New House Blog: Episode LXXXV - Three C's

In this Episode we revisit the Parents' House, first seen in this exciting, action-packed Episode, then again in this mystery-filled Episode, and also in this thrilling Episode.

Caulking And Painting

I came over to the Parents' House initially to caulk and paint a newly-installed window sill in the master bedroom.  When I arrived, however, I discovered that I would have to completely re-caulk the window before I could caulk and paint the window sill.  This is because someone, for reasons unknown to me, removed some of the window caulk and used a sharp blade to cut through all of the remaining caulk, all the way around the entire window frame.  My dad is sure that the window was not taken out, but I can't think of another reason for cutting all of the caulk around the entire window frame, and I can't think of a reason why the person who cut it would not repair it.

Note the missing caulk, and the cut in the remaining caulk.  Finding this unfinished work annoyed me a bit.  Scraping out the remaining caulk so that I could put in fresh caulk annoyed me a bit more.

This is another section of the same window frame.

Here is the window frame and new window sill after the new caulk has set, and before painting.

And after painting. There's no post-paint picture with the masking and plastic sheeting removed, so you'll just have to imagine how it looks now.





Carpenter Bees

Around these parts we have big, black bees that I have been calling bumble bees for a many years.  Recently, however, I have discovered (in part due to Becky's research, and in part due to a random overheard comment mentioning carpenter bees) that I have been mistaken for many years, and that the all-black bees are carpenter bees, and that bumble bees always have some yellow on them.  While I was at the Parents' House my dad mentioned that he thought there was a bee's nest in a small dead tree stump in their neighbor's yard.  I was intrigued, so he took me to look at said nest, and he showed me the stump and the two circular entry holes where he had seen large, black bees entering said stump.  At the base of said stump there was what appeared to be sawdust.

In the picture you can see, next to the blue arrows, the two round holses in the dead stump.  It turns out that these are two separate carpenter bees nests, and not two entrances to the same nest. Carpenter bees are mostly solitary, and their nests have only one entrance.  They are good pollinators, and the males of the species don't have stingers.  In short, they are our friends.  Sadly, the neighbor didn't see these bees as friends, and he had them forcibly evicted and cut the stump down to the ground.

We also have a carpenter bees nest at our New House, but instead of being located in a dead stump (good luck finding a dead tree stump at our New House), this nest is located in a piece wood that is part of our back yard patio shade.  We have decided to wait until fall before we evict the bees and fill in the hole.  This will allow the bees to pollinate all summer, and the bees' offspring to grow up and  leave the nest and fly away.


Cactus

Once again the time had come to expand the ever-expanding cactus garden.  Over the winter one of our zig zag cactus completely died, and the other just barely clung to life.  The barely-surviving zig zag is showing some signs of new growth, and the dead one is turning into compost.  The dead cactus left a hole in our cactus garden, so we got two to replace it and expand the ever-expanding.

First up is the evilly-named, but not really evil, Devil's Tongue Cactus (ferocactus latispinus). Alternate names include Crow's Claw Cactus and Fishook Cactus.  We chose this one based on its looks and not its name (which we had to look up because the pot was just labelled "cactus").

Next up is the Road Kill Cactus (Opuntia Rubescens). We chose this one based both on its name and on its looks.  It is flat like roadkill, and Becky thinks it looks like ghosts.

Here you can see the new cactus in the broader context of the cactus garden (ever-expanding).  The barely-surviving zig zag is way over on the left, near the rock.




And that, I believe, is that.
     bIsh

New House Blog: Episode LXXXIIII - Breaker Breaker!!

As I sit here typing this, and sipping my Surge soda, I ponder some questions that have been in my mind lately.  The first question is why are our wasp traps not effective this year (zero dead wasps so far)?  They're the same traps, and the same baits, that we used with great success last year.  Do the traps smell different to the wasps after sitting outside for a year?  Did the formula for the bait change?  Are the wasps immune to the bait now?  Are the wasp traffic patterns different from last year due to the change in our watering patterns (due in large part to the restrictions on watering in this area (seems kind of silly to be having a water crisis when we live right next to a huge ocean filled with water))?  We moved one of the wasp traps recently into an area where we have observed high wasp activity, but it's too early to tell if this change has made any difference.

The second question is why are we not hearing more about building desalinization plants?  We're in the middle of a drought, but we have an inexhaustible water supply just off the left coast that we're not tapping into.  And we have a lot of unused sunlight that could power these desalinization plants, or at least provided partial power.  So far our own solar experiment has been highly successful.  It's fun to watch the meter run backward, and to-date we have generated 2.8 megawatt hours, enough to power a typical smart phone for about 85.5 years, or the Eiffel Tower for about 14 hours.

The third question is why has our pear tree been so much less productive than it was last year?  Is it trying to thwart the slimy squirrels by not producing enough to tempt them to steal pears from us?  I may actually have an answer to this question, but you'll have to keep reading to find out (or just scroll down the page a bit).

Breaker Breaker!!

We occasionally do laundry here in our New House, and we prefer to use modern conveniences like our washer and dryer, so we don't really like it when one or the other has a problem, and one of them had a problem recently.  The dryer, I noticed, would often not turn on when I pressed the power button.  A quick check of the breaker panel revealed that when the dryer would not turn on its breakers had been tripped.  Sometimes I would have to reset the breakers two or three times before the dryer would power on, and this annoyed me somewhat.  A quick troubleshooting call to awesome brother Mike revealed that it could be bad breakers, which would be easy to replace.  Please note that main power to the house, and power from the solar array, was turned off before any work was done on our circuit breakers.

The breakers in question are the paired green 30 Amp breakers on the left side of the panel.  Note that the quadplex breaker is labelled as "washer and dryer".  The green pair is 30 Amp, and the blue is 50 Amp, which seemed odd for a washer connection.

Mike suggested replacing this setup with a 30/20 Amp setup.  Off to Home Depot.

The panel with the cover removed.

Hmmm... Something doesn't look right if the two inner breakers are truly for the washer...

Look at that heavy aluminum cable.  Why would the washer's 20 Amp connection need such a cable?

The new quadplex circuit breaker all wired up.

All breakers in place, and the cover is back on the breaker box.  Everything is as it should be, or is it? Something seemed odd about that washer connection, so I called Mike again, and shared my concerns...



Fire Fire!!

Not really fire, but fire blight.  Our pear tree was afflicted with fire blight, but we didn't know what the affliction was, or its treatment, until recently (and thanks to Becky's diligent research).  Fire blight is a bacterial disease that can be encouraged by overwatering, which one of us (me) may have done.

This is what fire blight looks like.  Notice that the leaves have grown and then turned brown and died, looking somewhat as though they had been burned in a fire.

 We had seen this before, every year since we moved in to our New House, but we didn't know what it was, so we ignored it mostly.  Now we know, and there's no cure for it, but there is a treatment.

The treatment is getting up on a tall ladder and clipping off every single affected branch, at least 8 inches above the first sign of infection, and wiping the clippers with an alcohol wipe between each and every clip (to keep the bacteria from spreading via the clippers).  This picture shows the pile of branches we had to cut down.  The white things are the alcohol wipes.

Since the severe pruning we have seen a huge surge in new growth on our pear tree.

This is our pear harvest to date, and it's about 6 more pears than we harvested last year.  As of this post they are chilling in the reefer.





Breaker Breaker!! - Continued

As mentioned above, I had some misgivings about that alleged washer breaker, so I called Mike again and we did some additional troubleshooting and figured out that the breaker labelled "washer" was actually the breaker for the oven/stove.  D'oh!  Lousy pre-Bishopians!  Suddenly it made sense why that breaker had large aluminum cabling and was 50 Amp.  Back to Home Depot for the correct part.

The new quadplex circuit breaker, properly wired.

Finally.  The new circuit breakers are in place and correctly labelled.  We have not had any more trouble with the dryer since this repair.






Now I must go check on the laundry.
    bIsh