Dysmey Blog Archives  >  Summer, Hot and Wet

Summer, Hot and Wet

I spent a Saturday morning and early afternoon at the library. I had to run a script on the Cardinal Scholar repository which, because of its more than a thousand items, takes a very long time. And I had to restart its server after I am done. So, until it was finished, I was stuck in the library.

I discovered the day before that IPR had ditched the RealPlayer server that it has had for ages, and which had not made IPR very popular online. IPR now makes its signal available using the PLS playlist format at both 128K stereophonic and 48K monophonic. This saves me from having to install RealPlayer on the Macs here in the library. It is no longer necessary, now that Mac users can listen to IPR in iTunes.

The past couple of weeks have not been good, weatherwise. We have Sirius Days right now, with hotter and wetter air than we have had in years. It is good that I have a job in an air-conditioned building, and a car with decent air conditioning. It is not so good at home, where my air conditioners strain in vain to cool down and dry out the air. As it stands, it is hard to breathe that hot and heavy air. It’s keeping my folks indoors, too.

This hot-and-wet guarantees nasty storms. Yet, we have had few of them in Fairmount, mostly because the storms dodge the town, going to our north or to our south. But when the storms do come, they seem odd, with the rain hitting the glass on the back door. This has never happened before. I was wondering what was done to the back roof to bring that about.

Last Thursday I discovered why my cat was not eating the dinner I put out for her the evening before: The ants were doing that for her! There was an ant highway going from the cat’s food bowls through the kitchen into the living room to the foyer, where they were emerging out a hole in the carpet along the edge where the foyer meets the living. But meanwhile it was a half hour of:

• dumping the cat food and bowls in the yard;
• washing the kitchen floor with Pine-Sol to rid the floor of food, ants and their pheremone scent;
• vacuuming the living room floor of ants;
• scrubing the living room carpet with shampoo to clean off the pheremone trail;
• deploying ant poison around the hole to destroy the colony from inside the hole.

I put the cat’s food and water in a place other than where it was in order to throw off any ants stubborn enough to return to the kitchen.