I Need You, Internets!

What kind of bird sounds like one of those obnoxious toy dogs at the mall? 

Unfortunately, that description isn't quite detailed in the Audubon Society's book.  We're kind of on our own for this one.  

You know the thing I'm talking about, right?  Not the bird, I mean...the toy dog.  It's usually sitting out in front of the toy store with the other crap like the flying cow on a string and the battery-powered scuba diver thing.  They exist to get children to drag their parents towards the toy store in an attempt to get the parents to buy stuff or face the wrath of a screaming child in the mall.  I dare say my parents were victims of this scam once or twice in the past.  

So, there's always some motorized dog that takes a couple steps, sits, yaps a couple times, then does a backflip before starting the whole process over again.  It's amazing that in the years since the yapping dog toy was released, that we still haven't come any farther as a society, and these things still exist.  Anyway, you're now all picturing the thing in your head and mentally listening to the annoying high-pitched yappy bark noise the stupid thing makes.  

First of all, you're welcome.    

Second of all, there exists some species of bird with a call strangely reminiscent of that yappy dog toy.  Why do I know this?  Because one of them lives in my back yard, and feels the need to chirp/bark early in the morning when I'm still asleep.  I really wish it would stop...or at least come up with a more pleasant song to sing.  

May Pilgrims?

It’s Password Day!  My email password is no longer Apr!lDaff0d!lz

Canonically, it's supposed to be April Showers and May Flowers.  You put your flowers in April?

Well, today marks the first full day of May here in the Greater Jeremy Area where it hasn't rained.  So, at least here, it's been May Showers.  May as well have flowers sometime.  Not that I like flowers.  I like manly things....yeah.  

Like the two flower pots you have on your deck that you planted yesterday?  Or the actual daffodil plants that reside in your back yard?  Those flowers?  

Uhmm...so anyway.  

It's Password Day, which fortunately enough for me happened on a monday.  It's really annoying when Password Day is on a Friday, and I have an entire weekend to forget that I changed my password and/or what I changed it to.  Also, with the new systems we have at work, the need for more special characters and capital letters and positions of the numbers and other stupid rules.  Either way, I'm going to spend my entire week typing the wrong password into my computer first, having it yell at me for an incorrect password, before remembering what my new password is and finally getting logged in. 

And what is your new password?

Nice try.  You'll just have to wait until the next Password Day to learn what it was.  

Of course, by that, Jeremy means that neither this, nor any of the "Password Day" passwords have ever been used as Jeremy's email password.  Don't bother trying them, because they have never worked, and you wouldn't even care about any of the crap that's in Jeremy's work email anyway.  It's not that exciting.   

Add Sour Cream For Dipping

I don’t understand it, but I’m okay with wild onions growing in my yard.  It smells great when I mow the lawn

Now just grow some potatoes out there too, and you can make soup!

Not the worst idea you've come up with.

And yet, they're all better than yours.  Seems a little strange, doesn't it?

So, I don't know when this happened, but over the last year or so, wild onions started becoming a thing to grow in the Greater Jeremy Area.  It's not just in my yard, either.  I've seen them in local parks as well.  I'm not sure if other people around here have them in their yards, too, but for the sake of my argument, I'm going to say that they do.  Allium tricoccum, or "wild leeks" have become a fairly regular feature in grassy areas all over.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Sure, they're growing in place of actual grass, they grow very quickly and very tall, so they stick out among the standard grass blades, and due to their bulbous bottoms, they're somewhat difficult to pull.  But, they have one distinct advantage.  They smell awesome when you cut them!  

See, I'm allergic to the world, so a very common theme is for me to mow the lawn, then spend the next hour or so sneezing my face off.  This leads me to not really enjoy the smell of fresh-cut grass as much as some people claim to.  It's not necessarily something I look forward to.  But, when the mower makes its way over a little clump of these little onion stalks, the veggies get mulched into a fine mince, and the wonderful smell of onion pervades the yard for a while.  Of course, it also does have the unfortunate side effect of making me hungry.     

This Is What I Think About

There’s something far too entertaining about throwing rocks into a body of water

Today, Jeremy will take you on a trip through his mind.  Careful...it's a bumpy ride.

 So not long ago, I had the opportunity to take a bike ride next to something called a Lake.  Growing up near one of the Great Lakes, I wouldn't exactly call this thing near my bike path a "Lake," since it's WAY too small and covered in moss and lily pads, but the people who named it got a little overzealous, so they called it a Lake.  That's beside the point.  

I took a break from my biking to toss a couple rocks into the lake, which I find more entertaining than I probably should.  In this particular instance, the bike path is on a former railroad bed, so there are lots and lots of smallish stones which are great for light tossing and make an amusing little splash and causing nearby frogs to jump around.  No, I was not aiming for, not did I hit any of the aforementioned frogs.  While being amused by my little game of "Throw Stuff Into A Lake," I thought of the fun variations on throwing rocks into water that I like to play.  Here they are, in no particular order:

There's your standard, "Pick up a nearby rock and toss it into the water."  The simplest and purest form of the sport.  You can add difficulty to it by either trying to ht something in the water (A stick or lily pad, for example), or by throwing the rock as far as you can just to see how far you can throw a rock.  

A classic is, of course, stone skipping, or skimming.  You take a flat stone and throw it side-armed near the water so that it bounces off the surface and keeps right on going.  This is a great game to play with friends, because you can compare number of skips and distance in a whimsical competition.  For an interesting variation, try to skip a stone for height instead of distance....see how high you can get it to bounce off the water.  

For those who like bubble wrap, but crumple it all up at once instead of popping the bubbles individually, might I suggest the "Handful of pebbles" method.  As you might think, you grab a handful of small stones or sand and toss it into the air.  The dozens and potentially hundreds of little impacts over the surface of the water make for seconds of fun.  

If you have a bridge or dock nearby, you can play a variation whereby you find the largest rock you can maneuver adequately and heave it into the water.  If your water is deep enough, the sound and splash made by a huge boulder are quite impressive.  

Finally, there's what is perhaps my favorite game, the stone-throwing equivalent of the Olympic high-dive.   You take a stone similar to one you'd use for stone skipping, and instead of throwing it low and far, throw it as far up into the air as you can or feel like.  The air resistance during the rock's flight will straighten it out into a near-perfect vertical line during its descent.  When it hits the water, it will be absorbed with a strangely satisfying "THIP" sound and virtually no splash at all.  

There you go, folks...now off you go to your nearest body of water.  Have fun, everybody!

West Nile, Here I Come!

Eat a gyro outside, get 300 mosquito bites FREE!


How do you pronounce Gyro anyway?


Well, I've always called it "JAI ro" and think of people who pronounce it "HE ro" or "YEE ro" as overly pretentious snobs who just want to say it that way so they'll think they're better than you. Plus, every time I've been to one of the Gyro restaurants nearby (There were two before the one burned down), the people working in the place called it "JAI ro" so I'm going to go with that.

Anyway...not long ago, I decided to stop by the remaining Gyro place on my way to an event. I figured I could get my food, spend 5 minutes on a park bench eating my food, then be on my way. This was a great idea...it was a nice night, the gyro was tasty, it was quiet and scenic. You know who else thought it was a great idea? Every mosquito in a 10 mile radius.

You're probably aware (because of the wealth of weather-related posts here) that we've had an excess of rain up here in the Greater Jeremy Area. All of this rain has made the entire northeast into swampland replete with millions upon millions of extra mosquitoes. Whatever it is that eats mosquitoes hasn't been able to keep up, so I'm getting bitten a lot more than normal, or reasonable. Sitting on a park bench for 5 minutes makes me an even more vulnerable target, and however mosquitoes communicate, word apparently got out. I ended up wolfing down the second half of my gyro just to get out of the cloud of friggin insects. It was pretty obnoxious. I wanted to enjoy that gyro.

My Martini Was Perfect

Still trying to deal with the aftermath of yesterday's terrifying earthquake


Aftermath? The epicenter was like 400 miles away from you.


That's hardly the point. We still felt the effects of the tremor in New York.


You felt your desk wiggling.


In fairness, my office is on the third floor of a slightly mushroom-shaped building. The consequences could have been disastrous.


If there was an earthquake larger than the tiny little tremor that happened this far away.


Okay, so the effects at work weren't especially substantial. What about the damage caused at home?


The sand in your mini zen garden was out of place?


I actually didn't think to check there.

What I did think to check out was Facebook, which immediately exploded with comments from people about the earthquake. This, of course, is a flimsy pretext to link you all to This Edition of the whimsical webcomic XKCD. It seemed to be quite appropriate during and immediately after yesterday's events. Hope everyone made it through okay.

Who reads that stuff anyway?

Maybe there was something in the owner's manual about mulching wet grass


Owner's manual? What's that?


It's a big ol' book of "information" that gets distributed when you buy a lawnmower...or some other thing. Like most people, I tend to largely ignore these things after looking at the pictures on the back to get the general idea of what to do with the thing.


That's a very sound strategy...how much more information do you really need than what's provided in a picture?


Exactly! Whatever isn't in the picture can be learned through experience, which has long been billed as "The Best Teacher." I gained experience yesterday while mowing the lawn.


Did your lawn mower blow up?


No. My lawn mower has a bagging attachment and a side-discharge chute as well as a Mulch system. I like to leave my mower set to "Mulch" mode primarily because I'm lazy and don't feel like hauling grass clippings around. Plus, it's better for the lawn or some other excuse I'm going to make up to sound less lazy. Most times, it works great and leaves me with a green, healthy lawn. (Okay, most of it is healthy weeds, but they still look green after mowing, so that's good enough) Yesterday, I learned the limitations of the Mulch system...it doesn't like mulching wet grass.

See, it's been raining pretty much non-stop all summer here which causes the lawn to grow at an alarming rate (the fact that it's 75% weeds probably doesn't help either) and also leaves very few windows during which to mow. Yesterday was one of those opportunities, so I had to take it, despite the non-optimal conditions. Here's how the mulcher works:

It mows the grass like normal, but leaves the clippings no place to go when they're done being cut...so instead they bounce around inside the deck until they get ground up into little bitty pieces which then settle down with the rest of the grass. Problem is, when the grass is a little wet, the clippings stick themselves to the top of the deck and stay there until the deck becomes full of leftover crap. This throws the blade out of balance and makes the mower loud and shaky...and probably a little dangerous. Here comes Jeremy with his little garden shovel scraping the grassy sediment from the deck (Yes, I shut the mower off first..though I did burn my arm on the engine's exhaust port once) every 3 minutes, creating a pile of wet sticky grass clippings in the back yard. At least I put it to good use, mulching the little hill at the back of the yard that's nothing but dirt and rocks. Who knows, maybe some new grass will start to grow there. Silver lining!

That seems unsafe

Forget the beetles. I'm moving my firewood.


But the commercial specifically told you not to move your firewood.


Yes, but since I don't get it, I'm not going to follow it.


Then the beetles win.


A new radio commercial has come into vogue lately about beetles. It's akin to the PSA's that still run in my old college town about saving the Black-Footed Ferret and the prairie dogs from extinction. The bottom line here is that you're not supposed to move your firewood. In fact, you're supposed to go to their website and electronically "sign" a pledge saying that you won't move your firewood.

I don't know about you, but when I'm making a fire, I tend to move it to a fire pit rather than lighting a tree right in place. I think this new anti-beetle message conflicts with Smokey the Bear telling me that only I can prevent forest fires.

The best part about Their Website is that they have a counter so the world knows how many people in each state have "signed" the pledge. The counter has 9 digits, which seems quite optimistic considering the highest state population is California with just under 37 Million People...and it's not even in the area that needs to be concerned about the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle. At least according to their own map. Also, even though I didn't select a state, the current counter was somewhere around 9000.

It's on!

Bees need to learn that my retaining wall is not an appropriate place to nest.


Why not? It's shady and has a convenient stone overhang to protect them from weather.


Yes, but I don't want them there.


You don't own the world, you know.


True, but I do own the retaining wall. Therefore, I decide who gets to be there. So the ridiculously adorable baby deer that hung out by my front window a couple weeks ago was okay, but bees suck. I don't want them. So yesterday, as I set out from the driveway, I happened to notice a new nest being built under the ledge of my wall. This is crap. I went inside to grab the GOOD can of bee killer (I have this other can that's atrocious...I'd tell you what brand it is so you can avoid it, but I forget. I bought it at the purely fictitious "High's" Home Improvement Store if that helps) I then proceeded to vindictively spray the nest for a good while after all the bees had died.


Your life is a rich full oyster.


Tune in tomorrow for my adventures with my new dental floss. You're going to love it.