Bruce Letters

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Slime mold and Battle Bugs

Guess ‘who’ moved into the neighborhood:

A pair of barn owls had a pair babies this spring, so we now see one of them fairly often:

They normally sing the fun and familiar ‘who cooks for you’ song, but at night they occasionally make a really scary jungle monkey sound. At least we hope that is them making those sounds.

The hope is they are not big enough to carry of little doggies. Just in case, we have instructed the fat Buddha to act as doggy’s bodyguard:

If that doesn’t work, we can use this. Believe it or not, this is a fully functional flare gun:

This is where you should fire it … outside. It sends a bright flare 100 feet into the sky:

This is where you should NOT fire it:

It is surprisingly easy to fire :)

Speaking of fire, my subwoofer decided it wanted to try smoking by flaming out a transistor, to the right of that yellow transformer:

I spent a few hours replacing it:

Only to discover the transistor was not the problem. But now I know how to turn a 3 legged transistor into a 2 legged one:

Having concluded that a 2 legged transistor is not too useful, I got a new subwoofer. While I was at it, I now had an excuse to upgrade our TV audio into a 3rd dimension. Those 2 speakers 15' up are to play a new audio format called Dolby Atmos:

In other projects, we gave doggy got a summer hair cut:

This him trying to look noble while someone fiddles with his butt hair:

I found a 6" yellow puddle on one of our new trails. Looked like one of the owls ate a fleet of canaries and pooped them out, paintball style. But the next day it collected itself into a 1" marshmallow like blob:

Pretty sure it was slime mold, something that has been around about 1 billion years, predating plants and animals.

That is over 3 times older than these guys ancestors:

Time for Battle Bugs! Who will win?

The 1/16" little black ‘sugar’ ant wins!

Goes to show you size is not always the most important factor. Being not dead helps.

My close relationship with the insects have attracted this guy’s attention:

He is keeping a close eye on me:

Closing out with a link to my latest home automation project:

MisterHouse Home Automation
Any guesses as to why we have this mini Wall-e in our kitchen? Or why we are providing the carpenter bees in our tree…misterhouse.blogspot.com

Bruce

Sunday, May 15, 2016

It rained Tulips!

For a few weeks last month, these tulip flowers rained down on everthing in our backyard, including on this guy:

Turns out we have a bunch of tulip trees! They only flower at the top of the tree, and only when the tree is mature and tall, so you never see them until they rain.

Care to guess where this stuff came from?

Those leather work gloves were new last month (I went through 4 pairs!). Those screws came out of this part of the deck:

And then it magically changed to this:

I’ve spent much of the month doing more trail work. I’m up to 500' of trail and 64 steps … those steps are the hardest part. Rocks are heavy.

For the last few weeks I have been taking more showers than usual for some reason. Here I was so dirty, our camera wasn’t sure it wanted to take my picture:

Here is another before/after shot of another section:

In between moving rocks, I moved a piano and couch. They were easier than rocks. Our living room before and after:

Last project was to snaked 150' of garden hose up the creek to gather some free water presure to make a fountain using a garden nozzle, then added yet more landscape lighting to light it up at night: