Bugs

Eeek!

A couple of evenings ago I was sitting in front of the PC in the guest room when I heard Donna squeal my name loudly from the living room. When I got to the living room, she told me that a giant spider just ran across the floor in front of her and dashed down the hallway towards where I was.

I didn’t see anything when I came down that hallway, so I turned on the flashlight on my phone and started looking for the spider. Under anything, on the floors and even walls. Nothing. Donna’s sense of scale is skewed a lot smaller than mine, anything over a 1/2″ in diameter to her is giant. To get labeled giant by me the spider has to be at least 2 inches.

After my fruitless search I wanted to get a more accurate size from her, so I asked her if it was as big as the laptop’s mouse figuring if I went over the top, she would give a me a much smaller estimate. But I was wrong, she said, “Yeah, that big.” There were no further sightings that night.

Last night I was in the kitchen making her evening sleepy tea when from the living room I heard her cry, “There it is again!” I popped out and said, “Which way did it go?” “She pointed and said, “By the desk.” I hustled back into the kitchen to grab a couple paper towels and went over to the desk. Crap, there was a large brown mass on the floor pushed up in the corner of the desk and the wall. Well okay, that is kind of giant. I grabbed it with the paper towels and squeezed to kill it.

She was wrong as to it being as large as the laptop’s mouse, it was maybe half that size. She was also wrong that it was a spider, when I opened the paper towel, I realized it wasn’t a spider at all, it was an honest to God mouse of the rodent variety.

78,000 Dead Little Bugs

While reading over on the Miata.net Forums to keep my Miata knowledge up to date I found a post that peaked my interest on LED headlights. Turns out they have now crept down to plug and play at affordable levels. Some one posted a link to a set on Amazon that was a mere $40. I took the bait and ordered a set. They arrived yesterday, so I spent 20 minutes in the garage putting them in.

This called for a drive in the dark, so a few minutes before the sun would set (which put it behind the Cascades, so no late evening glare) we backed out of the driveway and made a nice little 20 mile loop, around the south end of town through farm lands and along a bit of the west side the Upper Klamath Lake. The new headlights were not a holy sh*t, these are a fantastic upgrade, but the whiter color light was pleasing and they did seem marginally brighter. Maybe I’ll go ahead and get the high beams as well.

I would swear I’ve mentioned it here before (I looked and couldn’t find it), but I wish we could have the Masters Miata Club’s Bug Splat Rally here. Every time we take any kind of evening drive here, the front of the car returns literally plastered with bug carcasses and this would solve the usual lack of insects we experienced back in the south. Of course the bad thing would be picking out the car for the most bugs prize. I bet when we got home last night there were 78,000 splatted bugs on the nose of the Miata.

Coincidentally, the CTBNL’s odometer turned over 78000 somewhere on our drive.

Cicada Siren Song

Remember last Friday when I said I had two things on my honey-do list before I put down the garage floor tiles? The tiles were installed on Sunday and those two items are done, but for the life of me I can’t remember what day I did them. Might have been Saturday afternoon or heck even Monday after work, I do remember it was during the day.

I don’t have my own little shop to work in, so I often do little projects either in the driveway or on the back deck. For cutting up that junk wood, the deck was used, because this way I could lay the long pieces of wood on the seat that runs around half the deck, stick the wood out about a foot, step on it and use the circular saw to cut segments off the the end.

The 12 feet of junk wood from behind the plant started life as a box top, so along with the 1/2 thick pieces I needed for my test, there was a border of 1″ x 3″ wood strips as support that had nails spaced about 4 to 5 inches all around. Rather than try and remove the approximate hundredty-million twisted nails from the 24′ of wood, I just hammered the bent ends down flat. Because of the nails I had to cut the 1″ x 3″ wood into about 60 pieces total.

After a little while I got a nice rhythm going; cut a couple pieces, release pressure on my foot, slide the board forward, repeat until done. About halfway through cutting up the second 6′ piece of wood a very large black bug dive-bombed by the front of my face and angled down towards my right hand. I let go of the trigger on the saw and dropped it to the deck.

There was a female cicada trying to mate with still spinning blade. After a few seconds the insect realized its mistake and flew back whence it came. I finished that board and started on the third 6′ piece and wouldn’t you know, my horny cicada took another shot at the saw. I dropped it on the deck again. This time when the bug flew back into its tree, I went inside the house and got my can of Raid Wasp & Hornet spray for the next time.

Sure enough, as I was finishing cutting the third piece, my love struck bug returned. I dropped the saw, grabbed the can and fired off a stream of insecticide at her. I’m not sure if I hit the cicada with any of the stream or she finally learned that the sound of a circular saw rhythmically cutting 1″ x 3″ pieces of wood was not a male of her species, but I cut the full 6′ length of the last piece without a return fly-ins.