Greg In The Desert

It’s been rainy in Rio Rancho the last few days and it looks like there could still be a few more days of rain. I’ve been too busy to sit down and write blog posts but that should change soon.

I haven’t kept up with replacing the roof shingles that blew off in the spring winds and managed to get a hole in the roof. Yesterday I noticed dripping from the garage ceiling and I found that the tar paper under one missing shingle had given out causing the leak. I was not pleased with having to get on a wet roof to make the repairs.

Before the rain started I have been doing quite a bit of work outside including some landscaping and laying pavers, I hope to have a blog post written about that later.

Thanks to the high humidity, available resources and delay of my travel plans I was able to get the self leveling concrete installed in the master bathroom. Although it didn’t come out perfect it’s good enough and moves the project along to some things I an do by myself.

Some of the weeds in the backyard were cleared and burned (rain makes for good burn days in the City of Rio Rancho). I have a new visitor to the house and found about 8 months worth of missing blog posts I had to manually post to the site. It’s now too muddy and wet to do further outdoor work so I hope to have some blog posts about these events up in the next week.

A few days ago I wrote about Google using goats to control grass on their property. Techcrunch didn’t seem impressed and was worried about the jobless human mowers.

The city of Mesa, Arizona has used 70 goats for the last 50 months to clear vegetation around a water reclamation plant. They expect to save $10,000 by using goats.

Besides being cost effective, it reduces the use of fossil fuels, toxic chemicals and pesticides. It’s a pollution-free way of ridding the three retention ponds of compromising vegetation, Satter said.

Goats’ bodies break down plants in such a way that they won’t grow back when it becomes waste, making the job more permanent than what a machine can do.

It’s not mentioned how many people it took to mow the grass with machines vs. taking care of goats. I suspect goats are more labor intensive that mowers.

Annie, the family dog, died today. Technically she belonged to my sister but lived with my parents. She is a mutt from the pound and was probably abused.

They took her to the Vet a few days ago and she had respiratory problems and maybe cancer. She had lied down on the floor near the front and passed away. Her hearing went out a few years ago so it’s not unusual for her to sleep and not wake up for anything.

I estimate her to be around 15 years old, maybe older. She was with us for around 12 years.

Moonlight over Spruce Hole, originally uploaded by gregjsmith.

I completed my third yurt trip and it was by far the best. The basic concept here is that we cross country ski to a Yurt and spend a few days away from the world. The Spruce Hole yurt is nice because it has bedding and is fairly large. The yurt itself is located in Colorado just across the boarder from Chama, NM. All we really need to carry is food, drink, clothes and personal hygiene items. There were four other people besides my self on this trip and we stayed for three nights.

This is usually the only cross country skiing I do, I’m mostly a down hill guy. Plus I’m not in any great shape and I therefore tend to be the slow one of the group. Caring a 30 to 40 pound pack doesn’t help. The first several hundred yards of the trail are all up hill. It is grueling work getting there but worth it once we finally arrive.

This particular trip was planned around the full moon. The highlight was our moonlight ski in the nearby Spruce Hole meadow. The moon was incredibly bright and blue. It was an incredible experience that I can’t begin to describe with my pathetic words and pictures. Speaking of which, taking pictures in moonlight requires a tripod which I didn’t have. Yet I managed to take a few decent pictures. You can find all the pictures I took on my Flickr set. They are all geotagged so you can view them on a map.

Wow, I’m really ruining my reputation as a Apple Fan Boy and early adopter. I didn’t buy the first iPhone when it first came out (instead waited for the 16GB version) and I haven’t purchased a iPhone 3G. I had no desire to stand in line for one on launch day. I’m not really a people person and I’m not interested in socializing with strangers.

I did look into it last week. The Albuqueruque Apple Store was out and while I was in Portland for a few days, all three of those stores were out.

I can live with the EDGE network speeds. The killer feature for me is the GPS. Since there are no real GPS realtime navigation software out for the iPhone, yet, I think I will hold out. If I hold out long enough a 32GB version might be available.

Last year it started with spiders. Big scarry looking spiders. All harmless. Then I had Scorpions. 7 to be exact. I had big gaping holes between the door jamb and wall leading out to the garage. I filled those gaps with expanding foam. I also weather sealed the front door. I’ve had no further problems spiders or scorpions since then, but that was near the end of summer.

This summer I’ve only had a few spiders, nothing like last year and so far no scorpions. But I have had crickets and crickets and more crickets. My weapon of choice is the Dyson. For several nights in a row, I vacuumed up around 6 crickets at a time.

The thing about crickets, they seem to hang out where they came into the house. I was finding most of them coming from one area of the living room. After a few days, I started looking around and found a big crack between the fireplace and the wall. There were even crickets in it. I filled all the cracks around the fire place with expanding foam. This has blocked off the main cricket highway.

Now I’m finding a few in the hallway. I’m finding at least two a night under the refrigerator. The other thing about crickets is the male makes the chirping noise to attract the female. Whenever a male is chirping, there’s almost always a female nearby.

It’s been about 10 days since I set up my aquarium and I’ve suffered 2 losses. After a few days I did the testing for ammonia, nitrides and nitrates and everything looked good. I put in two Bala Sharks, they died almost instantly.

What a waste. As far as I can tell, my test kit chemical had degraded and wasn’t giving accurate readings. I bought a new test kit which showed a high nitrite level. The tank has since settled down and I proceeded to add more fish.

I first added two White Clouds (Tanichthys albonubes), which really are not tropical fish but minnows that come from cool streams in China. They don’t seem to mind the tropical environment and they were really cheap. Next I added a Gold Gourami and a Blue Grurami, both which are doing just fine.

AAAGHHHH. I woke up to this a few days ago, a roof tile had blown off in some winds. It wasn’t just this one, a whole bunch of them can be found around the property.

I don’t get it. After I made some repairs last year, they seemed to hold up. In fact it help up through hurricane force winds. I’m glad we just got winds and not rain. This weekend is suppose to be warm, I plan to get up there and make more more roof repairs.

[Update 3/9/07 12:50 PM] replaced the shingles today. I think I have discovered the failure mode. Some of the staples appear to be popping out. Even just a little bit of the staple popping out is enough to lift up the shingle, giving the wind something to grab onto. I inspected all the shingles and found several others that were sticking up. Removed those staples and replaced them with nails.

I guess I don’t have a infestation. After my last post I went to the nearest Home Depot and found some Glue Traps. They are a platform with a ultra sticky substance that’s suppose to attract scorpions, spiders and other bugs. I’d prefer to stay away from the nuclear option of spraying the place if possible. Besides, scorpion’s are difficult to kill with standard pesticides anyhow.

Since putting them down I haven’t seen as single scorpion, which surprised me. Until a few days ago, I found a small one in the glue trap. I’m not sure where they are coming from but It’s pretty clear they are coming from the north end of the house. They could be coming up from around the heater ducts in the floor or possibly from the master bathroom where the roots were coming up, i haven’t finished demolishing that yet.

In either case I’ve learned to live with the fact that they are there. In fact, they are a excellent predator and will eat centipedes, another nasty insect that people find in their homes in New Mexico. So what would I rather have, scorpion’s or centipedes? Scorpion’s turn out to be the lesser of two evils.

A few nights ago I found scorpion number 4. After vacuuming him up I quickly found scorpion number 5. I’ve seen 5 more scorpions in the last month than I have seen in my life, and I’ve lived in Arizona and New Mexico all my life.

I hope this is just a natural reaction to the rain we have had. I put down some glue traps a few days ago and so far no hits. I also haven’t seen any bugs, except for a few crickets, in a few days.