The Elephant's Child

So Where Does All The Stuff on eBay Come From?

Apparently 70% of the the merchandise on eBay is generated from a single small bungalow.

 

The Care and Feeding of the Eastern Subterranean Termite, Reticulitermes flavipes

First of all, remember that reticulitermes flavipes needs moisture to survive.  This is perhaps the most critical element of termite care. It is advantageous to allow gutters to overflow and clog.  This allows vital moisture to collect in the soil around your home. Also, consider leaving the house nearly unheated during the winter, so as to assure all moisture introduced into the basement will condense within your walls, and on the basement side of your subfloor. Do not install ventilation fans in your bathrooms.  These pull too much humidity out of the room and create dry, clean, mold-free areas behind drywall. Not a nice place for the soft-bodied worker termite to forage for his dinner!

Make sure that your termite colony has easy access to their food source.  Allow brush, branches, and debris to pile up alongside your foundation.  Besides providing snacks for your buddies on their way from the earth to your home, brush and debris shelters your foundation from the drying effects of sun and wind exposure. Deep mulches made of forest by-products act as resort hotels for your termites, providing them with warmth, shelter, moisture and an ample food source on their arduous journey into your home.  Make sure all foundation plantings are surrounded by a mulch layer at least 2 inches deep. 

Cover exterior wood surfaces with non-wood “improvements” like vinyl siding, steel siding, and aluminum trim. Non-edible exterior surfaces allow your colony to feast on the wood right up to the back surface of the paint job.  Termites like their privacy, and these surfaces will also effectively protect your termites from prying eyes that might wish to disturb the colony.

Make sure that all your crawl spaces have dirt floors, and that any insulation in your crawl space runs all the way down to the dirt floor.  This allows your colony to quickly work its way up the concrete foundation, safely protected in the space between the Styrofoam insulation and the damp concrete wall. Go ahead and glue the Styrofoam right to the concrete.  Your termites are quite small, only about 1/8” of an inch long, and can squeeze through spaces only 2mm wide. 

Also, make sure your house has ample cheap wood in it.  Plywood and pine subfloor, cardboard drywall facing, and pine wall studs are all favorites.  Eighty-six year old Douglas Fir; not so much. 

Finally, enjoy your friends.  Although small and cursed with the moniker “bug,” they have an amazing hive-intelligence that is not equaled anywhere else in the insect world, communicating with pheromones and creating colonies that can have several million members.  Their queens can live 25 years, outliving even the most tenacious third-world dictators.  The worker-class members are sterile and blind and work 24 hours a day until their death at age 2 years.  The elite upper class gets to fly before they have s*x. They are totally incapable of biting you. So stop being so grossed out.

How To Make Great Merwaine

Yeah, let me see you try to spell it on the first try after a day like today.  To make excellent meringue, start by choosing a from-scratch waffle recipe like your Mom used to use.  Make sure it requires three bowls and separation of the eggs.  Separate eggs, putting the whites in your small stand mixer bowl.  Assemble mixer and beaters, and push start. 

Now for the critical part.  While the mixer is beating the egg whites, run upstairs at full speed carrying a 32-pound four-year-old in gastro-intestinal distress. Assist child with throne room responsibilities, including, but not limited to, the use of warm water, soap, wipes, tissues, zinc oxide cream, towels, and clean undergarments. Provide much comfort, hugs, and reassurance. Remember mixer, but settle child in her bedroom with books and blankets before returning to the kitchen.

Enter kitchen.  Behold the prizewinning White Peaks of Glorious Stiffness!

Too bad the waffle batter really needed those whites folded into it.  Such perfection wasted on waffles.

Can you hear me now?

We watched The Day After Tomorrow last night.  It was funnier than Destination Saturn. Especially since I read Micheal Crichton's State of Fear just a few weeks ago. Who ripped off whom? Both came out the same year.

The world is being destroyed and their cell phones are still working. I want the name of the provider those guys were using.