There's only a floor in the part closest to the main house, the other part is supposed to be a garage and it has a dirt floor.
When I moved in, I had been the first to inhabit the property in over a year (according to the real estate agent). The yard was completely overgrown with blackberries and all sorts of other weeds, as well as mountains and mountains of pine cone. I got a guy to come out and mow the yard, but he said picking up the pine cones would be an extra $135, so I thought "heck", I'll go pick them up myself. Holy Cow . . .
For some reason I did not decide to wear gloves, and completely tore up my hand. I also came across about a million spiders ants and other critters that could have done a number on me as well. I used a little bucket and filled it with about 50 cones and brought it out to a pile at the front of the house. I probably made about 200 trips over 12 hours. Luckily the cones were bunched up around the base of the trees so it made it slightly easier. The strange thing though was that at time I came across pre-piled heaps near the base of the trees as though someone already collected the cones and just left them in these heaps? This made it more difficult for me because I didn't have a shovel, and the subsequent pine needles that fell ended up stitching it all into a tangled mess!
Now I have a giant heap of pine cones to mark the entrance of my house. I plan to put them through a wood chip and bag them. If anyone knows any good uses for ground pine cone please let me know. Right now I plan to use it as a anti-fungus agent in mulching the garden I plan to start soon.
After I picked up the pine cones, the guy did the yard for $ 75 and I started to move on to other more pertinent issues.
The well for the house water had gone sour from neglect, as far as I understand, sulfur reducing bacteria migrated into the well and began emitting H2S into the water. I talked to a plumber guy that said dumping clorox down the well for a few hours does the trick to kill the bacteria. Once the well is disinfected, so long as the house is occupied continuously the well should be OK (so he says). I guess the bacteria wouldn't have a chance to migrate in and set up colonies if there's always a flow through the well. Some details about well disinfections can be found all over the web, like here http://www.wellowner.org/
As this guy and I discussed, we realized that the wellhead was burried. Furthermore, the check valve that protects the pump was also burried ! This meant that somehow that pump line had to be dug up all the way to the wellhead in order to sanitize the well. This past weekend I got out a shovel and started digging.
Well, now with my new shovel and gloves (I ended up getting some nasty blister anyways, go figure), 4 hours and several roots later, I had my hole dug. The guy should be out sometime this week.
Another adventure I worked on was these mirrors that were stuck together. The back of them had some kind of glue which is supposed to be used to stick them to walls. Someone put all 5 of them together and forgot that the adhesive would forge them permanentely together if left in the heat (the house gets to ~ 40 C during the day). The mass of them was completely worthless, but separate they could be useful, since I don't have any mirrors in the house. I tried plying them but that only resulted in breaking the first one. I had to get smarter so I picked up some adhesive remover from Home Depot. I wedged a serreted fishing knife in between them with this stuff all over the place and that did the trick, although i did get myself on the right thumb with the knife = ( I dropped one, and so I am now 3 mirrors richer than before, a total value of probably $ 30 . . .
Other things I did were related to gardening. I have two blueberry bushes which produce berries like cracy, 3 cups worth in one picking. I'll see how many I can get next weekend to get a feel for the berry producing rate ;) Later I would like to grow more blueberry plants around the house, potentially as boundary markers on the south side of the property. Once again my hand takes a beating because after crushing these blueberries (oh such a wonderful smell to crush blueberries!), I discovered that they have some serious staining power. My hands are now black and blue from the berries. In addition to the blueberry plant, I bought a roma tomatoe plant and a basil plant, and transferred the basil plant to a pot. They are both outside and I try to keep them watered. I read somewhere that coffee grinds make good compost, and of course there were plenty of pine needles for the mulch!
At some point digging out the new garden will be quite a lot of work, but I wouldn't want to have fruits and veggies growing, only to have them picked up by rabbits, deer, and other wild animals. Right now the property is wide open, so I'm gonna need to fence in the yard. I went to Home Depot and picked up one of those pole diggers with this in mind. Little did I know I would need it for something else as well. At some point it was recommended to me that I should move my mailbox closer to the house for security reasons. So, I dug up a hole and my mailbox is now right next to the basil and tomatoes instead of over with the wildberries on the neighbors field.
Out here, I have a constant battle with the bugs. They want in, I want them out. I'm really don't mind if they are in the yard, just not in the house. My first battle started with buying the little traps. It appears to backfire, since at first they swarm the thing thinking it's ice cream or something. After about 12 hours though, they're all gone. Supposedly it works because they end up distributing the poison to the queen and all of their sisters. These traps were only a temporary fix though, as I found out after the first hard rain. A little investigation revealed that the house is really not sealed up at all. The door frames have holes big enough for me to weasle into (not really but, you get the idea). In the background of this photo you can also see the caulking I did around the doors. Before applying the caulk I sprayed some nasty bug spray around the windows and doors. Later I'll probably do some more work on this, including replacing one door altogether.
One way in which my battle with the ants took a strange twist was when I noticed that there was a light bulb that didn't work. For some reason I didn't catch this when I bought the house. After the inspection, the previous owner was kind enough to repair any electrical work we mentioned, but I failed to notice this one. Since earlier I had repaired my coffee grinder motor by bypassing the thermal fuse (need to order a replacement), I was feeling very confident I should be able to fix this small electrical problem.
So I started by testing to see if there was anything wrong with the light fixture itself, and just using my eyeballs everything looked ok and no need to test the wires if I didn't have to. I heard from a guy who did a lot of electrical work in his day that when your working with live circuits to be sure to only use one hand at a time. In the event you do get shocked, you don't want the current to go from one hand to the other (one hand has positive, the other negative), because it is very likely it would pass through your heart. I had this happen to me when I was young, and at 110 V it did indeed do something funny to my heartbeat rhythm for a few seconds afterwards (bump-bum-bum- . . . bumpbumpbumpbump - bump), luckily it went away after about a minute and I was fine, but I didn't want to repeat it, so I used one hand this time. I did get shocked once, and it was really not that bad for only one hand, but again, another hit to my hands in these home improvements. I really should start wearing gloves more often. . .
Eventually after checking the switch box for a while I realized where the problem was - it was the actual switch itself that had gone bad. The guy that's coming to put in my HVAC said he would bring by another one if he remembered. They're not that expensive.
I couldn't let it go though, I really wanted to know what went wrong in the switch itself. So I tried to take it a part carefully, to no avail because they aren't meant to be taken apart once they're made. . .
So I busted it open, and the reason for the fail was immediately obvious . . . but a very peculiar result . . .
I had heard before that ants have an affinity to electrical equipment, and if left unchecked can ruin things like radios, TVs, even computers! Having studied RIFA in a biology class at Georgia Tech, I felt like I knew enough about these peculiar arch enemies, probably more than I wanted, but I still found the whole electrical thing puzzling. I suppose if they just like being in an electromagnetic field I suppose that's fine, but what I saw here is clearly something that defies logic and the basic tennants of evolution.
These guys were not just attracted to the electromagnetic field, they actually bridged the connection of the switch and zapped themselves clear to smithyrenes!
Anytime an ant dies like that, it releases a warning signal for more ants to come, so they all pile up at the switch connection, one zap after another until finally the switch fails from the mound of kamikaze ant corpses. You can even see their guts splattered all over the switch. This is quite possibly the strangest thing I have ever heard of. I try really hard to believe that the ants are not actually at war with me, but the kamikaze tactics of taking out my utilities definately had war-like overtones. There is no way that this suicidal tendency is just mother natures way of getting back at the evils of industrialization.
I found this stub on the web from a publication from Texas A&M that confirms that this has been observed by many people and well documented
Worker ants of all ant species have an affinity
for oscillating magnetic fields (60 cycles per
second). Once ants in a switching mechanism
bridge the gap between an open switch, they are
shocked and electrocuted. The shocked ants
release communication chemicals (pheromones)
or other signals that attract other worker ants. The
result is that switching units can become tightly
packed with the bodies of dead, electrocuted
worker ants, causing a failure of the mechanism.
Managing Red Imported Fire Ants in
Electrical Equipment and Utility Housings
Bastiaan M. Drees, Fire Ant Project Director
Department of Entomology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
http://fireant.tamu.edu/materials/factsheets_pubs/pdf/fapfs011_2002rev.pdf
The only clue I have as to why these loyal warriors would be attracted to the electromagnetic field in the first place comes from a study I found from The University of Exeter in the UK.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/50044
Apparently the reason these guys are so good at being able to have these really long and complicated search missions but never lose touch with HQ is because they have evolved several ways of finding their way around, one of which is by using the Earth's electromagnetic field. These guys have built in compasses!
I always thought respectfully of ants as being almost equal to humans, kind of like the way that people do with chimps and dolphins. They individually lack any cognitive abilites of their own (or at least, we have not been able to demonstrate that they do), but as an organized society they bear a striking resemblance to our own. They build things, tear things down, manage their own workforce, and will wage war on occasion.
As I continue to work at my house and battle to keep these guys out, I grin at the resemblance I bear to them in my habbits, and how remarkably more efficient they usually are at it than me. Although in this case we both got shocked by the electrical switch. I suppose they should have only used one hand~!
No comments:
Post a Comment