Damn, i thought we had it bad here with creepy crawlies. Heard of a guy on army basic training, settled down for the night under the wrong kind of bush-found him comatose next morning from paralysis ticks. I hate ticks.....was working on a drilling rig out bush, everything vibrating, but i thought there must have been an earthquake or something-because the ground was moving more than normal. Looking around, i realised it was moving toward me-thats right, ticks, friggin thousands of 'em, the vibration attracts them evidently. So, i have a partial solution for you-surface spray, and lots of it, on your boots. I hated spraying it on leather, but if you had something like this, not a problem, http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/t...parentType=index&indexId=cat280030&hasJS=true that will discourage them to a large extent. Honestly, i cant say its safe, i dont know what happens if your bitten by a sickly, toxin filled tick-but couldnt be much worse than the other shit they carry? It worked for me, they hate the stuff and wont climb over it, if they do they dont tend to bite because there already croaking, reapply every day though, especially in the wet. Presumably there is an organic solution, but for cheap, nasty, instant and effective-rubber boots and surface spray. Incidentally, i recommend black flag surface spray for european wasps, drops them instantly. Todays tips brought to you by the axis-of-evil chemical corp and allied holdings.
I'm ok. Everything is fine. I guess the first time you take a bad step out of a restaurant and twist your ankle bad it's a revelation- " Oh we got to do something about those drinks! " says the manager can I get you some ice.... " Don't worry we won't sue ": snaps my wife even she gets pissed when an unlit entryway has a foot or so drop off into oblivion and who wants to see their six foot three husband crumble like a baby exiting? You guys out there will vouch for me sometimes the misstep is so bad you just know from prior basketball injuries rather than take a month out of my life in an air cast at that first feel of real trouble- you crumple like a women and fall into some furniture it's not the F*ing drinks man-- it's that black hole of a step... Anyway with a severely puffed up foot i managed to drive us to Ct for a weekend of relaxation and leaf moving... Well as my dog recovers from various ills, we keep a special eye on him and find one or two red backed ones crawling on him and then later two small ones attached to his penis area. That was a owch of a removal and when dealing with big dogs there is always that scary moment when you hope they don't freak out and bite your head off for yanking at their underbelly ... well not our Clyde... I hope emergency #2 avoided and I felt better about things... if we just pay attention we will find them and that will be that you need two days of sucking to really get sick... and then my wife woke up in the middle of the night. " That's not a mole! " What? Yup AC, she got bit right on the belly....!!!! There's a red ring but as I understand it that can happen it doesn't mean Lyme that's more of a white ring around a red ring or some other sort of madness I don't want to know about oh dear mother nature what have you wrought on me!!! I just want to jump over that stream and clear out that ages old underbrush but there's this guy Kurt he does this stuff you have to pay him of course and so I have now picked up my first recurring expense at the weekend house... Kurt man genius, lawn and flower maven welcome please spray the F*ing property BEFORE MY ENTIRE FAMILY IS WIPED OFF THE MAP FOR my greed... no it's not greed it's an inability to admit happiness just say it's a great day already and then wham another F*ing TICK! God country living is different than the concrete big city... something about the bats dying too early and the night bugs i don't even know do we have screens... I think so but I'm not sure.... oh the picnics out under the stars will be so beautiful by the brook.... with a couple bats around... got to get bats Ac.... ok time is running out I have to go... i am ok my wife is now under constant watch for fever i guess... my dog gets another checkup thursday that's now closing in on a grand... liver levels coming down at last check thank god... and taxes too. Oh these times are a trying and I haven't even got my boots yet. ~ stoney
You sure have a tick and bug problem. Reminds me of a story. The Adirondacks and black flies. Years ago I worked for a guy who sold his house in the Adirondacks to some folks from the city. We were moving him out over a period of weeks starting in Feb or early March. Our last trip coincided with the closing and the new owners arrived at the home. I forget exactly the date but the black flies were so bad, you could not breath through your mouth (hard to do when you are lifting and moving) without getting a mouthful of bugs. These people had never even heard of black flies. They were not very happy.
Back in the day nutmeg, a friend of my now wife had a family house in Scarsdale NY and had maybe 200,000 snakes under the house and all over the property they were there most of the year and they managed to sell that house to some unsuspecting fools when they were hibernating.... imagine that night by the pool when they all slithered out.....
Heh, like the scene from Raiders of the lost ark.......must be garter snakes, completely harmless though, right? Strange, we got all sorts of stuff here, but its the "creepiness" that gets me. Red-back spiders? All over the place, but you would have to go some to get one to bite you. Very timid, small jaws. White tail spiders, accused of causing arachnid necrotism-studies suggest, they arent so bad, not one identified white-tail spider bite did that much, just as likely more common varieties with a fluke of bacteria mix or immune reaction. Saw one on the wall last night. Big fucker, too. Lived in a place, where i could figure out what kind of spider i was dealing with by feel, crawling over the skin/or the sound it made hitting the pillow or sheets at night. "Thump" oh, just a huntsman, bout two inches across, no prob. They bite too, there is a lot of disinformation about bugs. White tails and redbacks-or funnelwebs-sure, the redback or funnelweb could kill you, but white-tails? Not a zot of evidence, they will cause your arm or leg to start rotting like a leper in ulcerous weeping sores, you know, totally unfounded in my veiw. On that very topic, i have a theory, that given white tail spiders hunt other spiders, that the necrotism likely results from a particular bacteria/pathogen/thingy, picked up by white tails, rather than anything truly endemic to the species. Just a theory, I kill them on site.
Oh, and along those lines, re; noxious bugs and random stuff that might, or could, spoil your day, just burned "gutsy gibbon", yeah. Linux distribution, and what not. Sure, there's a new one not far away, but well-watcha gonna do, for free. Honestly, no idea what it means, or how good it is. But if i boot this sucker, into a partition, (assuming i figure out how to) do the windows migrate thing, or even part of it, and see so much as a commandline prompt, I will projectile vomit glass shards of pure death, in the general direction of the nearest nerd, I shit you not. God, I hate nerds.
I HAVE EXCITING NEWS! Sometimes you find true genius where you least expect it- like Australia! Just kidding, in this case in my cleanup of the house on sunday. Doing the toilets I did my usual number when I take a sloppy piss and then with a wad of toilet paper- use that piss to clean the rest of the toilet. I've done this forever behind my wife's back and it works great. Well on a whim I made up a little diluted mixture with some sweet vinegar and did a load of laundry. It really got the stain out. Well jump forward and I HAVE FINANCING!!!!!! Yup I met this chap Hank he's the son of one of the oldest mutual fund families or hedge fund families I didn't quite catch it, I met him at a party and loe and behold he's looking to finance some new " it " product... well the " it " is " piss " baby, I told him... and he turns out to be a bit of an authority on urine and informs me that if you go deep into the dry cleaning blogs on the net you can find out more about this but piss has been used to clean in times past. To wash one's clothes in water was of course the first and natural way to clean them. However early on man began looking after ways to make washing easier. Just how old soaps are is not a well researched subject, but archeological excavations show that as early as 5000 years ago Sumerians had a recipe for soap, made from potassium carbonate (potash) and oil. Man discovered that urine had a cleaning effect. During the Roman empire it was a disgrace to be seen in the forum in a stained toga. During this time a thriving and profitable business developed, i.e.,washing in urine...... and this is where I come in Ac, I'm going to market a line of cleaning aids that are urine based.... " are you clean? Or are you URINE clean.... Like to clean but don't like that sickly orange smell??? English wool spinners, in the 1700s used sheep and pig droppings to increase the washing effect, Bile from cattle was also used. It has a slight alkaline reaction and contains both soap and palmitic acid. Hummmmm. Anyway back to the toilet it works great and so I had my spray bottle made up with the vinegar and somehow this all found its way atop a tre colore' salad at the table..... got to label these sprays and oils carefully... Those two wacky mythbuster guys did a piece that validated urine especially " cooked urine ' which has me thinking about warm bottles at the sales counter... and of course can i make this whole endeavor " green " Can I collect urine that would otherwise go into the ground water and spray it onto stuff? THIS MYTH WAS FEATURED IN... Episode Title: Special 11: Pirate Special Original air date:1/17/2007 Myth Title: Rum Laundry Myth Description: Pirates used Rum to launder their clothes MythBusters on the bust: Adam, Jamie and Karie Hypothesis: Rum can clean clothes better than water Procedure/Experimental Design: 1 foot square cloth (bleached embroidry cloth with thread count of 40) swatches were stained with Pigs Blood, Sweat and Pitch/Tar. Adam runs on a treadmill in a fire suit in a hot room in an attempt to stain the cloth with sweat. However, the sweat did not stain the cloth nor did it cause the cloth to smell. The sweat stain was replaced with oranges. Adam attempts to create an ammonia based cleaning agent by cooking urine. This is another reputed pirate laundry agent. Cleaning agents tried are soap (made the old fashioned way), rum, cooked urine (see above) and modern detergent (with hydrogen peroxide) Jamie is tasked with using the candidate cleaning agents on the swatches. Karie is then invited to rate the cleaness of the swatches in a blind condition. Results: Worst was rum. Stale urine was best for blood. Modern detergent was the best on the tar YUP BEST FOR BLOOD TM ~stoney Conclusion: Rum is ineffective as a cleaning agent. Did you catch that? urine is in pirate lore' as a cleaning agent! the skull and crossbones is my label!!!!
more good urine stuff! 17 March 2008 Maladies & Treatments: Healing with Urine By Sandra Schwab In the past human and animal urine was used for all kinds of things: for cleaning cloth and wool (even as late as 1966, the British government decreed that the famous Harris Tweed ought to be cleaned with urine--even if it did smell funny), for tanning, as reducing agent in dyeing, and even for the production of watercolours: since 1750 the colour Indian yellow had been imported from India, but what nobody in Britain knew was that the lovely deep yellow was the result of feeding cows only with mango leaves and water, collecting the urine (or perhaps the earth on which the cows had peed), drying it and eventually forming funny smelling balls of the raw pigment. Apart from that, urine has always been used in medicine as well. In the antiquity, urine didn't yet play an important part in medical diagnosis, even though doctors already knew that a strange smell or a strange colour might indicate a disease: "If the urine stinks, is too thin or too thick and black of colour, the patient ought prepare for his last journey." Nevertheless, looking at the urine of a patient was not yet part of the doctor's routine. However, they did recommend using urine as medication: drinking one's own urine was supposed to help against snake bites, poisoning, and dropsy. Urine boiled in the skin of a pomegranate was said to heal a purulent inflammation of the ears, while patients who had trouble with breathing were treated with the urine of pure young boys. And those with kidney problems were given donkey urine. Furthermore, scars, burns, rashes and other skin problems were all treated with urine as well. Due to the influence of Arabian teachings, the uroscopy eventually became an important part of medical diagnosis in the Middle Ages. Indeed, looking at the urine of a patient, inspecting the quantity and quality, the smell, taste, colour and cloudiness of it became such an important task of the medieval doctor that he is usually depicted with the uroscopy flask in art. The flask with the morning urine of a patient was brought to the doctor who could then consult his charts of urine colours. Different parts of the flask were thought to correspond to specific parts of the body, therefore some doctors used flasks that looked liked miniature humans. The art of uroscopy became more and more complicated as more and more elaborate charts of urine colours were published. In addition, the superstition surrounding this form of diagnosis grew: some doctors even claimed they could tell not only the age and the sex of the patient from looking at the urine, but also whether somebody was still a virgin. Due to these extreme forms of uroscopy, it was finally banned from orthodox medicine. Yet this does not mean that the practice of uroscopy disappeared: one of the most famous practitioners of this art was Johann Reinbacher, who died in 1935. In the Steiermark (in Austria) and beyond he was known as the "Höllerhansl" and he enjoyed such a good reputation that in the years 1925-1930 the conductors on the trains between Graz and Stainz gave out numbered tickets to regulated the masses of people who wanted Reinbacher to look at their urine. Even today this railway line is known as the "Flascherlzug" (the "Bottle-Train") because of the bottles of urine people brought to Reinbacher, who lived near Stainz. In folk medicine, urine was not only used as medication (for the treatment of skin and eye problems, of wounds and burns, of fever, stomach pains, sprains, and flatulence), but also for charms and magic: for example, peeing through one's wedding ring was supposed to prevent impotence; and if you had fever, you ought to pee into a river while saying the following blessing: Flowing water, I come to thee, Seventy-seven forms of fever I bring to thee, Thou shalt carry it over stick and stone! That shall help [insert name of patient], In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. While some of these customs seem outlandish in the extreme, others do contain a grain of truth: treatments with urine can indeed be quite effective especially when it comes to skin problems such as acne or neurodermatitis, wounds, burns, but also skin diseases like shingles.