Much to my surprise, given the awful polar vortex two weeks ago, and the cold dampness since, I was waiting for HK to warm up this morning, and happened to wander over to the edge of the patio. Lo and behold, cold and nasty as its been, and notwithstanding Saturday’s freezing rain, I have miniature daffodils poking their little green arms from the ground.

Not to be outdone, there are also some hyacinths. Probably the purple ones the old lady had; those things are tough as nails.

These two are from…a long time ago. I hadn’t posted them because winter sucks and I couldn’t be arsed, but they’re both little fuzzy caterpillars that I’d found amongst the leaves on the patio.

Wooly bear.

I’m not 100% sure who this guy is, and I’m too lazy to look for an ID, but I’m sure he’s some kind of moth!

So…we now have a Nest learning thermostat. P was fully prepared, and knew exactly what he needed to do to install the Add-A-Wire, and proceed to a flawless installation of the thermostat. He got it all done in 54 minutes, which included a lot of screwing around, trying to fit the wires into the tiny hole in the wall behind the thermostat without pulling any of them off their connections. Turned the gas back on, turned the power back on…nothing. Fuck. Okay, so check the wires. All good. That means either the Add-A-Wire doesn’t work, or the Nest is for some reason not compatible. Goddamn it, but we can just put the old one back on, and at least we won’t freeze (cold outside!) He unhooked the Add-A-Wire and put the old thermostat back on. Turned the gas back on, turned the power back on…nothing. FUCK! By this time, it was getting pretty chilly in the house, and we couldn’t think of anything except possibly a blown fuse on the control board, but it’s a 5A, and really hard to tell whether it’s blown or not. We gave up and tried to call the company that installed it, but got no answer, so he called the first one that appeared in a Google search, and got a very helpful guy, with whom he chatted for a while. Eventually, the guy mentioned the…safety switch. I’d wondered what the little black lever-looking thing was, but figured it was just some kind of latch for the front panel, and P had forgot about it entirely. So, he put the front panel back on, turned on the power, and it fired right up. I said, “I’ll bet the Nest was installed just fine,” so he decided he was willing to give it another shot. We let the house warm up for a while, then he went for Round Two. That went quickly, and this time, when he turned the power back on with the front panel in place, I saw a tiny green light, and then a little house appeared on the screen. HALLELUJAH! Setup went fine, though using the dial keyboard made me wish our wifi password was “abcd” (it’s not), but after I finally got that entered, everything was fine. I like Farsight, and I like that it turns the screen on when I walk by; it feels like it’s saying, “Hi there–I’m doing my job!” P likes it, too, and though I did have a little glitch with my phone location (not sure why…the auto-off for wifi that I have set in Android Auto?) this morning, I was able to turn it onto Eco mode from work, so that’s no big deal. I added the Nest to my “Bedtime” routine, too, which was about 75% of the reason I wanted one; I don’t have to get into bed, get all comfortable, and realize I forgot to turn the thermostat down. P turned it up this morning while he was still in bed, and he seems to like it. Given how little he cares about smart home technology (or any technology these days), I’m glad he does. So far, so good, but we’re holding on to the old thermostat, just in case the Nest decides to crap out on us.

I guess Miffy doesn’t care about it one way or another…or does he?

So, this year I finally decided to break down and cover the pond, which will hopefully keep it from freezing with anything more than a thin layer of ice, and (assuming it works) will mean I don’t have to stress out all winter over a de-icer potentially catching fire, or shorting out and leaving my pond to freeze over because I didn’t happen to walk over and look at it that day.

So…I got 1″ PVC pipe from Lowe’s, and P picked it up for me on Friday. First thing I noticed was that I had got the wrong size cross fittings. I’d entered, “cross fitting 1″ PVC” in the search on Lowe’s site, and bought the first result…which turned out to be 1/2″ PVC cross fittings. Well, fuck. CHC had them, though, and since I’d also got 10′ wide plastic, and knew it wouldn’t be wide enough, I also got another roll of 10′ wide 6mil plastic at CHC. This was not an inexpensive project, but I paid for peace of mind, I guess.

First, I pressure washed the rocks, cleaned out the leaves, or at least most of them, but it was windy, so I kept getting more. Fuck it–there are certainly enough on the bottom already. I rinsed the gunk off the filter bag, then pulled the filter up so it’s about 1′ deep in the water.

Initially, my plan was to put it together, then carry it over and place it atop the pond, then P and I would lift each bow and slide the ends over the rebar. This turned out to be a less-than-perfect idea, since we had to put so much pressure on the bows to lift them over the rebar that they popped out of the cross connectors.

Plan B. After thinking about it for a few minutes, and swearing a lot, I thought of our big ladder. P and I carried it over, and he found two plywood scraps, which was good, since I’d already resigned myself to falling in the pond. I didn’t, though; the plywood made a nice, stable surface. Since I could be in the center, and push down as he put the pipe over the rebar, everything stayed in place. Then, I wrapped the joint with enough white Gorilla tape to choke a…gorilla.

My assistant, on break. Damn unions.

Frame complete!

It was almost dark by the time we’d finished, and I’m not happy about the seam, but I overlapped about 18″, and taped both sides with Gorilla tape. I was glad for the big front room in our house because it was way too windy to do this outside. If this doesn’t survive, though, I’ll have to pony up the big bucks for 20′ wide plastic, though I’ll have to buy 100′. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes, and I’m definitely happy to look over and see our “geodome” instead of worrying about ice and freeze/thaw damage to that very expensive pond liner!

I dumped shitty Site5 and for $20 more than I’d have paid them for one month, I got three years of hosting from SiteGround. Not unlimited server space, but it’s not like I need that anyway, so it works, and I’m good for three years. Anyway, it took me a while to get everything sorted, but it’s fall, and the weather has been shitty anyway, so I had only a couple of pictures, so no big deal.

Cute little fuzzy guy from 10-28-18. I don’t know who he is, and I’m too lazy to look, but he’s cute and fuzzy. I found him while clearing leaves off the patio, and put him safely in some leaves over by the pond where he can hang out for the winter if he likes.

The toad lilies didn’t do very well again this year–I’m not sure why, since we had a very reasonable amount of rain for Southern IL in the summer–but I did get at least a few blooms, and they’re so cool-looking that I almost always take pictures of them. This one was taken 11-03-18.

That’s all. The weather has been shit, seriously.

It’s too long to type everything again, so I’ll just copypasta the email I sent to Dad. Also, while I do know the file is really “fs tab” for “file systems table”, I still read it the way I did the first time I saw it, which is f-stab. That was a long time ago, but I still think it’s funny. 😀

A very long time ago, I was in a computer lab that had a rather irreverent poster picturing a cartoon Jesus and the words, “Jesus saves, and you should, too!” I thought it was funny, but I also took the meaning to heart. That poster just saved me literally DAYS of work.

I had got a used server on eBay for less than it was worth; I paid 50 bucks including shipping, and it had to cost $35 for them to ship it because that thing is heavy! Anyway, it’s old, but it’s good enough for my purposes, so I was very happy with the deal. I installed Ubuntu Linux (an operating system, like you guys use Windows as your operating system), and then installed a server called Apache, a MySQL database manager, and then the software that runs my security cameras, and the software that runs my media server so I can stream my own files (video that I ripped from my own DVDs) to TVs, tablet, or phone. I also installed home control software called Hass.io to integrate Google Girl somewhat, and perform some automation. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Zoneminder, Hass.io…all of this is completely free; anyone can download it and use any of it at no charge, and change it in any way they wish if they know how. That said, sometimes, configuring everything to do exactly what you want can be complicated and/or time consuming. I also wanted to be able to control things in my house from remote locations. I’ll spare you the long, boring explanation, but it basically comes down to the fact that without some finagling, you can’t access your own home computer by using www.whateveryoucallit.com. Point being, I had spent weeks sorting this out, and it worked the way I wanted it to work.

When updates are available for software, I usually proceed with extreme caution because an update that doesn’t affect most people might affect one of my customizations, and I obviously don’t want to break something that took me a lot of time and effort to do. Last Sunday, we were installing a remote in the bedroom ceiling fan. I was waiting for Patrick to finish wiring in the remote, so I went out to my office and thought I’d just check the load on the server…mostly out of curiosity. I noticed that there were some updates available, so I quickly scanned the list. Just then, Patrick finished with the wires, so instead of carefully looking through the list, for reasons I don’t quite understand, I hit “update all” and walked away. Once the updates had completed, the server rebooted, and…I couldn’t access it remotely. Well, that’s strange. I turned on the monitor attached to it, and there, at the end of a bunch of error messages, I saw, “read-only file system.” Oh…that is baaaaad!

When a computer is doing something, or you are doing something on a computer, the majority of it is that files are being read. However, in order to read those files, other files are created and written, such as temporary files. For instance, in order for that server to connect to my security cameras, it needs to create temporary directories and files for the images. When a file system is read-only, no changes may be made to the file system, not even one tiny text file, and my server could not finish booting. That meant that everything was unavailable–an absolute disaster! I’ve used Linux long enough, though, to know that even a disaster can often be fixed without reinstalling the whole thing, so I left it alone until today, when I had time to try to figure out what went wrong.

On every Linux system, there is a file called “fstab”. Violent-sounding name for a little text file that basically tells the system, “Hey, these are your hard drives, and here is where you should mount them so you can find them, and here how to communicate with them.” It took me about an hour of looking through system messages to figure out that somehow, all of those updates running at once had made changes to my fstab file, and those changes made the system think there was a hardware problem. To protect the file system and minimize potential data loss, it had made it read-only.

Back when I was configuring the server, I had customized my fstab file. Remembering cartoon Jesus, though, I had also made a backup of it once I had everything working the way I wanted it. I called it “fstab.bak” so it would be easy to find. So…in order to recover from a disaster that would have taken me days to fix if I’d had to start over, I did this in literally five minutes, including the reboot.

1. Told the system to remount as read/write instead of read-only. This alone would not fix it because it would read the damaged fstab when I rebooted, and again would set read-only.
mount -n -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 /

2. Now Jesus comes in. After I had made the system read/write, I could fix it in literally one line.
cp /etc/fstab.bak /etc/fstab

That’s it. That line says, “Make a copy of the file called fstab.bak and use it to replace the current copy of the file called fstab.” I rebooted the server, and everything was just as it was before I stupidly applied a bunch of updates without looking first. Jesus saves, and I did, too! 🙂

It was chilly and windy, so I was in the garage, playing on my phone. I sort of noticed Onje walking by, but didn’t pay much attention. When he went back the other way, heading outdoors, I realized he had a bird in his mouth. I figured it was probably dead already, but made him drop it. The bird wasn’t dead, and just sat there on the floor. I got a pair of garden gloves, and was going to euthanize it because birds with cat bites usually die from infection anyway. The poor little thing was a female goldfinch, and she was all covered with spider webs and dust. I’d guess she got that way from trying to escape Onje in the garage. I picked her up, and checked her over. Her feathers were a bit ruffled, but I didn’t see any blood, and her wings didn’t appear to be damaged, so I just decided to hold her for a little while and see what she did. I left the garage, just in case she could still fly, and sat outside with her. Lacking a beak, I used a piece of straw (finally–the Patio Straw is useful for something!) to “preen” the webs and dust off her feathers. I figured my giant hand hovering over her would scare her even more. At first, she kept her eyes closed, and repeatedly opened her beak, which I have seen before when the stupid starling got trapped in between the windows, so I knew that was just fear, not injury. As I cleaned her feathers, I resisted the urge to talk, and instead, I peeped to her the way M did when our pheasants were little guys. She’d occasionally open her eyes and look over at me, so I thought maybe she was less afraid, and I scritched the back of her little birb-head as I’d seen the owners of Princess BB the Japanese White-Eye do, and I got the same reaction; she tilted her head back, and closed her eyes. I guess all birbs like scritchies, even if they’re frightened wild birbs. After several minutes, she was moving around a little, and I didn’t want her to think she was trapped under the patio roof, so I slowly walked her over toward the part of the yard where the rest of the goldfinches hang out. Once she caught sight of the great outdoors, I felt her little feet move, and she took off, flying strong. This time, the cat lost, and the birb won.

Not that a spider and some butterflies go together, exactly (or at least I hope they don’t because that would not bode well for the butterflies!), but their names do!

This orb weaver started out with a small web up near the gutter of the carport. His (or her…I don’t know) next web was larger, and encompassed one entire corner. The third web is the one that earned him the name “Empire” because he’s building one. The web sort of got messed up yesterday, either due to wind damage, or to cats’ tails, but somehow I doubt Empire will be daunted by a small loss. Terrible drawing (I’m not thrilled with the plastic screen cover on my phone case because my stylus skips), but good enough to illustrate the sheer size.

This is Empire himself (or herself…I need to learn to sex these spiders). Not a big spider, really, but a spider with big plans.

I may not have had many caterpillars this year, but there must have been some that I didn’t see because I certainly have several very fresh Monarchs! Two boys and a girl in one shot. The Mexican sunflowers look like shit, but the flutter-guys care not in the least.

The lovely lady was the only one that would let me close.

I felt kind of bad because the deer and rabbits ate all of the stuff I’d planted for Black Swallowtail butterflies, but I needn’t have because I have US Marine butterflies. No Golden Alexander, dill, parsley, fennel, or carrot? Fine…we’ll use rue. I’d planted the rue for Giant Swallowtail, which I’ve had only one year, but it’s a perennial, and it hasn’t died so far. I now have a pretty good idea of what kind of swallowtail chrysalis was on the west side of the house because it was only about 15′ from the bed where the rue lives.

P had just got home, and thought he might have heard one of the BRs. He asked me, and I said it was just a very agitated squirre. A few seconds later, we discovered the source of the squirrel’s agitation because a magnificent Barred Owl swooped up through the underbrush andl landed on a branch above the woodpecker feeding station. I was sure he’d fly away in a few minutes, so I snapped a bunch of crappy photos with my phone. He stayed put, though, so I sneeeeaked in the house and got a proper camera. I need not have sneaked; this owl was fearless! P was shooting video with his phone, we were talking, I was talking to the owl and walking around the patio, and…zero fucks given. Owl-y McOwlface didn’t budge. He stayed right where he was until I was standing right beneath him, and noticed those enormous black eyes had zoomed in with laser precision on…Onje. I literally shooed the owl away because I knew he’d missed the squirrel, so he was hungry, and although barred owls do not usually prey on cats, they are perfectly capable of carrying one off. Onje may annoy me occasionally, but I don’t want him to be eaten! Even when I shooed the owl, it went only over to a tree just past the edge of the patio. Utterly fearless, and very lovely!

Also, I forgot to post this cool dung beetle that I found on the patio on 09-15. Not as majestic as the owl, but still interesting!

This isn’t the most we’ve had because I shot this when it was chilly and actively raining, but it looks like we got some really good reviews on Yelp this year! I actually added a third feeder to the Man Cave window last night because they’d completely emptied the two that were there in less than two days. Hungry little shits, but sugar is cheap, and they soon have a loooooong trip to make. Besides, they’re little shits, but they’re our little shits, and we’d give them lots of sugar water (and flowers) even if it was expensive.