NUDES!!!!

 

Seriously, what did you think I was going to post?

Fine Art Tuesday

 

"Angels of Holy Hill". Do you see the angels?

Don Kloetzke was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1951 and died in 2023.

His father was in the military and he lived in many different locations throughout his childhood but retained a special affection for Wisconsin's outdoors and the Green Bay Packers.

His paintings are notable for their detail and highly believable backgrounds. 

P.S. The angels in the first image are "Snow Angels" left by children in the snow, right-foreground.
 

Running, moving furniture, mowing and burning brush

Running notes

My first half-mile was slow. I clocked it at 7:30 (15 minute miles).

The two-mile mark was 26:22 and the 2.6 mile time was 33:35. 

My plan is to run the 2.6 miles and walk the last 0.4 miles as a cool-down. While 2.6 miles looks like an arbitrary number, it isn't. From the end of my driveway, up the center of the road and around the block to a very large White Oak on the top of a hill is precisely 2.58 miles. Rounding gives me 2.6 miles.

The time it takes to run 2.6 miles at a 12 minutes/mile pace is 31 minutes. If you take out my very slow first half-mile, I was running at a 12:25 minutes/mile clip.

Moving furniture

Two hours by the clock. One hour of actual hands-on furniture.

Pulling weeds and lifting weights

Neither happened.

I pushed a lawn mower for 89 minutes. I was shooting for two hours but I felt a sudden sharp pain in my left, Achilles' tendon.

An academic would have puzzled over the phenomena. He would have opened up scholar.google.com and performed multiple queries. He would have posted rambling essays on his Facebook page. If he noticed many insects boiling out of the ground at his feet, he might have been inclined to snap photos and use an app to determine the species. If his degrees were in the social-sciences, he might have asked them if their aggression was due to childhood trauma while lecturing them on the evils of systemic humanistic biases.

I, on the other hand, am a redneck and this isn't my first rodeo. I SPRINTED out of the area pushing the mower ahead of me. Yellow-jackets are assholes and run in gangs. It is a good day, relatively speaking, when you only get stung by one of them.

After popping into the house to down two Diphenhydramine (Benedryl), I dragged a hose and flopped the end of it down by the hole that the Yellow Jackets were buzzing around. Then I turned the hose on.

Everybody has their favorite method for eradicating ground-nesting bees. Mine is to drown them. I flood the hole for half an hour and then I back off on the rate of flow. I will turn it off completely in the morning. 

Plan B

B is for burning

I burned brush for two hours. My enthusiasm for pushing a lawn mower  or pulling weeds had evaporated.

The branches from the Honey Locust tree that have been drying for three weeks needed to go away. They burned but it was with all of the enthusiasm of a kid going to the dentist.

Two adult beverages were consumed while watching the fire and contemplating the wickedness in the universe. 

German Engineering

 

Weed processing facility liquidation

Short notice Liquidation sale. Ends this evening.

Cash-flow issues are probably the #1 cause of businesses failing. Buying items in bulk because of the huge discount and "I will use them someday" bites a lot of business owners. Part of the issue is that if you need to generate cash, you get pennies back on what you originally paid when you try to resell them on secondary markets.

 

Chalk that up to "Practice"

Yesterday, I replaced the battery in a wristwatch.

I opened it up about a week ago. It required LA1130 or 389 batteries. I could spend $5 locally to buy a single battery or purchase on-line and spend $3.99 to get ten. So I bought on-line. 

The batteries showed up yesterday. I opened up the heavy-duty, gallon, zip-lock baggie that I had stored the disassembled watch in. Then I went to work.

Everything went as well as can be expected. I lost one of the four screws that held the back on. That was in spite of using a ceramic donut magnet to hold them.

Miraculously, I found that tiny screw on the carpet. The screw was about 1/8" long and I need tweezers to hold them upright while starting them with the microscopic Philips screwdriver.

The watch face illuminates. All the buttons worked....

and that is when I noticed that the buckle hardware that is supposed to be on  one end of the wristband was not there.

I guess we can chalk that one up to "Practice". I still have 9 batteries.

Summer is winding down

Some spinach seedlings.

The last several days have been misty and hazy. Nothing is drying out. The grass keeps growing.

Our biggest project of the summer (should) be wrapped up this week. After that, I can turn my attention to maintaining the deer stands. 

I expect to start seeing more of Quicksilver this week.

Random tip

This showed up in our church bulletin. This tip is probably most valuable for people who are living alone. We used to carry lists in our wallet/purse of the prescriptions (brand-name, chemical name, dosage, frequency) for each of our kids. One of our boys was a frequent-flier in terms of E-Room visits and having a legible list the staff can photocopy saves time and aggravation.

Today's Work-ticket

Run 2 miles (stretch goal 3 miles)

Help Southern Belle move some furniture

Lift

Purchase 1/2 yard fill sand

Mow some of the yard if the grass dries out

Pull some weeds

I am 99% sure that I am not going to get all of these done. 

The difference between Democrats and Democratic Socialists