Spinners!

I've had a problem with doves bouncing off the back door for a long time now. Even though there is a covered patio, the sliding glass door acts like a mirror so the birds see another hopseed full of feeders. Of course, when they fly into it they find a surprise. I have had doves banging into that door at least four or five times a day forever. Only once has the result been tragic. That was a few weeks ago. A dove hit the door with impressive audible force and when I went to look, it was just sitting there on the patio looking dazed. I stepped out and picked it up and could hear the rattle in its chest. About that time it started coughing up blood all over my hand. I decided the trade a lengthy bit of suffering for a quick twist. I didn't really consult the dove on that decision, but I hope it was the right one. Since that day I've thought about how to solve the problem.

Non-glare films? Silhouettes of predator birds? No. These are all unsightly solutions. It just so happens that the perfect solution came along accidently and it only cost $2 plus tax!

Joan and I stepped into The Dollar Store to see if there were any appropriate Easter junk for the kids. There were these little cloth spinners with cute animals on them--they might not be Easter decorations but I was pretty sure the kids would like them. And, hey, they were only a buck. I bought a tortoise and a frog and hung them up from nails that were in the patio from previous unremembered hangings.

Well, wouldn't you know it? They hang in front of the door between the real hopseed and the reflective glass. Since I hung them up there hasn't been a single dove hitting the door--at least not that I have heard or seen.

It's a great solution and I suspect it works better than those cheesy silhouette things anyway. If you have a similar problem you might want to consider a similar solution.

SunChips Go Compostable, Week 04

Yesterday was very warm: 86°. Today it is currently 74°, but it's supposed to be about 84°. However, it's very windy today. We are supposed to have wind gusts of up to forty miles per hour. It''s important to make sure your plants are getting a little extra water when it's windy because the wind can really dehydrate a plant.

As for my SunChips bag, apparently week four is the week you begin to wonder if anything is going to happen at all. There's no discernible difference in the bag from week to week other than the bag gets dirtier. Ah well. Hopefully in a few weeks there will be some real change going on.

One interesting note is that some of the worms from the barrel next to this one have traveled into this bin by one route or another. That's good because worms really help break things down more quickly.

The bad thing? I was bitten by a horsefly while I was out there! Seriously! I hate those things.

Some Photos from Sedona, AZ

We had a great weekend in Sedona. We did a lot of hiking and vegging and it was a great way to recharge. The weather was fantastic for hiking--cool, not cold, and not too hot, ever. It got pretty chilly at night though. One night we went to dinner and when we came out of the restaurant afterward it was probably down to almost thirty-nine degrees. We shivered our way back to the hotel!

Click on the picture below and you'll be redirected to a full album of photos from the trip!

Sedona, AZ March 2010

SunChips Go Compostable, Week 03

This is a little late going up, but it has been three weeks since I started tracking the SunChips bag in my compost bin. Though it is perhaps a little less crinkly and no longer as loud, the bag is still in pretty good shape after three weeks. It is, however, decidedly dirtier.

One thing I can tell you--have no fear of this bag disintegrating on top of your refrigerator and leaving your SunChips homeless and alone. The bag is clearly of hardier stuff than that. It has a lot of integrity.

With luck my tumbler will have completed processing the current round of compost in the next few weeks and I can move everything from the holding bin into the tumbler. I think progress will be more obvious in a more true composting environment.

SunChips Go Compostable, Week 02

So the new SunChips bag has been in the compost staging bin for a week. It has been covered by some compostables, but there's not a lot in that bin yet. I pulled the bag to the top of the heap for its weekly photo shoot and it doesn't look much the worse for wear having been in the can for a week. It's still pretty crinkly, that's for sure. One encouraging note, though--I think I'm getting a good "green/brown" mix in the staging bin because when I mixed it up there was definite steaminess going on in there. That's a sure sign that the forces are at work!

In case you're wondering, the green/brown mix is the ration of wet and dry ingredients in your compost. Green would be things like fruit and vegetables, grass clippings, coffee grounds, etc. Brown is the tougher, drier stuff--paper, cardboard, egg shells, dry leaves, twigs, that sort of thing. The ratio should be about 50/50 (by weight, not volume). My biggest challenge has been adding enough brown products to the mix. The green ingredients from my kitchen seem to pile up very quickly! My biggest "brown" contribution has actually turned out to be toilet paper tubes and egg cartons--I save the TP tubes up, slice them up the side and then run the flattened sheet through the paper shredder. The egg cartons (the fiberboard kind) I just tear into small pieces and add to the daily collection.

Now that the warm weather has arrived, I think, for good, the weeds are going to go crazy and I'm going to have no shortage of green mix. I better start stocking up on those toilet paper tubes.

SunChips Go Compostable, Week 01

The new SunChips bag is out. Early. It was supposed to make its debut on Earth Day, but it's in stores now and it's making itself heard--this bag is loud! I'm guessing the bag is predominantly cellulose, much like the window on an envelope. It's very crinkly sounding.

According to the bag and the online presentation at the SunChips site, it should take fourteen weeks to compost the bag in your backyard. That's a pretty long time, but it's much, much less than it would take for a regular chip bag to decompose in an anaerobic landfill! I thought I would take up the challenge and document my own bag as it goes through the composter.

My tumbling composter is currently full, i.e., I'm not adding any more until it's done "cooking." So, for now, the bag has gone into what is now my staging bin. I have, basically, a twenty gallon garbage can that has been modified for (wholly inefficient) composting. Until the tumbler is finished, or until I build a second tumbler, the old can is gathering my compost materials. That's where the bag has gone. Because of this, my guess is it will take more than fourteen weeks in my yard because the first several weeks are not going to be the most efficient. There's not much I can do about that at the moment.

So, here are a couple of quick pics of the bag and the bag as it sits in the staging barrel. Check back for weekly updates on the progress of my backyard composting of the world's first fully backyard compostable chip bag.

ADA Tour de Cure

Sunday was the Tucson Tour de Cure in support of the American Diabetes Association. The Tour de Cure was 100K bike ride, also called a "metric century." A hundred kilometers sounds better than sixty-two miles. I signed up for it about a week ago and was totally unprepared, but I would have felt very guilty had I not signed up. You see, one of my old students, John Armbruster, posted on Facebook that he was going to sign up for the shorter one. I told him he should do the full ride because it really wasn't any harder than the 50K. I told him I might ride with him. That was my mistake. As soon as I sent that part of the message I knew I was committed. Or should have been.

To be honest I had not been on the bike for more than a few little jaunts around the neighborhood with the kids since El Tour. Still, I tend to think I can ride sixty-five miles without too much thought. I'm not a "racer" or anything. I take it easy. I wasn't fast when I was a kid, there's no point in pretending now. Since John had never ridden that far before in his life I figured I didn't have too much to worry about.

And then came the weather.

A few days before the ride they began predicting a freak winter storm that would rush in and out but pretty much dump buckets of rain and cold all over the course during the exact hours of the ride. I was not looking forward to riding in the cold and the rain. Sure, I've done it before, sometimes on purpose, but it can be pretty uncomfortable when you're not in the best shape to start with. Joan told me to just blow it off and not go but I couldn't see how that was an option.

The morning of the ride I got up at 4:00 a.m. after about four hours of very restless and fitful sleep. I was a wreck, but I was on my way. I thought I was being blessed--the skies were clear and it didn't seem all that cold. I left the house at 5:25 and I made good time and arrived in Sahuarita at 6:15 in the inbetween light of early dawn. The organizers were still setting up so I sat in the car and tried not to think about feeling nauseous and too tired. When that didn't work I got out and took my bike from the rack and made sure everything was ready to go. I wandered off to the event tents and grabbed a cup of coffee in hopes the caffeine would set me right. Not being a coffee drinker, I should have known better. I visited the portable bathrooms three times while waiting for John to show up.

John arrived about fifteen minutes before the start and I found him at the start line along with a lot fewer people than I had expected. This was by far the lowest attendance of any charity ride or walk or run I've ever participated in. I don't know if this event is generally this small or if people had been scared off by the weather forecast. I for one was ready to believe we had lucked out and were in for a day of decent weather. At least most of the way anyway.

It didn't take long to find out that this ride was going to be anything but easy with or without rain. An out and back ride, the ride out was almost entirely uphill with a serious climb waiting at the end.Top that with a steady, heavy wind with gusts in the thirty-five mph range and it was tough. Not having any sleep didn't help either. Ten miles in and I was feeling about what I would have expected to feel near the end of the ride, not right at the beginning. I tried a bite to eat at the first stop, a quarter of a PBJ and regretted it nearly immediately. It wanted to come up. Later in the morning the same would happen with half of a banana. Clearly my gut didn't want to be there.

There were parts of the ride where we were struggling to go five miles an hour. It was crazy. At one point John got ahead of me only to end up walking his bike up a hill. I made it to the top but was more than willing to stop and wait for him. I was spent. The next time this happened I figured I'd walk with him. He was three quarters of the way up the hill and I stopped beside him and dismounted. Whoa! Wobbly legs! I had rubber band legs and was really surprised. I knew I was tired, but I didn't realize I was that tired. It made me light headed, too. This wasn't good--we weren't even twenty miles into the ride and the halfway point was more than ten miles ahead.

Just before mile twenty-two we both agreed we didn't have the juice nor the mental reserves to fight the wind any longer. We turned back. I think it was the right decision. I've never done that before, give up and turn back before a ride is finished. Oh well. I honestly can't say I would have made it back if I had fought my way to the turnaround. Even though the wind was mostly with us on the way back to the start we still had to struggle on the few hills that we came to. Then, just when we though we were home free, we made the last turn and hit a wall of wind as strong as any we'd encountered on the way out. Top that with the heavy bank of clouds filling the horizon and we wondered if we could make it back before the rain hit after all.

In the end we made it back with forty miles under our belts and just a few misty patches of rain arriving behind us. As with any really tough ride, now that it was over we were both very glad we had done it and were already planning to sign up for the Tour of the Tucson Mountains at the end of April. Hopefully we'll be smart enough and dedicated enough to at least train for it--it's a seventy plus mile ride (and usually has its own share of wind, too!).

Javalina Tracks

Julian and I went down to the playground this morning and the sand around the equipment was just full of javalina tracks! I tried to explain a javalina to Julian--"They're like pigs!"--but I'm not sure if he was making the connection between the "paw print" (Thanks, Blue's Clues!) and the animal. I guess javalina like playgrounds, too. I can just imagine them running around there when no one is around, going down the slide, swinging on the swings, all that good stuff.