Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group discussion
What are U doing today?
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What are U doing today? (Ongoing thread)
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Nina
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Apr 21, 2016 06:55PM
What about the Monarchs and their long journey from Mexico?
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Yes, Nina, 1/4cup sugar to 1 cup water. NO food coloring. I mix mine in a measuring cup & then microwave it until it starts to boil. Then let it cool. It's best to use in a week, less if the days are hot.
Thanks Jim, I will follow your instructions.
I made up 5 more carpenter bee traps tonight. I made 3 yesterday. Hopefully that's enough for now since I'm out of jars. They seem to be a real pain this year so I have friends around home & work requesting them. They're easy to make. I do them something like the instructions here:http://www.myfrugalhome.com/how-to-bu...
Mine are working well, but I didn't follow the instructions exactly.
- 5/8" holes for the sides & center hole in the wood, 1/2" in the jar lid.
- I'm using odd chunks of wood about 4" - 6" in diameter about 8" long.
- I've made them of cedar, ash, walnut, & sassafras.
- I turn mine on the lathe to round the top & also inset the lid into the bottom. No real need, though.
- I drill them by eye since the only critical mark is the center & that's made by the lathe.
- I drill the wood with a spade bit since it's easier to angle.
- I wax the top if it is going to sit outside since I believe the bees want dry wood to go up into.
- I'm using any kind of glass jar, mostly 16oz spaghetti sauce, & they're fine. Most plans use plastic, but I read they can chew out of that. I don't know.
- I put some water in the bottom to kill the bees faster. Otherwise they live for days & new ones can be hard to kill.
- I use a screw hook to hang them.
Jim, I've heard of carpenter ants but not carpenter bees!
Sometimes called borer bees. They look like bumble bees but bore a 1/2" hole into exposed wood. We had a 2x4-16' long that held up the netting over one of Mom's chicken runs break. It was supposed to be treated, but I guess they didn't do a good job on it & it had 2 borer bee holes on the bottom in the center where it broke. After I replaced it, I cut it up & found that there were several tunnels bored into it running several feet in each direction.If I see one of their holes, I fill it with Liquid Nails, a construction adhesive that is about the consistency of peanut butter. That fills the hole & kills them off if they're inside. It has toulene & acetone in it, I think. Nasty stuff.
Gee, Jim, I hope we have no borer bees around where we live! They can really bring down buildings if they weaken wood!BTW, I hesitate to use weedkiller because it can be harmful to pets and kids. Is it possible that it might also eventually affect well-water?
Is there a less harmful weedkiller?
The weeds grow up in cracks between cement slab walkways and also between cracks in the driveway blacktop. I've covered some of the cracks in the walkways with the green outdoor artificial grass carpeting but the carpeting is getting old and dry and rips, and the wind blows it around. It gets messy.
We also have a cement slab patio area where the weeds grow. I covered that with the green artificial grass outdoor carpeting but it's getting old and messy.
PS - Here's the green artificial grass carpeting sold at Home Depot:http://www.homedepot.com/p/TrafficMas...
I'd use Round-Up to kill the grass & weeds. It's not harmful to animals since it works by turning off enzymes that plants need to grow. You're not going use that much of it & the solution you would buy at the store is watered down. You can even buy it with a sprayer attached. Handy for homeowners.There are some herbicides that are dangerous to animals. The Gramoxone that I sprayed this spring to kill off the invasive Star of Bethlehem weed is one. It contains paraquat which is deadly to most everything. I've still got the areas I sprayed fenced off from the horses & will for another week. As nasty as that stuff is, the dock (burdock) managed to survive it. It's a broad leaved plant, so I generally kill it by spot spraying with 2,4-D. That's somewhat poisonous to animals, but not awful.
As for run-off to your well, that shouldn't be a problem for a properly dug well today. Used to be they were shallow, but even then a proper one took pains to make sure any water it got was forced to filter through the ground a good distance from the well itself. Here in this area of KY, wells usually can't meet health codes which is why we either have city water or cisterns. I can't get decent Internet service, but have city water. There is a well on the property, but it's too shallow, only about 10' down to the water. Shallow wells are often contaminated while deep wells around here don't usually last. Too much fractured rock so water comes & goes.
Most of our streams are intermittent. My big pond used to get enough water to stay full all year round, but now usually dries up in the summer. It didn't fully dry up last year for the first time since we've been here save for the first year. The guy that dug it told me it stayed full for the first few years & suggested we have a leak, but the real problem is the spring that feeds it has quit running as much.
Jim wrote: "I'd use Round-Up to kill the grass & weeds. It's not harmful to animals since it works by turning off enzymes that plants need to grow. You're not going use that much of it & the solution you would..."Jim, thanks for the information! I may even have some Round-Up somewhere in my cabinets. Those sorts of products just seems to accumulate and you forget you even own them. :)
It's a drippy day here. We've only gotten about 1/2" but it's been raining all day & feels pretty chilly. We've been in the 70s during the day, but today started out at 62 & dropped to the upper 50s. It's kind of a shame since it's so pretty out now. The Black locusts are blooming & filled the air with their perfume. The hummingbirds finally got here, but aren't touching their feeders now. They don't when the locusts are blooming. They're too good for food, both in nectar & bugs around them, I guess.We're going out to dinner tonight. Probably shouldn't since the A/C unit quit the other day. I got it fixed, but I'm going to have to replace it ASAP. That's $4000 or so to come up with on short notice. Ugh.
Jim wrote: "It's a drippy day here. We've only gotten about 1/2" but it's been raining all day & feels pretty chilly. We've been in the 70s during the day, but today started out at 62 & dropped to the upper 50..."We've got sunshine and 63 degrees here.
Jim, I assume your A/C unit it a pretty fancy one with the whole house cooled by the unit which is outside your house and not in a window. Am I right?
joy, almost everyone here has an indoor a/c. You are lucky if you don't have to have one of those. I grew up without any air conditioning except in the movie theaters. As a child I didn't mind but did sleep sometimes on wet sheets in the back yard.
It's supposed to be cool in the fifties tomorrow. It was seventy today. Sounds like our weather is like yours Jim. After tomorrow it will be in the seventies all week and fifties at night. Good weather and wish it could stay that way. We are being warned that May is the month for tornadoes in our area. Hope we avoid them.
Yes, Joy, it's a whole house A/C with forced air electric heat. I'll be replacing it with a heat pump with electric heat backup for when it gets too cold out for the heat pump to keep up. This is the first house we've had with whole house A/C & we like it. As you know, the summers get hotter & the winters colder as we age.
Nina wrote: "joy, almost everyone here has an indoor a/c. You are lucky if you don't have to have one of those. I grew up without any air conditioning except in the movie theaters. As a child I didn't mind but ..."WOW, Nina. It must get very hot there! I guess I never thought about Kansas' weather before this.
Nina wrote: "... We are being warned that May is the month for tornadoes in our area. Hope we avoid them"Nina, I hope no tornadoes come your way. I think of you every time I see a tornado report! Now I'm reminded of the connection with the Wizard of Oz and Dorothy. :)
Jim wrote: "Yes, Joy, it's a whole house A/C with forced air electric heat. I'll be replacing it with a heat pump with electric heat backup for when it gets too cold out for the heat pump to keep up. This is t..."Jim, what's a heat pump? No oil burner? No gas furnace?
Tell me, with forced hot air, do you find that in the winter your lips feel chapped from the dryness and your nose gets all caked up from the dryness? We have forced hot air and my lips and nose are both affected. I have to use lip balm all the time as well as nasal spray.
Sometimes, but not usually too bad. It's pretty humid here most of the time.
Jim wrote: "Sometimes, but not usually too bad. It's pretty humid here most of the time."You're lucky Jim. Dry air sometimes has annoying effects on the skin.
BTW, is anyone having to wait for your post to be posted here at Goodreads? Sometimes I have to wait over 10 seconds for the screen to roll around. The waiting time is annoying. Or is it just my Internet service provider?
So far, no problem but I have had that in the past until I got this new computer. However, that might be a different problem than yours.
Joy we have a humidifier in our basement and it eliminates any problems with dry air.
Joy H. wrote: "BTW, is anyone having to wait for your post to be posted here at Goodreads? Sometimes I have to wait over 10 seconds for the screen to roll around. The waiting time is annoying. Or is it just my In..."This topic isn't bad for me, but I have one topic in one group that I have to wait 45s- 1min for it to post each time. It started in Feb & I reported it to GR tech support at the end of that month. It's still happening. We've now exchanged a dozen emails on the issue, the last reply being this morning, & they are still 'working on it' in between rolling out new features & such. Wonderful. I'd rather have the old ones work.
:(
Joy, I have never been in a tornado, thank goodness but once when my children were young we then had a picture window/large/ and I could see the tornado headed toward our house. I told the children to go to the basement/grabbed the cat and down we went and the tornado didn't touch down. I had company for dinner that night and it was delayed.
June is usually nice and then in July it can get in the upper nineties or even one hundred some summers and stays hot but not every day is that hot until middle of August and usually starts cooling a bit and raining. September can also be hot on certain days but October is lovely and usually November. Sometimes it is warmer on Christmas than Easter. We do have a strange pattern but it begins to look like spring by early March. So I'd say we have two bad months in summer and two in the winter and some good days and bad days in between. And it really never looks like it did in the Wizard of OZ.
It's been almost 40 days since I last sprayed the Gramoxon to kill off the Star of Bethlehem in the horse fields, so I took down the fencing that was keeping them from the areas. I was about 15 minutes from done - I had the last, long line of electric fencing down & was coiling the wire - when it started pouring down rain. I couldn't leave the wire down, so I had to finish up & then collect all the temporary fence posts & other coils of wire. Huge winds, lots of rain, & some lightening crashing about as I drove the tractor back to the barn in shorts & a shirt. The temperature dropped by 20 degrees. I had a heck of a time with the doors to the barn. There's no gutter on the barn, so to unlock them I had to stand under a torrent & then battle the wind to open them up & brace them. The doors are about 6'x10', so catch a fair amount. It was quite a fight, mostly fought under the deluge from the roof. By the time I got in the house, I was drenched & cold. I emptied my shoes on the porch & stripped in the shower, wringing out the 3 bits of clothing I had on. All were dripping & the horse treats in my pocket were mushy. Yuck.
Nina wrote: "Joy we have a humidifier in our basement and it eliminates any problems with dry air."We had a humidifier once but the water in it started to smell. I guess it needed some sort of chemicals in it to stop the bacteria. Anyway, I gave up on humidifiers that year.
Jim wrote: "Joy H. wrote: "This topic isn't bad for me, but I have one topic in one group that I have to wait 45s- 1min for it to post each time. ..."Jim, strange that it only happened with one topic. I just figure that the whole website is overloaded. But I do have an old laptop. But I do suspect that our Time Warner Service Provider is trying to make me pay for faster service!
Nina wrote: "Joy, I have never been in a tornado, thank goodness but once when my children were young we then had a picture window/large/ and I could see the tornado headed toward our house. I told the children..."YIKES!
Nina wrote: "June is usually nice and then in July it can get in the upper nineties or even one hundred some summers and stays hot but not every day is that hot until middle of August and usually starts cooling..."We have hot spells here too but it depends of the year! LOL Some are worse than others.
Jim wrote: "... By the time I got in the house, I was drenched & cold. I emptied my shoes on the porch & stripped in the shower, wringing out the 3 bits of clothing I had on. All were dripping & the horse treats in my pocket were mushy. Yuck."Jim, I hope you don't catch cold. Maybe you'd better move to a condo. LOL Too much work there! LOL
Sometimes while I'm typing a post the screen scrolls down by itself and I have to scroll back up. It's probably because the palm of my hand touches the touch-pad. How can I stop that from happening? It's an awful feature with no reason for having it! Grumble, grumble! Stupid programmers!
That's kind of the purpose of the touchpad, Joy. Some laptops come with a button centered in the keypad that can be used instead of the touchpad. My boss prefers this method, so I turn off the touchpad on his laptop in the BIOS (the startup black screen). I was just glad we didn't get too much hail out of that storm yesterday. It was bad enough that it knocked the power out for a few minutes, piled hail up just east of us, & caused flash flooding all over. Working, not to mention driving an open tractor, in the middle of it was nasty.
The Maryland Hunt Cup is possibly the toughest timber horse race in the country, if not the world. It's almost 4 miles long over 22 fences, one almost 5' high. This year's was held on Saturday & was very good, thrilling end.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u05S...
Mom said Senior Senator is the rankest (nastiest) horse she's seen in a long time. He was knocked down last week in the Grand National (the timber race in MD, not the brush race in England) because he pushed a horse off course. She said she didn't know how the jockey managed to ride him.
Nina and Joy: Enjoyed your discussion about tornadoes. I n Omaha we have our share of tornado alerts and warnings.One day ,the tornado alert sounded. I went to the basement/laundry room. The windows got dark; doorknobs rattled. Our apartment was not hit. However less than two blocks away a 60 foot tree had been yanked out of the ground and laid right across 40th street, blocking both lanes.
The city had to come with chain saw to cut it up to open the streets. I remember the roots being so very long sticking up into the air.
I never want to get any closer than that to a tornado!!
Nina: We did not have air conditioning in our house until I was in college.We did have a screened in front porch made by my dad and grandpa. Dad would open all the screens and put a box fan at both ends. We slept there if the heat was really bad.
Which in Omaha in July and August it usually was!
We had a window air conditioner in the fifties and not all house conditioning until 1959. We also had a screened in porch where we slept in the summer. Lots of houses built in the thirties in Kansas City had what they then called sleeping porches. where the family slept in the summer.
I grew up in Iowa in the 50s and 60s, the summers were very hot, but we didn't have air conditioning, so I never got used to it. (We did have a fan, and my mother usually spent most of the summer days, once the heat was strong, lying on the couch in front of it; she was very hot-natured, and suffered a lot from the heat. That trait skipped my generation; I'm the opposite.)The Bluefields pride themselves on being naturally cool in the summers, because of the high mountain elevation (the highest for any U.S. town east of the Mississippi). For a long time, the BC administration maintained, for that reason, that the library didn't need to be air-conditioned. However, our summers can still get hot enough at times; and the library got whole-building air condition (paid for by a generous donation from one of the trustees) in the mid-90s. Neither Barb and I nor Deborah have whole-house air conditioning, though we both have two or three window units (we don't use ours much if at all; it's more convenient to just open the windows). We do have ceiling fans in most of our rooms.
Growing up in the Midwest, I always heard about tornadoes, and experienced plenty of tornado drills, watches, and warnings. But the only time I was ever actually in one was in 1990, when our house (and much of the rest of Petersburg, IN) was totaled by one. But I'm pretty sure I've told that story in this group before!
Jim wrote: "That's kind of the purpose of the touchpad, Joy. Some laptops come with a button centered in the keypad that can be used instead of the touchpad. My boss prefers this method, so I turn off the touc..."But why would people want to keep scrolling to the bottom all the time? It's annoying while you're typing.
Jim wrote: "The Maryland Hunt Cup is possibly the toughest timber horse race in the country, if not the world. It's almost 4 miles long over 22 fences, one almost 5' high. This year's was held on Saturday & wa..."I keep forgetting about the world of horses! There are so many worlds out there! "Senior Senator", a suggestive name for a nasty horse. LOL I'll bet there are a lot of jokes about that!
Mary JL wrote: "... In Omaha we have our share of tornado alerts and warnings. One day ,the tornado alert sounded. I went to the basement/laundry room. ... a 60 foot tree had been yanked out of the ground... I never want to get any closer than that to a tornado!!"Yes, Mary JL, that was close enough! One time a large old tree in front of our driveway split in half, crashed to the ground, and missed our car by a few feet. We were lucky we weren't standing there. No wind that day either. I guess it was the old tree's time to go.
Mary JL wrote: "Nina: We did not have air conditioning in our house until I was in college. We did have a screened in front porch made by my dad and grandpa. Dad would open all the screens and put a box fan at bo..."Mary JL, we used fans too, of course. We had a big one in the attic. We'd pull down the drop-down stairs, run the big fan, and it would pull the cool air in through all the open windows while the hot air was drawn into the attic.
Werner wrote: "I grew up in Iowa in the 50s and 60s, the summers were very hot, but we didn't have air conditioning, so I never got used to it. ... Growing up in the Midwest, I always heard about tornadoes, and experienced plenty of tornado drills, watches, and warnings. But the only time I was ever actually in one was in 1990, when our house (and much of the rest of Petersburg, IN) was totaled by one..."How awful, Werner. I had never heard about your house being totaled. Glad you weren't hurt! A small tornado once blew through Mahopac, NY, where we lived. We were away and our in-laws drove up to check our house which was OK. It was very unusual for that part of downstate NY to be hit by a tornado. You never know!
Nina wrote: "We had a window air conditioner in the fifties and not all house conditioning until 1959. We also had a screened in porch where we slept in the summer. Lots of houses built in the thirties in Kansa..."Nina, I like the name, "sleeping porches"! Sounds wonderful. When I was a kid we had an open porch. We put a hammock out there one summer and I was looking forward to sleeping out there on the hammock. However, as the night grew cooler, the cool air came up through the hammock and woke me up. I moved indoors very quickly! LOL
Funny, but I can still feel the cool air I felt that night! :)
Joy wrote: "Glad you weren't hurt!" We were pretty glad too, Joy! And glad your place wasn't damaged in Mahopac's tornado.
Thanks, Werner. As they say, we both lived to tell about it. LOL
Hi Joy. Thanks for your message. I just realized (I should have already known this) that one of my sports heroes Jimmer Fredette is from Glens Falls. Did you by any chance know him while he was living there?I am currently re-reading The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I really admire his writing style.) And I am working on a follow-up to my book A Splash of Kindness.
John wrote: "Hi Joy. Thanks for your message. I just realized (I should have already known this) that one of my sports heroes Jimmer Fredette is from Glens Falls. Did you by any chance know him while he was liv..."Hi John. No I didn't know Jimmer.
Good luck to the follow up of A Splash of Kindness !
Hello, everyone! Guess what! I am writing this message using my new kindle fire tablet! Ican,t figure out how to star the word kindkle with a. Capital le t tter. As. You can see, i am having trouble using the keyboard.Anyway, this is a start. I think i will go back to my trustee laptop! Lol
Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group
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