since I was trying to improve the smoker (I had cleaned it thoroughly of all grease and ashes), I thought why keep doing that?  Why not put some pans under the cooking rack to catch the fats that could be removed and cleaned separately?

Ahh, my friends, the world is designed to not provide pans that fit.  Every pan I could find was just too narrow or long or deep.  Well, "almost".  You know those cheap roasting pans that come with the oven?  They fit perfectly.

OK. so then I needed new roasting pans.  Those pans that come with the oven?  They don't sell them anywhere I can find.

Darn, now I need to buy fancy ones for actual oven use...

More Stuff

Since I painted the broom, I decided to make some planting pots a color I liked better.  I had bought a pack of eight 12" wide pots that were orange in a basketweave look.  I wanted them in blue.  So I bought a spray paint in "Wildflower Blue" described as "for plastic".

Painting the pots was tricky.  I couldn't just hold them and spray.  I like blue, but not on my hands.

I finally set up a 4"x4" post wedged into a cinder block and set the pots upside down on the top.  With a latex glove on my left hand, I sprayed, turned, sprayed, turned and sprayed.  Set each one on a newspaper to dry.  Then sprayed the top of the insides.

It is impressive!  Orange is now blue.

And having matching planter pots is great.  I used 2 for repotting Dracena and 1 for a Poinsettia.  I'll be moving other plants to the remaining matching pots soon.  Well, I do like blue...

Lots Of Stuff

I didn't post here for a while because things got busy.  Part was the stress of the World Series I was sure we would lose (yes, I am a fan of little faith).  Well, optimists may be happier, but pessimists are right more often...

But during that time, I just kept doing small things.

Some may sound silly, but they were important to me.  For example, I painted a broom.  I bet few people have ever done that.  There was a reason...

I loved the bristles on this one broom I had, soft but effective at catching dust.  But the handle broke.  I tried to find a similar broom without success.  So I cut the broken part cleanly and found a PVC pipe that just fit inside it.  I used construction adheasive to join the 2 pieces together.  That failed (I think the adhesive needed air exposure). 

So I drilled holes and put screws in.  That failed too.  The handle stayed wobbly.  But one thing I am is persistent.  I discovered the broom head unscrewed from the handle.  So I brought the broom head to the locval DIY store to see if I could find a matched replacement handle.  None on the replacement handles fit the threaded broom head.

But wandering through the hardware section, I noticed extension poles for roller paint brushes.  They fit!  But the broom head was green and the handles were bare wood or red metal.  I bought the red one.  And spray-painted both the broom head and handle green.

I am insufferably pleased with myself...