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 (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.
Re: yellowjackets
ReplyDeleteMark nest hole with a rock. Wait til dark when they’re all back home. Pour 3 cups gasoline down the hole. Cover with the rock.
End of hive.
You must have a great water supply. If I ran a hose for an hour my well would run dry.
ReplyDeleteWith all due modesty, I do have a great water supply.
DeleteThe geology of Michigan resembles a stack of bowls. beneath 100' of dirt left behind by the glaciers. The edges of the bowls are exposed to ground-water percolating through the dirt. Pulling water out of the sandstone, 240 feet down is replaced by water force-fed by gravity from the edge of the bowl about 30 miles south of here.
Michigan gets about 30 inches of precipitation a year and is very flat. Much of the dirt left behind by the glaciers is gravel-sand.
We get dry-spells through the growing season, but in general we have a great supply of ground-water even though some areas are plagued by brine.
All in all a pretty good day!
ReplyDeleteYes, it was a very productive day.
DeleteI hasten to add that taking a couple of antihistimines and then drinking a couple of adult beverages in the three hours afterward is NOT recommended practice.
I rode horses most of my life. New England is rough country, rocky, trails are narrow, and heavily wooded. Encountering ground bees on a horse can be the ride of your life, not in a good way.
ReplyDeleteSouthern NH
I do not know how many species of wasp nest in the ground. I did not know that yellow jackets did. My experience with yellow jackets has been paper nests in unexpected locations, which benefit their ambush technique.
ReplyDeleteI also know that ground wasps can outrun a tractor if they get a head start. And they stay pissed off for a while.
Many years ago I read in a gardening book that no self-respecting gardener would ever go out in the garden without a bottle of essential oil of lavender in their pocket. And you know what? It works. Drop some oil on the bite and almost instantly the pain and/or itching goes away. If you continue to use it for a few days it helps the welt not get so large and go away quicker. I have used this in MI on a yellow jacket sting, and in FL on fire ant bites. A pick-your-own fruit and vegetable grower in FL places a rag soaked in vinegar on bites. I haven’t tried that.
ReplyDeleteI've been a proponent of gasoline down the hole, after dark, but have seen folks advocate laying a trail of potato chips up to the entrance as a way to attract and direct skunks to the nest, where they will dig it up and consume the residents ( or, at least, their larvae/pupae.
ReplyDelete