Squirrels, tomatoes, and zip drives oh my!

No exciting field work or adventures to report. Hopefully next week I'll have something of interest to report.

I found out that the baby squirrel is the culprit of all the recent and daily birdfeeder traumas. So it's off my nice list and joins the rest of the obese naughty squirrel gang on my naughty list. The naughty squirrels have also been sampling my green tomatoes. They take one bite, decide they hate it and leave it on the deck. Then they try another.

But at least the tomatoes are plentiful so it's not the end of the world.

Basil plant is doing quite well considering the constant digging by the squirrels.

In computer nerd news, I dug up my old external zip drive. Remember those before you could burn cds? I had put a bunch of pictures on zip disks back in California. I thought I could hook it up to my new laptop and burn all those pics to a CD. Nope. New laptop does not have a parellel interface or whatever you call it. Y'know in the olden days how you would hook up a printer and then turn those two knobs to connect it. I bought a converter but it's not the right size so I'm off to try again. Sigh. I really don't know what I'll do if I can find the right converter.

Dog days of summer

I've had my fair share of field days during the dog days of summer. I think the hot days of NJ are far worse than the hot days of CA. At least in CA, it wasn't as humid. Granted it was like 100+ degrees, but you could hop from tree to tree. In NJ, when it's hot and you are working hard, it's just brutal. Just as soon as you wipe the sweat from your face, it's starting dripping immediately. Your face turns beet red and you become real stupid and irritable. Then cue the dehydration headache that comes when you get home.

The past couple years I've managed to avoid the real hot days. Like 2 years ago, when our company was working on Staten Italy. The site was huge and there were no trees for shade. There were out a bunch of days in a row during a heat wave of 95+ F. I wouldn't have survived and they knew it because I was never out there. There were four guys and the pairs took 30 minutes shifts. The off 30 minutes was spent in the air conditioned truck. They were sweating so bad that they got poison ivy everywhere since it bled through their clothes.

As anyone who's lived in Brumfus can tell you, the days of summer there are unreal. I lived in a house where the candles in the 3rd floor melted during the day. You know it's bad when as a sleep obsessed college student you wake up at 8 am because it's too hot. Or you take a shower at night and don't dry off but just jump into bed hoping to cool down enough to fall asleep.

I'm really looking forward to the break in this heat wave. The ozone is starting to get to me. If you have that random tickle in your chest that makes you want to cough, it's the ozone. I just love that thunderstorm that comes through and cools everything down. The steam rises from the pavement and all is well again.