Nature and Evil

Jim has headed off to the local hardware store to obtain two 2 inch flapper valves for the toilets.  One has failed, and is allowing a small leak, the other one is also old, so we're replacing them both.  I am so not looking forward to this.  Even thought we successfully replaced the guts of two toilets in Spokane, I just hate doing stuff like this.  We will watch you tubes and get 'er done tomorrow.

Remember the in-ground trash containers we have? If you don't, that post is here.  We don't use ours, we have too much trash to put it one.  Anyway, the recent torrential rain washed gravel under the lid, the lid opened slightly, and three mice got in.  They're all dead, they were all partially decomposed.  Ewwwwww.  Nitrile gloves were worn, as well as KN95 respirators.  Mice carry Hanta virus, which has no treatment other than death.  It was awful.  There are no photos, you're welcome.  The lid is now back down with a large rock on it.  Too much nature!

Who knows about horn worms?  I've read about them because they eat bloggers' tomato plants.  We have them in Tucson.  Who knew?  They live in trees, and when it starts to get cold they burrow in the dirt and spend the winter.  I can not imagine these soft sided critters burrowing in to the dirt here.  That would be the dirt that requires a jack hammer for a large hole.  We saw this guy first.  I think he's sick, he wasn't moving much.

We scooped him up on a trowel and put him in a planting bed in the back that has some dirt in it.  Hopefully he burrowed, I'm inclined to think something ate him.  Later we saw a healthy horn worm heading down the driveway, I wonder where he ended up.

We rode twice this week.  The weather has been stellar since the rain.

Mrs. Wiles resigned her position as 47's Chief of Staff yesterday.  Today 47 announced her replacement would be the ever odious, evil spawn of Satan, Stephen Miller.  This is not good.  Miller is the architect of ICE raids capturing US citizens, green card holders, and law abiding people and deporting them to countries that they have no knowledge of.  He's heinous.

The vote counting continues, Democrats are still picking up seats, especially in the house.  It would be wonderful if both houses reached the number required to over turn vetoes.  That would be something to see.

That's it!  That's all I've got for now.

 

 

The House and Senate Have Turned Blue

 Are we happy today?  I certainly am.

The whole world looks a little brighter.  I have "ding dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch, the wicked witch" stuck in my head.

Rain - NOW With Flood Video

 A large storm has come in from the Pacific, carrying a lot of water.  Yesterday it rained, and then cleared up a little.  Today it's raining a lot

Our dry stream is running.

Water running down the street, eddying a little.

Backyard, more dry stream.  Look carefully, you might be able to see it raining sideways.

There is a lot of water to be dropped.  Eventually, that red streak made it on top of Tucson.

Yesterday we had rich people saying stupid things out loud.  
BREAKING: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says having RAM in personal computers is an inefficient use of the world’s limited DRAM supply, arguing it would be better allocated to data centers, per Tom’s Hardware

Think about that, he wants the population of the United States to have their data on data center servers.  Who is going to provide all that network?  This is the dumbest thing Sam has said to date. 

And then Haley Stevens, who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in the MI Senate Democratic primary said this: I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.  She just killed her future in the party.

Other than this, I have nothing interesting or important to say.


Here is a video of how flooding starts in the desert.
 

Work and a Ride

We're back, we're still exhausted.  After the unpacking, there is the pulling of weeds.  It was a very wet summer, and everything has grown.  We spent today outside picking up mesquite leaves and killing weeds.

I discovered termite tubes up on the hill behind the house.  Come to find out, they're not wood eaters.  They swarm, land somewhere, drop their wings and then settle in to reproduce.  The internet says it's not necessary to kill them, but I am still thinking about that.  This is a tube.  It's center photo, and looks sort of like a dog turd.  They build the tubes so they can forage without dehydrating in the sun and heat.

The oleanders have filled in.  Last year they didn't have bottom leaves due to the shade from two enormous sage plants.  This year they grew a lot; lots of rain. 

Last winter, the fruit trees did not produce anything.  I don't know much about citrus, actually I don't know anything.  However, it appears there will be fruit this year.

Yesterday we rode the bikes.  Even though we'd missed a week, 4 days of which were sitting in a car, we weren't as de-conditioned as I was expecting.  You've seen this photo before.  Left of the photo is a house.  There is a trail that runs behind their house.  Evidently, they're hoping to discourage people from walking on the trail by piling debris at its starting point.  I view this as antisocial behavior.

We've made the obligatory trip to Costco.  It was very disappointing.  They don't carry the Kirkland ravioli, Aidell's chicken sausage, Nature's Bakery fig bars, or Nature Valley granola bars.  I was able to source the last two online, but Aidell's will come from Safeway at an exorbitant price.  This Costco also doesn't have the olive oil I buy in Spokane.  I'm surprised the stores are so different.  Next year, we may be traveling with olive oil.  

47 continues to deteriorate, just not fast enough.  He's started making weird sounds, that are not words, when he's speaking.  The twitter neurologists (and there are some) are saying it's damage in the part of the brain that controls speech.  The DOJ continues to try to prevent democrats from voting and winning.  It's going to be interesting to see how far they're willing to take this.  In Alaska, 47 is taking the position that if Mary Peltola wins, the election was stolen, and the only true result must be the republican won.  Sore loser much?

In news of the delightful, it does not appear that Vanky and Jared Kushner will not be able to buy the protected island off the shores of Albania.  The citizens have been protesting in large numbers, threatening to overturn the government if development is allowed to proceed.  We should do that here.

I mentioned that Jim's laptop had a catastrophic hinge failure on the trip down to Tucson.  While at Costco, we saw an Acer on sale.  It has one terabyte of storage. (!) I am really tempted to go buy one as back up for when my current Lenovo self destructs.  Their hinge/screen frame design is just criminally bad.  We've had two failures so far.  How long can a PC sit around and not be used?  Anyway, we UPSed the pc corpse to the Spokane computer guy, he is very confident he'll be able to retrieve the documents and downloads files.  Fortunately Jim does not have photos or music on his laptop.

Jim captured a nice sunset the other night.

 

In news of the very sad, Patrick Stewart has died.  He was a stage actor famous for his Shakespeare roles, then he was Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek, and was in X-Men.  He was so good, with that deep plummy British accent.  
A family statement shared via his official social media and Instagram accounts confirmed he passed away following a brief battle with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia.  It's interesting to me that the Alzheimer's was brief, it took 10 years to kill my brother.  Brief is better.

Was he not a lovely man?

So, that's what we've been doing as of late. 

Bullhead City to Tucson

We're back.  I'm too tired to type.  Maybe tomorrow.  Anyway, all is well. 

Ok, this is funny.  When we arrived, we each had a new pair of indoor flip flops on the shoe rack (for wearing indoors only) that are identical to our current pair that we have in Spokane.  Neither of us has any memory of ordering them.  This is just weird.  

Also, neither one of us could remember how to turn the ice maker on.  This is how.

Turn switch in the freezer to on.  

Old people, we're fun to watch.

Spanish Fork to Bullhead City, AZ

Today was a very long drive.  It's not that much longer than yesterday, but it felt like forever.  

It was cold last night, so the air in the tires was showing less air pressure than there actually was.  It took a long time for the idiot light to go out.  It went out when we were in St. George.  Speaking of St. George, never go there.  If you do go there, do not go to the Maverick gas station that's right off the end of the off ramp.  It was packed.  We ended up leaving and going down the street a little to a Shell that wasn't busy.  St. George itself is ruined.  It used to be a charming little town, now they've planted houses everywhere, traffic is horrible, and we left in a hurry, never to return again.   That was our key learning for today. 

It was fairly windy today.  This was taken at a Flying J.  Jim wanted to put air in the tires.  Did you know that stations who still have air are charging for it?  The air station at Flying J was broken, so no air for us.  

Ultimately it did not matter, the tires warmed up, and the TPMS was happy.

The Virgin Rivet Gorge is on this route.  It was, as always, breath taking.  I love going through there.

We're staying at the Holiday Inn Express and Suites.  I think we may be looking for something else.  They're cost cutting by taking in room coffee makers away, and I think they've decreased the number of luggage carts.  When you travel with as much crap as we do, having a luggage cart is critical.  The guy at the front desk said that people were keeping them in their rooms.  I doubt it.  Also annoying is that when we reserved we asked for a 4th floor room away from the elevator.  We're on the 3rd floor close to the elevator.  I hate that because people tend to get off the elevator, congregate, and chat.  There used to be a coffee table in this room class, which is now gone.  So, my user experience is not great this trip.

Tomorrow we will be in Tucson, and I am heartily happy about that.