WTF-Beta

@CHAS said in Ticks:

Keeping the grass short helps keep tick populations down.

I wonder if our grass is short enough. We mow once a week and keep it just a touch long — I mean, it doesn’t look long but the deck isn’t on the shortest setting, doing it this way is supposed to help prevent non-grass weeds…

@wtg said in Ticks:

Well it means you have ticks in your yard.

Yes, and in our house, at least one

Wow! That was fast!!!

The laboratory has identified the tick specimen as an adult female American dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis).

So what to make of that? (Given, among other things, that we don’t have dogs)

I sent it in, I'll report back!

@wtg said in Ticks:

Free tick identification

https://www.ticklab.org/identify-my-tick

Thanks!!

Not sure your photo is of sufficiently good quality,

It may not be, I think I took four photos and all of them are a bit on the blurry side. It was small enough that it was very hard to get a good photo and we didn’t want to let it get away, so I eventually gave up!

I will try sending it in though!

This was what we found:

Sure looks like a tick to me.

@wtg said in I want his job:

chief gelato officer

CGO! That's quite the job title!

That is terrifying. We found a bug in our entryway a week or so ago, it was big enough to be visible so I thought it was a spider, but looking at the photo of the lone star tick, I'm now sure it was a tick. It didn't have the marking so I assume it wasn't a lone star tick, but nevertheless.

Ugh. Very disconcerting!

@wtg and @Steve-Miller well that’s a relief!

Me too!!

@wtg said in Flush your toilets!:

@ShiroKuro said in Flush your toilets!:

A sewer line backup is when the pipe that goes out to the municipal sewer gets blocked.

Ahh. Fortunately we’ve never experienced that.

Newer homes have plastic sewer pipes that don't break or separate the way the old clay ones did.

I assume here you mean specifically the pipes outside the house?

So what counts as “newer”? Our current house was built in 1990, do you think we should expect to have clay pipes or plastic?

@Steve-Miller said in Flush your toilets!:

A quick flick of the lever uses very little water but if you hold the handle down you can empty the tank.

Does it work well? What brand is it?

@wtg said in Flush your toilets!:

how did you determine there is not enough flow? Have your sewer lines backed up? Or do you need two flushes to get rid of solids?

When you say "sewer line backing up" I assume you mean something more serious than a clogged toilet that's fixable with a quick plunging? If so, no, we've never had a sewer line back up. Well, I mean, I don't really know what a backed up sewer line looks like.

Anyway, I might be overly cautious, because as I say, we haven't had any serious issues. But we maybe had a toilet clog up twice (i.e., fixable with a quick plunging) and since then I'm just very careful. Anything more than a little paper and I flush twice, and so does Mr. SK.

These toilets are actually Toto btw. They are probably a higher end of the Toto line, and I am certain they're not original to the house.

BTW in Japan, the standard is that all toilets have two flush options, one that's very low flow and one that sends more water through.

This makes a lot more sense to me, but I don't think I've ever seen anything like that for home use in the US, and the ones I've seen (like in hotels or other public toilets) aren't set up the same way. I don't know what's different, but the Japanese one seems to work better/more reliably.

@Axtremus said in Flush your toilets!:

flushing the toilet is like practicing the piano

Pretty sure none of us thought we’d ever see this comparison here!

Back to the topic at hand: in our new house, the toilets are low flow, and we end up flushing more than once because there’s not enough water moving. Seems like that defeats the purpose, but I’m more worried about our plumbing.

I’m pretty sure that when the house was built, low flow wasn’t a thing.

@wtg said in Ice cream:

Coffee Almond Fudge

That sounds yummy! I’ve had other Tillamook but I don’t think I’ve had this one. Nor have I ever tried a vegan ice cream before.

But this is definitely the time to get some ice cream, whatever the variety!

@CHAS said in Why autism rates have increased:

There is no money in low IQs.

Can you say more about this? Is it because people think autism can be helped/improved upon, but they give up on kids with low IQs?

@CHAS Awesome!! Where will you be spending your time while there?

@pique I’m so sorry to hear about this! The physical and the mental/emotional tolls are awful!

@rustyfingers also sorry to hear that you have had other car troubles (the water damage etc.) too! What a mess!

@pique thanks!

@AndyD said in Happy Summer!!:

34c and high humidity! You must have a special room for the piano?

34C is our predicted high here as well today, and high humidity.

In terms of taking care of the piano, when I lived in Japan, I had my piano in a room with a mini split (an AC unit that sits up high on the wall and has an outdoor unit, so unlike a window unit, it’s super quiet, and the temps are super nice). So that worked out well.

Now, in the states, my houses have all had central air conditioning (which is very common) so all the rooms are basically the same in terms of temperature and humidity. These days, my piano room is sitting at about 24C and 40% relative humidity. This house is very consistent in temp and especially humidity. The two houses I lived in before this (one rental, one I owned) were much harder to manage in terms of humidity. But both had central air conditioning.