A little squirrely
Th squirrels are back!
Could not believe they would climb the sunflower plants and eat the flowers off of every one. Their weight would tilt them over halfway to the ground, and shooing them away only slows the eventual demise of all the flowers.
I put the trap back out baited with peanuts. But they wanted only the flowers. So I cut the last of them and put them in the trash and finally, they went for the peanuts. Caught four of them in one day and deposited all down by the river in the high rent district.
They will be happy there.
They just have to keep an eye out for the Osprey.
The site is working a little better. But I've heard that the Moon of Alabama site has been down and the comment section of Sonar21 speaks of other sites having difficulties and Cloudflare messages being somewhat in common.
This afternoon we received a text message from Xfinity (our internet provider) that our service could experience some outages due to some problems with maintenance, or some such.
I'm not the conspiracy freak (hiccup) people would suspect I am, but something seems amiss.
Just when we get news that some new Israeli software AI that can access any phone is being released for use in America.
Naw, I'm not suspicious.
At least our government is keeping us safe with soldiers in the streets and blowing up boatloads of drug terrorists.
Thread is open. What's going on?
Comments
Good morning e1. I have noticed a seeming absence of
squirrels for a few months now with a resumption of activity just recently. Perhaps moms have been busy caring for the young until just recently, but that doesn't accont for the absence of males and those moms would still need to do some self feeding. Dunno. Here, last week or two the great horns and screeches have been out and about. Maybe the squirrels were adopting crepuscular activity to avoid hawks and road traffic and have been driven back to daylight living by the owls, but that seems too smplistic.
It's raining here today, good for the garden, bad for the outdoor chores and such.
Israel has attacked Quatar, and possibly Tunisia. It appears more and more that they have carte blanche to attack anybody and everybody, perhaps China or the Rus need to send in an aid flotilla.
be well and havae a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Have to agree with you, EL
Nobody on planet Earth are safe from the Israeli or US forces if you cross them. Either with direct missile attack ( boat people), proxy attack (Ukrainian drone attack on Putin) or clandestine drone hits (Maduro assassination attempts).
Nobody is safe , anywhere in the world.
And this has all been created by the American peoples' apathy.
Reply button doesn't seem to work anymore.
Thanks for the post.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Reply button often has a srious time lag, but does
work. I always have more than one c00 tab open at any time, and I find if I do something like hit reply, clicking over to one of my other tabs often jump starts it.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Good morning, e1!
I have pecan trees at home and at the office, and no shortage of squirrels. They get active when the temperature drops. They are focused on gathering pecans.
I hope your rich neighbors stock up on peanuts.
Something is hinky on virtually all alt media sights. Not even small content sites are spared.
I have been bitching lately that I am not, nor will I ever be, an Israeli. Yet, they pretty much own us all. It gives them lots of targets to spit on.
Enjoy your day, ad thanks for the squirrely OT, friend!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I looked out my window
yesterday and lo and behold, three adolescent raccoons eating my peanut bait.
Gonna need a bigger bag o' bait.
Does your refutation of not being an Israeli considered Antisemitic? Asking for a friend.
Thanks for stopping by.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Well,
I am not Jewish, not married to a Jew, have never set foot there, and don't intend to. I guess being an USian gentile and not desirous of supporting their government with tax dollars that should be spent in my country could be considered antisemetic if a person were delusional. Hope that clarifies things for your friend!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I have also noticed differences
in squirrel activity here. In past years, roughly a quarter of my tomatoes went to the squirrels. This year, I have not yet had any swiped at all, and it is finally being a good crop- we started being able to pick and eat in August. Right now, we have about 50 that are perfectly ripe and ready to be turned into sauce, over and above our daily salad/side dish needs. The determinate Bush Early Girls are heavy producers! It is very strange that the squirrels have not been hassling us. We still see them, but they are staying far away in the trees. Curious.
Next year, I need to start the tomatoes from seed much earlier. We can't afford to have that much of the usable growing season go by to wait for plants.
It is bizarre to watch the Zionist entity marauding in such a completely unconstrained manner. The neighboring countries in the mideast are being unbelievably passive in the face of it: at some level, they have to realize that this will not stop until it is stopped by force. I know that they live in fear of the US now, what with our completely braindamaged leadership. But the fact that so little action is being taken, even at the performative political/UN level, is very troubling.
Oh, well. Whenever the big nuclear exchange finally occurs, I hope that they get turned into the same kind of fused-silica parking lot that my neighborhood will. It would be an outrage of cosmic heft if the US, Russia, and China were all to destroy one another, and they were to emerge untouched to scoop up all the the newly-radioactive Lebensraum they desire so desperately...
I have my little 1-gram Trinitite sample back in the gamma spectrometer for a nice long (3-6 month) run. I further improved the shielding to suppress the normal background radiation, and the X-ray fluorescence from cosmic/terrestrial sources, and sure enough, I can now just barely detect the last teeny undecayed bit of 60Co- along with the very obvious 137Cs, 152Eu and 241Am left over from that very first detonation 80 years ago. The half-life of 60Co is 5.26 years, so it is well decayed at ~35 half-lives- but astonishingly, I can still see it with my consumer-grade gear. It should never be forgotten that the leftover fission daughters and neutron-activation products from playing with those gadgets are persistent little mothers.
Truly, nobody is safe, anywhere in the world. It should not be this way, but it would be foolish not to admit the truth of that statement. I wish that we could somehow fix it.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Sounds like you got it going on
there, USF.
Been thinking about a Geiger counter for years now, but then I think "What for?" And then forget about it.
But then the recent revelations about radioactive shrimp compels me to reconsider. Your mention of "consumer grade" equipment sparks my imagination.
I've never known squirrels to eat tomatoes. Will have to keep that in mind.
I know they like gas lines on cars. Have had two experiences with that.
Thanks for your input and have a great day.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
It is a bizarre hobby of mine,
after all these years of being a student of the Cold War in all its perverse glory.
If you were to buy a detector, I can highly recommend the Radiacode 103. It is built in Cyprus from a Russian design, and is relatively inexpensive (~$300). But it is insanely sensitive for its modest cost, and as a scintillation counter, it allows the user to do gamma spectrometry (if desired), to actually identify the radionuclides that are doing the radiating.
Most people use it as a simple Geiger counter, and it does a good job at that for most of the radionuclides of interest. It is gamma-only, so it is not very useful for the alpha- and beta-emitters (like 90Sr and so on)- other detectors are better there. But it is very good for finding gamma emitters in even small quantities. And the 137Cs that is the contaminant in the shrimp is a great example of that sort of thing. Only serioous nerds like me will bother with this, but with a scintillation detector, you can identify radionuclides by the energies of the emitted gamma rays.
I built my original spectrometer around some much more expensive hardware, and it scared the shit out of the firefighters during our house fire, when it crashed through the floor of my 2nd-story office into the basement (that was the ~250lb of Pb shielding I'd used). I'd warned them about it, but it was still fairly spectacular... I originally built it to measure the 137Cs in Japanese nori after Fukushima- that was fun.
I built my current one around the Radiacode (and this one is in the ground-level garage on my workbench this time!). It has amazing performance for vastly less money. The instrument itself weighs all of 2 ounces, and is the size of a pocketknife. I like taking one out when we are going junkin' at the thrift stores, and using it to find radioactive Fiestaware- that stuff fetches good money amongst the collectors on eBay... (;-) Prospecting for a new age!
Here's an example spectrum, for the curious fellow nerd. The is a one-month run on 226Ra, sourced from the radium lume painted onto an old watch hand, probably less than 10 micrograms in total. 214Bi (a natural decay daughter in the U/Th decay chain) is the highlighted radionuclide- you can see many of its emission lines very easily...
On edit- yes, it is a fun hobby. Fun! I particularly enjoyed wandering the parking lot at the Home Depot that was built on the old Denver Radium Corp. superfund site at I-25/Santa Fe, looking for the really hot spots. Or Rocky Flats. Or going out to Grand Junction, because that whole *town* is a serious hot spot, about which I've posted before.
But I never claimed to be sane, after all... (;-)
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
LOL
I can just imagine you walking around the parking lots with headphones on lookin' all serious and intent and scaring the shit out of passersby. Ha Ha
Security! Security! What's that guy doing?
Security: Umm, sir you are scaring our customers, can you go looking for whatever you are lookin for somewhere else?
LOL
Thanks for the equipment tips.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Nah, I'm very stealthy
about this hobby. I carry mine in a pocketknife pouch on my belt. The instrument has a vibe motor as a signal (like a cellphone), in addition to optional blinkylights and the obligatory clicky-beepy things. I can silence everything, and set the alarm thresholds to give me just a quick buzz at one level, and then a continuous buzz at a somewhat higher level, so I can just stroll along and let my belt tell me when to whup it out and have a look at the display. Like walking by the smoke detector aisle in the store: the 241Am sources in many consumer smoke detectors are easy to detect when walking by.
It is also always fun when somebody who has just had nuclear medicine done wanders by. I can detect a person with a recent 99Tc or PET scan from 10 feet away for the first couple of days afterwards, and when my ex-boss had some 131I seeds implanted to perform a thyroid ablation, I could detect him in the next office over for several weeks, until they had decayed enough (half-life of 8 days) to blend back into the background. Needless to say, he was not amused.
Another fun thing is to take it out into the countryside and to look for hot fences. The horse people around here just love to build the fences around their properties using cheap old used well-drilling pipe, after it is retired. Well, a lot of it is cheap because it is radiologically hot, whether from having drilled through U/Ra-bearing rock layers and not properly cleaned, or having had nuclear well logging equipment used inside it during the drilling (which can light up certain elements in the alloy by neutron activation). And to think that some of them wonder why that nice white paint on their fence turns yellow so quickly... There's one place south of here that sets off my second level alarm when driving by on the highway, from 25 yards away.
A piece of Fiestaware will hit the first level alarm from 2 feet, so I can just pull it out and wave it in my hand as I browse, and know when to investigate further. Otherwise, my wife wouldn't go with me. She is not amused, either. (;-)
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Going to make a quick run
to the meat market (no not that kind) as it's senior discount day.
Will be AFK ( is that still used?) for short while.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Hi e1!
We don't have any squirrels here near this apartment complex. Mostly because there are no trees to speak of. Just some shrubs planted too close to the walls to be allowed to grow. There are some large trees off in the distance. The sunrise behind them this morning was beautiful. Two days ago we had an unbelievable thunderstorm with many lightning strikes close by. I unplugged the laptop.
Please forgive me for posting on this ICE raid again in Ellabel GA, but Saager did a great rant on this topic, describing how dumb it was, and how it fit in with a generally disastrous Trump foreign policy.
This DN video below with prominent Vietnamese American author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, discusses the relationship between and among Trump's "truth" posts re: Apocalypse Now, the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians in that war, the US slaughter of native Americans, and the current genocide against Palestine.
There is veritable cottage industry of right wing social media posts and youtubes ostensibly from South Korean right wing sources blaming the Lee Administration for the clusterf..k in Georgia at the Hyundai plant. Ironically, one of them noted the heated response of Koreans to the insult was intensified by the language and imagery used to report on the ICE round up of Koreans here in the US to build a factory to employ US workers. That being the use of expressions like Korean "forced labor" and "child labor" and other unfounded accusations in addition to video of multiple shackles being placed on those detained and dragging them off like criminals. This brought to mind the bitter experiences of slave labor endured by Koreans carried out by the Japanese during the colonial period. Also, this same right wing commentator blamed President Lee of all people for the "Kunta Kinte like scenes from Roots."
(Source- JTBC News 8.5.19) Korean collective memory of their own slave labor experience.
Somewhere I saw a poll that suggested that there are 30 percent among South Koreans that don't blame the US. This is somewhat hard to believe, but it could be true. These are the same people that supported Yoon's plans to literally exterminate the democratic party National Assembly members because they were Chinese communist agents. The level of manipulation of cultural stereotypes is too sophisticated in the messaging campaign, it can't be by accident, and is intended to motivate the domestic racists in the US and regime change elements in South Korea.
MAGA’s traveling circus comes to Korea
The cottage industry of US supporting internet trolls no matter what on social media in South Korea has to be, because even the conservative media, like Donga Media, always consistently favoring right wing views hasn't gone that far, and has been somewhat critical of the US action.
One report I read suggested that S.Koreans detained in Georgia, voluntarily repatriated, may still be subjected to a 5 year reentry ban, and that some might not even be released from detention. More Trump bullying going on here.
語必忠信 行必正直
Wasn't it Trump
under his first term the Hyundai plant came into existence, under the guise of bringing jobs back to America?
Thanks for stopping by.
Have dental appt. AFK.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Back from dentist
Seems we have a new dental hygienist. Old one retired apparently, she wasn't that old. And it was the third one in 30 years too.
I asked the new one why they retire so fast and she said the job was really hard on the body and especially the hands and wrists.
I didn't know that. Now have a renewed appreciation for dental hygienists
Anyway, all scraped and polished and no latent problems detected. So I'm back with a fresh twinkly scow.
Whad I miss?
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Squirrel Removal
There are only two ways I know of getting rid of squirrels. The first I don’t recommend unless you are desperate, like having them crawl into your car and causing over $1000 worth of damage to your wiring system or crawl in your walls causing your electricity to go out. Get some rat poison and slab on some peanut butter. Hated to do it but the balance of nature has gotten so far off around here that the squirrel population needed thinning out.
The other way is to get a barn cat. Find a feline rescue and they could probably set you up with one. They will almost certainly not be a pet but that’s why farms had cats. A squirrel is just a fancy rat. I got lucky. I was looking into getting one when someone dumped a 20-pound fixed male around my place. I fed him and he stayed. He’s so friendly that he’ll sit in your lab. He had to have been someone’s previously. The only problem I have is that he does not like being confined. He does not want to go in the house, no matter the weather. I even bought him one of those little houses they sell for feral cats. He’s never used it. He has a nest under the porch. Since I’ve had him for over a year and since he stays outside, I really need to get him a rabies shot. I just don’t know if I can get him in a carrier. But the only squirrels I now see are far away from my house.
Nothing like a good mouser
But there are a few feral cats in the tract and I still have lotsa squirrels.
Besides, E2 won't let me do harm to them (and I don't have the stomach for it either). so I trap them in a humane cage and run them down to the river in my electric Leaf to hold expenses down. I usually catch 40+- in the spring, and I'm up to 5 so far this week.
Costs less than a nickel to run them to the river and sometimes I throw a fishing line in while I'm there.
Fall Chinook season is close.
Thanks for stopping by, have a great day.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.