Making A Mole Hill Out Of A Mountain

I have moles in my yard. They've been here, as far as I can tell, longer than I have. They enjoy running around under the mulch and munching on bugs. They don't pay rent, but for the most part they also don't make a mess.

Well, for the most part.

Usually they just leave little raised tracks that are easy to stomp down, but sometimes they need to properly dig to get under something hard and immobile, like this concrete step outside of the former hantavirus shed.

When this happens, just stomping it back down isn't really sufficient, and a more invasive intervention is needed.

I need to rake back the mulch, level out and stomp down the dirt, then rake the mulch back into place again. A bit more of a bother, but all things considered, not the worst thing that could happen.

Good as new. Until their next digging session.

Life Begins Anew

Despite being quite fond of xeriscaping, I do find that having a patch of lush green grass does wonders for my mood, which is why I've been putting some time and effort into regrowing my emotional support lawn in the back yard this year.

I reseeded it about a week before spreading the compost, which I wrote about last week, and now this week the new grass seedlings are finally popping up.

I've had quite a bit of difficulty with previous seeding attempts, largely due to poor timing on my part. The lawn would end up drying out before the seeds germinated, and then the local bird population would just fly in and pick the whole patch of dirt clean. Not this time, though; thanks to the wet spring and the thin layer of compost the seeds have had time to fully rehydrate and sprout up, and with any luck they'll grow into strong, deep rooted grass plants over the next few weeks.

In other outdoors news, the geraniums are blooming.

They're a little damp from the unseasonably late rain that fell this morning.

The blue potato bush is also blooming.

This is about as nice as it ever looks. It really is one ugly motherfucker. I'll probably remove it at some point.

The echeveria is also getting ready to put on a show.

These will soon turn into 2-foot-long flower stalks.

Male-Pattern Baldness

So after 1220 miles, the rear tire on The Stig was starting to look a little thin on top.

The rear tires on bikes tend to burn through much quicker than the fronts, thanks to all the pedalling forces going through them.

Though the knobs down the middle no longer exist, you might well note that there's still some tread rubber left, and point out that I've simply created a semi-slick tire here. This is true, and I probably could have squeezed a few hundred more miles out of it, but rear tires also tend to suffer from a lot more punctures than their front-end brethren.

This one, for example, was actively seeping sealant, as was the one pictured below, along with perhaps another half dozen or so around the tire.

The sealant does do a pretty good job of keeping the air in, but the two issues taken together: the worn of knobs and the pinhole leaks, were enough for me to send this tire to the trash bin.

Here's its replacement, for comparison.

It looks quite a bit fresher.

Also, the front tire, with the same 1220 miles on it.

Now to be fair, the front tire has a different tread pattern with larger, taller knobs, so it would likely wear slower even if it were on the rear, but it certainly wouldn't look this fresh if it was riding on the back all this time.

In fact, on my road bikes where I run the same tire front and rear, I'll usually move the front tire to the rear when the rear wears out, so that I can actually wear it out before it succumbs to too many cuts and pinholes. Just a little life hack.

Golden Brown and Delicious

I made up a new batch of pot pies this weekend, and decided to perform a little experiment. Previously I had been doing nothing special to the pastry crusts after assembling the pot pies, but this time I mixed up some powdered egg yolk and whole milk to make a bit of an egg wash to brush over top.

The result? Lots of browning on top.

The browning is a little bit uneven and streaky on this one, though. The egg wash mixture I whipped up was a bit thick, so after the first two I thinned it out with a bit more milk and so I expect those will look more even.

This is what it looked like before baking, fresh out of the freezer.

If you look closely you can sort of tell that the egg wash on this is a little bit uneven.

Of course, the most important thing is that it was very tasty indeed.

Up On The Roof

As I've mentioned previously, my roof was not installed especially well by the previous owner. I'm pretty sure it's got two layers of shingles, which isn't a good start, and either the shingles themselves are very old or they were the cheapest brand on the shelf. That said, the north side is at least not doing too badly.

At least where "not doing too badly" is a highly relative term. Most of the aggregate is staying put, but there's a lot of places where nails are popping up through the shingle tabs, or where the shingles were just nailed in clear out in the open in the first place.

The south side is, naturally, weathering a bit quicker. It's still basically holding together but also has its share of nail pops and so on. The major issue, however, is the ridge shingles.

A few weeks ago, after a particularly blustery day, I noticed the corner of a shingle on the ground in front of my house. A quick peek at my roof revealed that one of the ridge shingles had become dislodged and the corners of a few of them had snapped off. So, it was time to get up on the roof again.

There wasn't  much I could do about the missing corners, but thankfully ridge shingles are mostly decorative anyway, so the important thing was to just make sure the nails got sealed up. This photo also shows a good example of one of the many misplaced nails on the roof.

I also went down the line and used the cold patch schmoo to glue down the corners of the ridge shingle tabs to hopefully keep them from lifting and snapping off in future wind storms, and to keep them from shifting around in general since they aren't remarkably well secured to begin with.

Eventually I'll just need to get a new roof put on, but this should help keep things from leaking for a little while longer.

A Real Shitty Situation

The chicken manure I bought yesterday wasn't going to do any good just sitting in a pile on my patio, so I decided that this morning would be a good time to spread it out on the lawn.

There we are, another job well done.

I'm kidding of course, laying out the bags like this helps to plan out the spreading. If the bags are evenly placed, then the mounds will be evenly spaced, and the spreading will go smoothly without having to drag a bunch of material from one area to another.

I gotta say, it must be one hell of a big chicken to drop piles of dung this size.

While we're at it with the tips and tricks, the best way to empty bags of material like this is to split it open down the middle, then flip it over and fold it in half. Then you're just basically pulling the plastic bag off the pile, rather than lifting everything up to dump it out.

And of course a garden trowel with a serrated edge is the perfect tool for the job of splitting open the bags.

On the subject of the right tool for the job, it's surprising how many people don't know the difference between the various types of rakes.

This is a garden rake. It is not for raking leaves. It is for spreading materials like mulch and compost, or for cultivating loose soil. If you use the wrong rake for the wrong job, you will have a bad time.

Anyway, the top dressing is complete, and I now have a really shitty patch of lawn in my back yard.

While I wait for the grass to grow, let's take a moment to appreciate this slime mold, which had grown on some mulch nearby and then dried up into a material not unlike hardened spray foam.

Nature is weird.

What A Load Of

Ahem...

So I've decided that, after this wet winter which banished the California mega-drought once and for all, I'd give my little postage stamp of lawn a little TLC. I switched the sprinklers off back in 2021 or so and the lawn basically shrivelled up and died.

It's bounced back a little since then, since grass never truly dies, but it could obviously use a little help. The chicken shit is one part of it, and the other part is giving it a nice hefty overseeding to get things fired up and growing again. The 12 bags should make for a nice 1/2 inch top dressing (though two of the bags will likely go up in the flower bed behind the short retaining wall, because the soil there is truly awful).

I'm also going to turn the sprinkler back on, which brings us to the next topic of discussion.

The sprinkler controller is in the comically oversized grey box at the top, and that little remote box below it is a "Solar Sync" controller. Basically it measures precipitation and sunshine to estimate the evapotranspiration, and uses that estimate to adjust the runtime of the sprinklers automatically.

Or at least it's supposed to. It's never worked since I moved in, and would gleefully let the lawn dry out during the heat of the summer, and soak it down with water in the winter just hours after a rain storm.

I tried poking around at it to try to figure out what's up, and eventually came to the realization that the problem with the Solar Sync box is that it exists.

This model of sprinkler controller has the Solar Sync function built-in. You're just supposed to buy the sensor without the controller and connect it directly to the main box. Luckily it's the same sensor, so I just yanked out the extra controller, wired in the sensor correctly, and for the first time since it was installed the system actually works properly as it was designed.

It really baffles me how someone can install an automatic sprinkler system like this, have it not work, and just shrug and live with it instead of fixing it.