6aug2025
Trying to be upbeat here (and since f2tE just helped my organize the textile studio (what I called the sewing room for years, but now it's beadstringing too, and that makes me very happy;) I thought I'd talk about a fancy new mousetrap I got, and why its failure to catch any mice made me so pleased.
The teal deer on this one is, if your parents’ snaptraps are no longer doing it for you, either the commercial rinnetrap ‘flip and slide’ 5 gallon lid mousetrap, or its homemade equivalent is the way to go.
Anyone who hunts around on youtube for very long about catching mice is gonna stumble across the ‘Mousetrap Monday’ guy, not to mention a lot of variations on homemade versions of mousetraps. After I had a mouse nearly run over my foot in the dining room on its way to that buffet of delights otherwise known as the kitchen, not to mention finding mouse turds on my counters —Ugh! I set out standard snap traps.
(I applaud all you folks willing to wild-trap your mice and drive them a mile away, it's my understanding that if you're dropping off a creature far enough away that it can't make its way back to you, that's roughly the equivalent of dropping me off in China, (or at least Europe) with no resources or knowledge whatsoever. If you've ever watched squirrels or birds drive their neighbors (let alone strangers) from their territories, then it's pretty clear to me that yes, the newcomer is just gonna get eaten by the next owl or possum to swing by. Snap traps, I figure, are less horrid than being stalked and crunched by a fox, and I know by observation their little corpses provide a delightful tidbit for all the critturs that visit my compost pile, because they're always gone by the following morning.
Problem was, at least one juvenile had been left behind, too light (or too clever) to trip the snap traps; so I made a spinning platform trap by threading an old mandrel through a piece of cardboard cut slightly smaller than the 5 gallon bucket opening on which it was rested. Typically you drill holes to thread the ‘axle’ of the platform, but I didn't want to weaken the rim of the bucket, so I just taped the mandrel in place. Balancing the cardboard platform was simply a matter of threading it thru various corrugations, testing it by resting it on the bucket rim; after several iterations, it balanced. (then I had to rebalance after baiting it.) You need to put in detents to get the thing to reset, and I recommend this fella's video if you'd like to make this trap.
The spinning platform caught one juvenile mouse, and the snaptraps, still set up, another. I wasn't seeing any fresh scat, but we didn't want to clean, put everything away, just to have it to do over again for missing a mouse or two—I'd actually given up on both traps by the time they caught these last two mice: usually I catch them the same day or day after (the parents) but it took three–five days for these others to get caught.
The homemade trap works well! But if you watch the commercial version in action it has some advantages, a) the mice can't explore the platform from the rim of the bucket, which is what they often like to do first; and b) the little cave over the platform also emboldens the mice. So, since we were in Menard's anyway, and they had the original Rinnetrap (not the Chinese knockoffs that don't work as well—you might as well make your own) for $20, I got it.
All told, it probably has a dollar's worth of plastic and cardboard packaging; but it's a well-designed dollar's worth of product and packaging, and besides $20 is nothing compared to the labor to clean all those drawers, and knowing the mice would get caught. After a week or more with no mice caught, I cleaned it up and reboxed it—the packaging will let you hang it on a hook in your garage if desired. (That said, the bright yellow colour and mouse head decoration are kinda ugly—I would've preferred a discreet all black or charcoal grey design—but let's face it, this is an American made product, and USians, for the most part, are deeply suspicious of elegantly designed products, especially inexpensive ones. They don't want to pay for handsome, even if it doesn't cost extra. Le sigh.)
So! As I did both, I can firmly say that, depending on your patience and cheapness, you can build the homemade version or buy this one. As the advertising says, it's pet safe (I could not have set snap traps if I were catsitting Cinder, but on the other hand, Cinder himself probably would've taken care of the problem; he loves hunting), catches multiple mice (unlike the toilet roll versions), is super easy to set up, and depending on whether you put water or sunflower seeds in the bottom of the bucket (you provide that yourself, by the way) you can either feed the local wildlife or set the mice free.
While I'm willing to do no more than grumble to anyone who will listen about rodents destroying my garden, once they cross the threshold into living areas, they're dead. But I'm thinking about setting this trap up in the garage this fall, & releasing the deer mice. (The invasives will continue to feed the raccoons I hear squalling in the middle of the night...)
Anyway, there you have it. Like the snow shovel I'm recommending the rinnetrap (or its homemade equivalent) because it works, and works well. Which, um, can't exactly be said about this overworked watercolour, but at least it's art.
1aug2025
We have a colour tinged racism (or at least, racism-adjacent) rant incoming, so if you wanna skip that, the teal
dear deer is that the Technology Connections guy has a fun little video as to why you can't have brown lights. Oh, and today's page rounds out my series on daylilies with eyes.
After the words for black and white (or light and dark) the next colour term in a language will be red; so I suppose it's not terribly surprising that we have a specific term for a tint of this colour, (i.e. white added) —pink. I read somewhere that of course until orange gets named, all sorts of warm hues get cached under this umbrella, which is why people with orange hair, and birds with orange breasts are historically referred to as ‘red’: once upon a time, they truly were. In a similar way, (green leafy) vegetables in Japan are called 青物—ao mono, or ‘blue stuff’ because until the word 緑 midori came along, 青/ao served for both blue and green.
But I never really considered the origins of two other common colour words in English after light/dark and the six primary & secondary colours (i.e. black, white, and in the pigment based system, red/yellow/blue and orange/green/purple respectively, which as a painter is the system I learned): grey and brown.
Grey is obvious: it's a mix of black and white. Pink I've mentioned. But what is brown?
Because when I do paint I do so with primarily with watercolours (& because I was taught that way) I typically don't use black to adjust hue (1) but rather a given hue's complement. So if I want brown, I could add green to red. However, oxides for browns are inexpensive, so I just buy them, as most painters do. But on those occasions when I did have to mix it, I used red and green (which in and of itself is a mix of yellow and blue). But with additive colour (red/green/blue—the sort of thing you see in an image editing program on your monitor) brown is orange with “black” added. At least according to the Technology Connections guy.
Actually, as it happens, sliding into black (which in additive colour is technically subtracting light) in the red zone also yields brown: and since red is the first named hue in language, it's not altogether surprising that we have specific terms for its tint, pink, and its shade (black added): brown.
No other colour (in English) has specific, simple monosyllabic terms for its tints or shades—the most common that come to mind are all named after things: mint, turquoise, lilac.(2) (I mean there are flowers called pinks, but unless you're a gardener, or even if you are, pink is the colour first, and Dianthus second.)
Where my mind went with this is that I've known (ever since I did a colour experiment where I was only allowed to add white or black to pure hues) that white people are actually orange. Well, now I've learned that brown people are orange too. We're all orange—which if I'd thought about it a hot minute, I would've immediately realized, because the thing that makes brown skin, black fur (or brown fur) is eumelanin, which is black (or dark brown) pigment, and, co-incidentally, a derivative of pheomelanin, which is...orange.
So there, racists who think white people are the be-all and end-all and best, which objectively we're not cuz we sunburn too easily...oh, never mind.
Anyway. Now you know why brown and pink (and orange) all mix so nicely:) And why the complementary(3) turquoise adds such a satisfying pop of colour to reddish orange-brown combos.
Anyway. Have a daylily with a super high tint of orange.
(1)what in common parlance is called colour, which actually is made of hue, its particular chroma, value, its lightness or darkness, and intensity, which its purity.
(2)Also in the category of colours named after fruit, we have peach, which I'd argue only really became popular as a term specifically for a tint of orange (at least in mainstream American English—I have no idea about other countries’ versions) after Crayola rebranded it from ‘flesh’. And of course actual mammalian flesh, is, um, red. Thus my argument that white people really don't like to be called orange. They'd rather be called a synonym for meat—ugh!
(3)Complementary, in this context, means the hue across the colour wheel. Green is red's complement (& vice versa), blue is orange's—therefore green-blue is reddish-orange's.
31jul2025
If the five gallon bucket in my driveway is to be believed, we've received 6 inches of rain in the last 12 hours; certainly the basement has water backing up the drains and oozing through the less dense concrete, which says to me the ground is pretty waterlogged. Soft soil means pulling weeds is so much easier:) —Normally by the beginning of July, let alone its end, I'd be deep into watering, trying to keep everything alive through the dry months, so I'm deeply grateful I get to do the much preferred weeding—after all, weeds make free compost, but water costs money. All that rain also means that besides tons of ferns and lots of blooms, the frogs have made a reappearance after a three year hiatus.
Currently I mostly have phlox, black eyed susans (two cultivars, but mostly the now deprecated goldsturm: I just put up with the angular leaf spot this cultivar typically develops later in the season), lots and lots of Queen Anne's lace, which I know is an invasive, but it surely has been attracting swallowtails, with the tail end of the daylily season and some Joe Pye weed; in back, astilbes. IOW, pretty but not especially showy, and since I've only got the one page on Storm Shelter, I thought I'd make another of this rather dramatic flower.
29jul2025
Oh hi all—or, if you like, おはいお (O ha-i o, good morning:)
As I did last year, I went to Japan for a month in the spring, and which means now the garden has had two years to get wildly out of control during its prime growing season. I've been playing catch up ever since, not helped by assorted kayaking adventures, though the latest, a week long trip to the Apostles, was cancelled by thunderstorms and a lot of rain, leaving me at slightly loose ends. Plus, as ever, linkies have been piling up, and I wanna clear out those tabs. So here we are:
First up an illusion of rectangles and circles. Called the coffer illusion for its similarity to the fancy ceiling treatment, it took me an embarrassingly long time to see the alternate interpretation, though this is typical for folks living the US or UK. But after thinking about it for a bit, I realized I was directed to the rectangular aspect not only because of living in a society dominated by rectangles, but also because I tend to read images from left to right—that is, sideways. The other, circular aspect was easier to perceive when I switched to vertical scan (its “lines” were up and down, rather than the “side to side” of the rectangles), which made me wonder how somebody in a culture with a lot of rectangular buildings but a bias towards vertical scanning, i.e. Japan, would have an easier time, as a great deal of written material is still printed vertically.
Speaking of 日本、Yano Toshitaka's adorable お見合いにすごいコミュ症が来た (Ominai ni Sugoi Komyushou ga Kita) which loosely renders to A Girl Woman Who Really can't Communicate Showed up to My Marriage Meeting. Super sweet and silly, just the sort of thing for lovers of shy, awkward protagonists, and—a bit—a Beauty and Beast story in which the disguised character is female:) Right up my alley, I loved it.
Don't put house spiders outside, they're not set up for it. —Turns out they're descended from cave spiders, and are now adapted to living indoors, where they happily consume all sorts of creepy crawlies. I leave mine alone, except when they drop from the hood into my torch flame, that's super distracting when I'm trying to make beads...
Dude retired with 33K savings in his 401K and couldn't be happier.
This is the linkie that brought the page to a screeching halt, (it was created over 10 days ago) and it took me a while to figure out why...
To be sure, there are some a fair number of caveats (but you knew that had to be the case): they sold their house & are living more cheaply in an apartment, he doesn't travel, his wife (who cooks all their food from scratch, & how does she feel about all this? Doesn't sound as if she's got any fewer responsibilities, & can't help I wondering which if any household chores he's taken up now that's he's retired...?) and not least he's able to use the ACA to get health insurance for $200/mo.
Even so, they rent for $1200/mo, which puts their costs already at 1400month, so there's no way he's living on the $150/mo he's withdrawing from that 401k. The dollar amounts from the contribution of his wife's savings aren't mentioned in the article, nor how much they got from selling their home. He's only a year from social security & his pension, and medicare will kick in after 4 years. (Also, their three grown kids are a doctor, lawyer and teacher, and two of those occupations are well paid, meaning their kids could also possibly help out in a pinch.)
So they have a lot of support that likely most retirees in their sitch don't have but...that wasn't what was annoying me. I felt there was more to this bit of bait'n’switch.
Why?
I mean, anyone with sense is gonna know, from the click-baitey title, that there's gotta be extenuating circs.
I think it's the article's lead illo, of a happy, fit looking couple serenely seated at the edge of a lovely half million dollar (at a guess, minimum) home with a huge backyard garden, when the reality is a small, rented apartment. When the reality should be a small, rented apartment! (Though not, of course, the disability that forced the man to retire early—a double hernia that made his warehouse job of lifting 150lb boxes untenable. Capitalism that prioritizes profit over well-being, yay!)
IOW: it's not just that the oversized home and gigantic yard deeply misrepresent the actual circs; it's that the illo betrays both the truth of the man's philosophy, of being happy with less, but it also also inadvertently reveals why his achievement is so difficult, when this unattainable and unsustainable goal is held out as the American (USian) dream. Despite every indication to the contrary, economical and ecological, of how we should strive to live, that moreover is a way of life 99% of us will not ever achieve is still dangled as the default.
Fostering that expectation is deeply corrosive to our national psyche.
(Not to mention that the sort of financial orgs that promote financial planning tend to be right leaning, leading to yet more cynicism on my part: sure, give advice on living on very little more than your social security, all the while supporting regimes that want to cut out what few social programs we still have from under us. Thanks, guys. Yes, you: you kinda betrayed yourselves, there, with that image.)
But that's not the author's fault (mebbe) and the article, however misleading, does have an important truth buried, which is, yes, human connections to friends and family is a whole helluva lot more important than stuff. That is what we should be striving for, and the publisher betrays their commitment to undercutting the social connection in favour of unthinking excess with their thoughtless illustration.
Hence the likely unhealthy rant.
Probably the real issue is that I should stop reading crap on the internet and find some more friends/human connections myself:)
Speaking for frugal, cheap or free classes for seniors. On person was telling me about her local community college's classes on minerals, bird ID, etc. Sounds lovely. Ours is free for seniors too, but alas, is all focused on blue collar careers to get jobs—welding, medical transcription and the like. Bleh.
Japanese scientists built a canoe using stone axes and traveled 140 miles in the ocean(!) from Taiwan to Japan. Considering that I wussed out travelling 8 miles on a large lake because of thunderstorms (and don't get me wrong, a number of kayakers die every year in this region), I was pretty impressed.
But what's meant to be a triumphant tale has a sad coda: the prehistoric canoers made the trip there...but the ocean current meant they likely were never able to return home. I wonder if they knew that was the price of their adventure. (Always assuming any number of them didn't just drown, of course—no PFDs or coast guard to rescue you back then!)
I'm left handed (as was my dad) so articles about it interest me. This one mentions microtubles and cilia, m and I've been seeing a lot of articles about how fluid dynamics and cilia influence development, which was kind of nice to slot this little quirk into. In the end, biology depends a great deal on physics:)
Grey hair (particularly stressed induced?) can return to its original colour.
I love dry stone walls. So cool that the technique is now being used to make art...
Anyway. It's hot, I've been unproductive, but at least the garden has enough flowers not to look just like a weed patch, though I'm not clever enough to capture its chaos meaningfully, so have some pretty peonies instead.
18mar2025
I like all these “minor” holidays—Valentine's Day, May Day—and of them all my fave is probably St Patrick's Day, which I typically celebrate by putzing around in the studio, tidying it up. (And eating corned beef, though I think that's gonna have to stop, I no longer eat meat frequently enough to enjoy this annual treat without gastrointestinal distress.) I'm so behind this year, both with regard to taxes (used to be, I had to file my 1120s by Mar 15, & so they'd be done by now, a great relief, but even if that rule were still in place, it would no longer be effective, since I've decided to dissolve the corp) and the garden, so I putzed around doing those instead.
I, personally, have a good deal to be thankful for, not least of which is all those COVID vaccines did their job, because although my 5 year streak was finally broken this February, my case very mild, I seem also, this time at least, to have escaped long covid.
And, so far, the flu. Why yes, I was dismayed with the FDA's half-assed approach to next year's flu vaccine which I consider just one of the many, many, deleterious outcomes pouring out of the current political situation's effluvia. So. Have a cat picture. We need cat pictures, and whatever other joy there is to be found.
29jan2025
Today I have two omoshiroi (interesting) links and two life hack links:
- Mount Lyell shrews had never been photographed alive in the wild—not, I gather, because they're particularly elusive or rare, but because their voracious metabolisms meant if you weren't checking your traps of these nocturnal animals constantly, they'd die of starvation. Well, someone decided to forgo the sleep and finally manage this feat, which I think is a pretty cool example of citizen science.
- The other is using science to examine this magnificent Roman mosaic from Pompeii —I mean, the cords tying on the armour, wow. (I'm not the only person impressed— Jill Bearup made some cosplay armour using this mosaic as one of her references, and wasn't I charmed to see the serendipitous connection;)
And then we have the endless round of how to do household/to-do type $thing which is just clickbait for me, but I rationalize it as allowable distractions because it's not the actively harmful sort, such as making fun of other people's misfortunes or spreading misinformation lies:
- Tidying in a spiral —this, IIRC, was starting in the perimeter of a room, getting the biggest/most obvious stuff tidied up first, then circling in to smaller tasks—just like laying out a drawing of a live model: start with the big masses (e.g. head/spine/legs, for me) then working towards limbs, then intermediate masses like the rough shape of hands and feet, and finishing up with fine details such as facial features, fingers and toes.
- Reducing procrastination (a huge one for me—I'm writing this intro, frex, when I should be inputting stuff so's I can turn in my taxes to the accountant in a timely manner). Again, to super-summarize, envision a successful implementation of the task, the consequences of not doing it, then zero in on a bit you can do right now to begin. (There's more in the link, but for me at least, getting started is usually the most difficult aspect of daunting tasks.)
Or you can check out this mixed media I made featuring a tampopo (dandelion) wine bottle sticker.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
