Coffee heat rising

How to deal with ants

by

They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k! The little myrmidons who think my yard is their empire are moving in on the house again. I had a little frenzy the time they got into the kitchen, where they evinced great joy at their discovery of the dishwasher, a rich new world heretofore unknown to the Ant Queendom. And then, after an hour of frantic activity, was a bit ashamed of myself for having sprayed them in a panic.

Yuck! How unecological. How self-destructive. How…messy!

After all, I do know better. When I first moved into this house, the backyard was overrun with ants…never saw so many biting ants in my life! About that time I realized I’d purchased the House from Hell, and the previous owner was Satan. The ants, it appeared, had burrowed all the way down to Satan’s throne.

Gila woodpecker

I really dislike bug spray—have had it make me very sick, indeed—and I will not have an exterminator on the property. (Not willingly, anyway.) Ant baits are pretty effective, but at the time I had two big dogs and didn’t relish leaving poison on the ground where they might get at it.

A little research, however, revealed that many birds, even seed-eaters, will eat ants. Matter of fact, a few local characters eat a lot of ants: the flicker, its relative the Gila woodpecker, the curve-billed thrasher, starlings, sparrows, grackles, Abert’s towhees, possibly mockingbirds. So, at that time I called in as many birds as I could by hanging bird feeders from the eaves and from a branch of the neighbor’s tree that overhung my side of the wall. This worked well. Within a couple of months, the ant population was under control.

Understand: I’m not interested in killing off all the ants. They serve many useful purposes, and besides, they’re interesting creatures. I just don’t want them to make themselves at home in the house. Or around the patios where I like to sit.

Abert's towhee

Lately, I’ve noticed it’s been unnaturally quiet in the mornings and evenings. At dawn, normally, the neighborhood is all a-chatter with birdsong. In the desert, a city with its lawns, trees, and shrubbery forms a kind of riparian area, and so we have a lot of birds. This summer’s extreme heat and droughty conditions, though, may have killed them or driven them to shelter. The heat really has been outrageous this year: we’re two days short of September and it’s still 114 degrees. Plus the ash tree in front has finally, once and for all, died. That removed a lot of shaded shelter, so they may have just moved on down the block. Still: weirdly silent. As in “no birds.”

Then a week or so ago, I’m sitting on the deck and yipe! My feet are getting chewed! The place was overrun with ants! Looking for nothing in particular, as far as I could tell: just foraging around. They were coming from a mound next to a lavender plant which, incidentally, they seem to have undermined and killed. I put down some baits, and, to keep the dog out, laid an old wire fan cage over them.

Red-shafted flickers

The dog and I decamped to the back porch for breakfast. I’d carried a dish of dog chews outside, so I could bribe her to leave me in peace to read the paper. Forgot to bring that in. That evening when I went out to retrieve it, lo! A blanket of ants was swarming over the doggy chews and all over the glass-topped table, carrying off the dog treats an ant-bite at a time!

Argh! In that encounter, a few of the little gals made their way into the house. I beat them back with dish detergent, eventually carrying the day.

But, it was clear, only a day. Time to mobilize the troops.

My neighbor next door—she of the overhanging tree limb—dislikes birds. Hates them. That could be another explanation for their absence, come to think of it. She threw a hissy-fit when she discovered Other Daughter, who’s next-door to her on the far side, was feeding the doves and thereby calling in a passel of grackles…which, it must be admitted, are messier than your average airborne elephant. As you can imagine, then, I need to be careful here.

This afternoon I bought some fresh bird feed, the old stuff having run out a couple years ago, and hung up the two feeders. If you enjoy using your patio to eat outside or just to sit and enjoy the fresh air, you don’t want to call birds in too close to the house. They can make quite a mess, not being amenable to toilet-training. So I placed one feeder in an orange tree, out of the neighbor’s line of sight, and one on an eave away from the patio and the deck, the same location where it hung the first time around.

There are other nonchemical, relatively nontoxic ways to engage battle with ants. Boric acid, available at drugstores and sometimes at Target, is more or less benign, unless you’re a cat and given to licking your paws. Sprinkle a line of it around the foundation of your house and across each threshold. It’s like fine cut glass to ants—slices up their exoskeleton, eventually causing them to dehydrate and die. Because it doesn’t kill them quickly, they’ll carry it back to the hive on their bodies, spreading it around among their sisters and, with any luck, getting some of it on the queen. Takes a while, but eventually it will get rid of them.

Some people claim you can “erase” the scent trails they follow (ants lay down pheromones to communicate where the food is) with 409 or similar strong household cleaners. I have never found that to be true.

Some say you can kill a hive by pouring boiling water over it. Ditto: never found it to work. Doesn’t do any plants around the nest much good, though.

Ant traps are almost as effective against the little ladies as roach traps are against roaches, which is to say very effective. You have to be sure they’re out of reach of pets and children though. And they do kill all the ants, which might not be the wisest thing to do.

No. Birds are your friends here. Bring enough of them into your yard and they’ll take care of the ants for you. They’ll make short work of field roaches, crickets, and other annoyances, too. A plastic bird feeder (available cheap at Home Depot; I got one of mine even cheaper at a yard sale) or even a planter dish full of bird seed will do the job. Remember to refill the feeder(s) every day or two, to keep them coming back. If you don’t have room to store birdseed, bread crumbs work just as well: save heels of bread, break them up into coarse crumbs, and scatter them around some distance from porches and patios. Then sit back, enjoy the show, and say good-bye to the bugs.

Curved-bill thrasher

Weekend pool frolics: Soda ash edition

by

At some point along the line, Frugal Scholar remarked in passing that the swimming pool sounds like a royal pain. And there’s something to be said for that.

But it also has to be said that if you like to swim and you live in a hot climate, a pool has so many redeeming qualities that you can see why people build them. At this time of year, I’m in the pool two or three times a day, every day. And I’m so spoiled to it I can’t remember how I managed to get through an endless succession of 115-degree days without a puddle of Clorox water to dive into. Every time I jump in the pool, I think aahhh! this makes it worth all the work and hassle.

However and on the other hand… When something happens to render the pool unusable, one’s memory is jogged; especially when dealing with the “something” requires a great deal of work, worry, or both.

The acid level in the pool’s water has been slowly climbing since the middle of last winter. I haven’t added any acid since early spring (normally one adds acid pretty regularly to a plaster-lined pool), but the pH keeps dropping. You recall high-school chemistry, right? Low pH = high acidity. Well, the pH has been at 7.2 for quite a while; that’s on the far low side of sort of OK. In other words, the acidity was a bit too much but nothing to panic over. The Leslie’s guys said if I just left it alone, eventually the pH would rise.

Wrong.

Au contraire, by Friday the pH had dropped to 6.8, the “add pH stabilizer” level. It was low enough that even the Leslie’s guys had to allow that the acid level was out of control.

So, come Saturday morning, Biker Phil, the Harley-ridin’ Leslie’s sales guy, says to me, “You need to add 30 pounds of soda ash.”

“Give me a proverbial break,” say I. “I can’t lift 30 pounds!”

“Well,” says he, “then add 20 pounds, wait four hours, test the pH, and if it’s still too low, come back and get another 10 pounds.” With that, he sells me two 10-pound containers of soda ash: that’ll be $48, thank you very much.

Biker Phil advises me to administer the entire 20 pounds of this stuff to the pool by walking around the perimeter and sprinkling it in, as evenly as possible. He says it will cloud the water, but in four hours or so the water should clear and be swimmable.

Okay. I go forth and do likewise.

Instantly, and I do mean instantly, the filter pressure gauge shoots over 20 psi.

Sumbitch. I backwash; recharge the filter with diatomaceous earth; go on about my business.

An hour later, I look out the window and notice a glass-smooth surface on the pool. “That’s odd,” think I. “The pump must have shut down.”

Oh, nooo. The pump was laboring away. Filter pressure had topped 30 psi! The filter was so clogged the pump, which is one tough little fellow, couldn’t move any water at all through the plumbing system.

The water, so lately sparkling like a mountain spring in a Coors ad, is opaque. Shut down. Major backwash. Recharge filter. An hour later: PSI is up to 30 again.

On the phone to Biker Phil. He can’t figure out the problem. “It can’t be the soda ash,” says he. “It’s dissolved. It can’t clog the filter.”

Phil. Phil, Phil, Phil. Were you not paying attention in your chem class? Or were you, like me, gathering wool from the clouds outside the window? What’s happened here is that when we deposited 20 pounds of soda ash into 18,000 gallons of water, we got a supersaturated solution. Think of the time you added several spoonsful of salt to a glass of warm water, to gargle your sore throat: what you got was a glass of salty water with a layer of salt crystals on the bottom. That. is. what. we. have. here.

Soda ash dunes.

Soda ash dunes, precipitated out of the saturated water, cover the steps, the seat, and the floor of the pool. I do not know how many pounds of soda ash is not dissolved, but I’ll bet it’s a lot. And, I figure, that’s what’s clogging the filter. Since Bob the Wonderful Leslie’s Guy was over here last week to disassemble, clean, and reassemble the filter, and since it was working so well the effervescent pool could’ve been used as an ad for Leslie’s Swimming Pool Supplies and Service, I associate the soda ash episode with the gagged filter.

Having followed Biker Phil’s instructions and met fiasco, I belatedly google  the function of soda ash in pool chemistry. At site after site I learn that one should never, ever, nooo never add more than two (count’em, 2) pounds of soda ash to a pool at a time. Biker Phil has had me add ten times the standard amount to the pool. Is there a question why the system has run amok?

The specific scientific details of the problem explained and comprehended, Phil recommends that I “bump” (a very short backwash) the pool every time the pressure threatens to move into the 30 psi range and says he thinks in time the problem will dissipate.

This requires me to do a minibackwash, illegally into the alley, every twenty minutes all day Saturday! In 114-degree heat. Sunday was cooler: a mere 110 degrees. Started with a full backwash at 5:30 Sunday morning. Opted the junket to church, where I wanted to hear the new pastor address the assembled masses for his virgin sermon, in favor of backwashing every twenty minutes. Around 11:00 a.m., reach Phil’s boss on the phone—the Phil himself being out until next Wednesday.

Seemingly unsurprised at the extravagant dosage of soda ash, Manager Jay speculates that the frequent full backwashes—which by now have added up to four in two days (one normally backwashes a DE filter about once every three months)—plus the three-times-an-hour “bumps” may have drained out most of the DE. He observes that when filter pressure jumps suddenly, one normally suspects too little DE. He recommends that I add five pounds of DE to the filter.

Refraining from observing more than once that the system was working fine Before Soda Ash, I feed 6 1/2 pounds of DE to the filter. This works pretty well: slows the process so that it takes an hour or two to reach a “Clean Filter” level of 20 psi. How long it would take to reach 30 psi, I do not know, not having enough nerve to overwork the pump to that degree. Probably another hour or so.

This adventure obviously is going to require another service call. Since I just paid to have Bob the WLG spend an hour working on the system, I am less than thrilled at the prospect of paying to have him come by again. I think Leslie’s should pay for whatever needs to be done to undo the mess that’s resulted from their advising me to add 10 times the recommended amount of soda ash to the pool.

Stay tuned! This promises to turn into an entertaining comedy of errors!

The glories of an honest mechanic

by

Allah be praised! That 90,000-mile megaservice that was supposed to lighten my bank account to the tune of $1,200? Chuck the Mechanic par Extraordinaire charged me $221.

Whence this generosity, you ask.

Well, he checked his records—he keeps computerized records of all his customer’s work—and discovered that I had insisted on changing the timing belt at 60,000 miles. Mike the Other Mechanic par Extraordinaire observed that there was no need to have changed it then: it should have lasted at least 90,000 miles and maybe more than that. He thinks the thing won’t need to be changed until the car reaches about 120,000 miles.

Think of that.

If I’d taken the car to the Toyota dealer, a) they wouldn’t have known the timing belt had been changed early; and b) even if they did, dollars to donuts they would have gone ahead with the full 90,000 whackaroo by way of extracting $1,350 (their price for the same routine service job) from my wallet. Really, Mike and Chuck could easily have gotten away without cluing me that there was no need to change the timing belt. I was resigned to having to pony up over a grand and had the money sitting on the altar waiting to be sacrificed to the gods of internal combustion. I would never have been the wiser.

Well! This leaves $1,000 in my post-Canning Day survival fund! Matter of fact, I probably can cover most or all of that $221 bill with this month’s paycheck, leaving the whole $1,200 in savings.

And that’s why honest mechanics never have to advertise.

Hallelujah!

Image: Cam drive of a Ford I4 DOHC engine
Dolda2000, public domain, Wikipedia Commons

Declutter! Clear your life of wasteful trash

by

Why do we tend to fill our lives with dust-catchers and useless junk? Every week when the notices for the current round of estate sales arrive, my mind is filled with wonder.

What does a person do with all that stuff? Where on earth do you store it? Many houses where these estate sales take place are not huge…how do the occupants find room for the piles and piles of stuff? And why would they keep it at all? For that matter, why did they acquire it in the first place?

There’s this, for example:

Everyone needs a glass chicken, right? To go with the fake flowers. These photos aren’t the greatest, being thumbnails. But you get the (heh) picture.

Collecting is one thing I’ve never been able to understand. Why accrete a large number of useless items just because they have one trait in common—images of pigs, say? The pleasurability of this, for example, escapes me:

Scores and scores of Matchbox Cars, all in their original, unopened packaging. Someone evidently viewed this as akin to an investment, since enough people have a fixation on accruing Matchbox Cars to make them “collector’s items” and therefore, one speculates (and we do mean speculates) that someday they’ll have some outrageous value. So, we might speculate, will our house. Our stock market holdings. Our plastic hydrangeas…

They’re toys. Kids are supposed to play with them! Grabbed off the market and left to collect dust in some closet, their purpose is perverted.

Over the past couple of decades, developers have been designing houses with “plant shelves” (read “dust-collection platforms”). It also has become the vogue to install cabinetry that doesn’t go to the ceiling, possibly because high ceilings are popular and cabinets are built so cheaply these days they won’t span that much space. The result is that every newer kitchen (and many older, renovated kitchens) comes with ready-made dust-collection platforms, all of which call out to the homeowner: ohhh please: fill me with STUFF!

This kitchen scene appears in a house occupied by an interior designer, who’s in the process of unloading the high-end furnishings of her present home so she can start over in new digs:

The chintzy cabinets are in a large, expensive house:

But the developer still couldn’t see fit to provide the well-heeled (or generously financed) homeowner with cabinetry to fill the available space. So what has she done? She’s stuffed it chuckablock full with plastic plants, plastic fruit, plastic vegetables, fake duck decoys, decorative pottery, collector plates, carved wooden boxes, and basketry, all of it collecting dust and (if she cooks) kitchen grime. Makes sense, eh?

Just look at this clutter!

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

She couldn’t use any of it if she wanted to: how likely is it that in the middle of cooking dinner she’s going to traipse out to the garage, drag in a ladder, climb up to somewhere near the elevated ceilings, haul down that gravy boat, drag the ladder back to the garage, and wash the dust and grease off the thing before she does anything with it?

But so pretty, you say, and you ask, “What’s wrong with this harmless expression of one’s taste and love of…junk?” Let us count the ways!

• It’s not frugal. Au contraire. It’s wasteful. Buying and stashing junk we will never use is incredibly wasteful! Think of the trips to Paris this woman could have taken with the cash she put out for all that debris. Or…think of all the food she could have contributed to charity, if she just wanted to get rid of her money.

• It’s selfish. It keeps products out of the hands of those who might use them. Case in point: the Matchbox Car fetish. When collectors grab these things off the market, it drives up the cost of nifty toys. Little boys (and yup, little girls!) who should be able to buy them with their allowances now can’t touch them. In this case, it’s akin to stealing candy from children.

• It’s not green. Consider the resources that went in to making and transporting all that pottery, basketware, and plastic foliage, just so it could sit on top of some woman’s kitchen cabinetry and collect dust!

• It creates a stupefying amount of extra work. We (or someone) will have to dust and clean all the tschochkies we’ve littered the “plant shelves,” cabinet roofs, and countertops with.

• It’s inconsiderate to the point of rudeness. After we croak over, someone is going to have to dispose of all the debris we gathered and stuffed into every closet, cabinet, nook, and cranny of the dwelling, garage, and storage shed. Why should our heirs or landlord have to spend hours (some have the privilege of spending days) gathering all the junk and finding some place to get rid of it? Why should they have to hire a company to sell Mom’s or Dad’s junk and then pack up the stuff that some other sucker wouldn’t buy and cart it to the dump?

What to do, what to do?

Well, first, let’s all refrain from collecting stuff that serves no practical purpose. If it doesn’t do something (collecting dust does not qualify as “something”), don’t get it.

Second, let’s invest our money in something better than speculative “collector’s items,” and leave the toys for the kiddies to play with. We could stash our money in a high-yield online savings account until such time as it’s accrued enough to buy into a low-load mutual fund. As investments go, savings accounts and securities are lot more likely to show some profit, a lot sooner, than will a collector’s item whose main function is to gather dust.

Third, resist! Resist buying houses that are designed with dust-collection shelves and corner-cutting cabinetry that shorts you on storage space. If you already live in one of those houses, get yourself some drywall, tape, and plaster and fill in the stupid shelves. If you know the brand and make of your cabinets, find the cabinetry maker and try to buy some matching cabinets that will fill in the space between the existing boxes and the ceiling. Don’t buy houses that give you useless space, but if you’re stuck with one, eliminate the useless space.

Fourth, at the very least, if we must have houses adorned with dust shelves, let’s refrain from filling them with dust-collectors. You could, for example, install up-lighting in them (puck lights are easy to install and very cheap at your nearby box home improvement store). Or…there’s no law against leaving them empty.

And finally, when something we don’t want anymore still has some use left on it, let’s pass it to someone else, whether by selling it or donating it, instead of saving it for a posterity that doesn’t want it.

Frugality is minimalist. Clutter is wasteful.

Retirement/unemployment: A slightly brighter light

by

A meeting with the investment adviser yielded a little decent news on the pending unemployment (i.e., forced retirement) front. He figured out that $10,000 of the $25,000 sitting in the whole life insurance policy my ex- bought back in the early 1980s is not subject to taxes.

So, he proposes that I withdraw that in January 2010 and use it to pay my share of the mortgage on the investment house. This should keep taxes low and, because it’s not earned income, will not work against me in the Social Security earnings limit department. With the mortgage covered and the likelihood that the community college teaching gigs will max out the earnings limit, I may not have to take a drawdown from investments at all next year.

This, he thinks, will allow my much-battered investments to recover from the depredations of the Bush economy.

If, as planned, I add the net amount of the vacation pay GDU will owe me to the living expenses fund, I should end up with about the same monthly income that I have right now. It will delay having to raid my retirement funds for as long as a year, and meanwhile, it’ll give me a chance to apply for full-time work. The community college district has had a hiring freeze going for quite some time; that one job has opened up means the ice-pack may be melting. Between now and next fall, several more opportunities may arise.

O’course, the fly in that ointment is Medicare. Even with the inflated health-care premiums presented to us in this month’s open enrollment, the cost of cobbling together coverage comparable to my present health-care coverage will be about 10 times what I’m paying now. That’s going to be a big hit, and because of the earnings limitation, I won’t be allowed to use freelance income or take on a summer course to take up the slack.

So…2010 is gonna be a little pinched, but it should be survivable. As for 2011: it’ll just have to take care of itself.

Fizzy lemonade

by

The other day a craving for something sweet, cold, and bubbly snuck up on me. I don’t care for pop and wasn’t in the mood for an unscheduled grocery-store run through 100-degree heat. But…last summer I froze a bunch of juice from the backyard Meyer lemon tree, in quarter-cup size chunks made in a muffin tin. Here’s the result:

Fizzy Meyer Lemonade

You need:

• about 1/4 cup lemon juice (no need to defrost, if frozen)
• about 1/4 to 1/2 cup orange juice
• about 1/3 cup sugar
• can of club soda or seltzer water
• ice cubes

Put the juice and sugar in a blender and whirl on “high” until well blended. Pour about half of the resulting mixture over ice cubes in a tall glass. Top with fizzy water and stir gently to mix. Makes two or three servings.

I’ve not tried this, but you may be able to substitute lemonade concentrate for the juice and sugar in this recipe. In that case, try leaving out the sugar, since concentrates are very sweet to start with. If this works, then probably about any frozen juice concentrate would be good: you could make your own orange, pineapple, apple, or cranberry juice pop.