Snakes

Lon spied this recently-shed snake skin while he was watering what passes for our landscaping.

This snake is over 5 feet long. Probably a black rat snake.

A closer look at the head. The holes for eyes were quite visible.

Someday I’d love to watch a snake shed its skin.

[Update early June: We now have a second snake skin of about the same size about 10 feet away from the first.]

Is this the same snake that doomed our old truck? David came across this snake skin when he was going to use our truck while we were in India, but Maria convinced him to leave it (the truck) alone. By the time I got back two months later, mice had taken over the engine compartment and I never could get the truck started again. Eventually, this truck was turned into NPR programming.

Reviewing my old photos, I find that I have pictures of black rat snakes almost every year. Maybe this snake explains why the baby bluebirds disappeared from their nest box earlier this week. Haven’t seem mom and dad bluebird around either.

David has other connections to snakes:

In grad school at Carnegie Mellon, David worked on snake robots.

The snake robots can climb poles and the inside of pipes.

First World Problems

A rare all-text post ...


We lost power this morning. That's not necessarily a "First World" problem. But our generator didn't start. That, too, may not be a "First World" problem -- we had a battery back-up system in India, and almost every business and apartment block in India has a diesel generator ("DG").

No problem --the generator's start-up battery was dead, so we jump-started the generator with our truck battery. But as soon as we disconnected the truck, the generator stopped. Clearly our generator battery (replaced in December 2016, so it's quite new) was out of juice. We have a battery charger, but that requires power -- circular problem! (Even more frustrating, we have solar panels -- 3 KW worth -- but because they are on net-metering, they don't give us power during power outages.)

So we re-connected and kept the truck running to keep the truck battery charged.

But -- we ran out of gas in the truck (we knew we were low on fuel). No problem -- we have gasoline stored in cans for our lawn mower, brush mower, chainsaw, and weed whacker.

But -- those fuel cans were empty. So we siphoned out of the brush mower. (The only yard machine that had gas in it.)

But -- the truck was on a slope. The gas tank wouldn't deliver gas to the engine. The truck wouldn't start even though it had enough gas in the tank.

So we let the truck roll down the hill to a relatively level spot.

Success! The truck started. We quickly backed it up to the top of the slope and our level parking area, then put all three empty gas cans in the back of the truck and headed to town and a gas station. (Fortunately, we can just about coast from our house to the gas station -- a drop of about 500 ft over 5 miles.)

Now we have a full tank of gas in the truck and three full cans of gas for our yard machines.

After three hours, the electricity came back on. (A tree had fallen on the power lines between here and Clifton Forge.)

And we need to find out why our generator is not charging the start-up battery.  But that's for another day....

And we need to fill our gas cans before all three are empty!

Straw Bale Garden

Way back in 2012 we grew a few plants in a small "straw bale garden". Then we went to India in 2013 and never pursued the method further. Now we're trying again -- on a larger (but still modest) scale.

We set up 16 bales of straw (that's what fit into the 6 1/2 ft bed of our truck) along the edge of the fill that makes up an access route to the back part of our house. It's mostly sunny, but will have shade in the very late afternoon/evening.

Then we collected the compost we've been "aging" for the last year. We discard all of our plant-based food scraps along with some fall leaves and other garden debris into a compost heap. Each year we start a new pile and let the old one mature into compost. At the right edge of the photo you can see yesterday's project -- a replacement "fence" that holds our recycle and trash bins. The old one was pretty flimsy to begin with and had one too many an encounter with black bears. (The bears ignore the compost and go straight for the garbage, which is in bear-proof trash cans. They've never gotten into the trash cans, but they have bitten through the 1/4 inch thick plastic.)

We spread the compost on top of the bales, worked it into the top inch or two of the straw, then planted seeds. Lon then soaked the bales with the rainwater we collect off our shed.

These gnats are my summer nemesis. They may be tiny, but they bite and are way too easy to breathe in. This is the "sky" or "up" picture from my "Picture Post" -- a way of taking photos from the same vantage point over time.