I told Brian back in April, usually a pretty nice month, weather wise, when it was overcast and depressing, day after day, that my prediction for this year is we go from winter to summer. Bypass spring altogether.
And I was right. I can't recall very many days were it was a sun shining, cool breeze blowing, windows open, springtime kind of day. Nope.
Last Thursday was the start of the most recent heatwave. We knew it was going to be a hot one. Thursday night Brian watered the avocado trees for about an hour. We were dreading the coming days.
Friday started out nicely, the rest of the yard was well watered, the bank, where the trees are, was watered for over an hour. We need to do this to prevent the beetles from doing damage. Watering helps the tree sap resist them. We closely watched the indoor temperature compared to the outdoor temperature and as soon as it was getting close to the same, all doors and windows were shut. I hate having to do this. The ceiling fans were all on high, but we didn't run any other fans because we're trying to keep our energy usage down. If it was just the house, it wouldn't be a problem, but Brian has machinery in his shop that runs on electricity and if he's not filling orders, we're going to be in a heap of trouble.
Since the humidity was down, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. The high Friday was about 113°. That was in the shade. It was hot.
Friday afternoon, I noticed a thin hummingbird sitting on the back of one of the chairs on the patio. And she was open mouth breathing. Not something you like to see in any animal. I said something to Brian about it and he got a bowl and filled it with water and ice and put it on the table. I was outside with her and she'd move to the back of another chair if I got too close, but she stayed on the patio (we have that white shade cloth over the top). She had no interest in the bowl of water. But she wasn't moving very fast.
I walked out into the yard and picked a couple of purple clover stalks (the white clover grows close to the ground, but the purple clover grows tall). I went back to the patio, where the little winged creature was still on the back of a chair and held the clover flower up to her. She moved to the back of another chair. I dunked the clover flower into the water, letting it get pretty wet. I held it up to the hummingbird once again. She started to drink. She moved her beak around the flower head, taking in liquid. I dunked the flower again and she drank some more. The third time, she had her fill and flew off into the kiwi tree in the yard behind us. I hope she felt a little refreshed.
Saturday wasn't as hot, but we did have a thundershower. According to my weather station we received about .04 inches of rain. It was nice, but it meant the humidity was on the rise. Monsoonal moisture. Twenty years ago this stuff hit in August. Now, it's July. Yesterday was a little cooler and so far today, we just have clouds. There have been reports of rain in my area, but none here.
So far this year it seems like the mosquitoes haven't been as bad, even though the pool was more swamp like for months (one of the pipes broke and we decided to just redo everything; got new filters, pool pump, vacuum...) I have video of those little larvae at the edge of the pool, just nasty. But we do have them and I do strongly request that unscreened doors be kept closed. For some reason, Brian wants to debate this. I do not. One mosquito bite will last weeks with me, or so that's how it's been the past few years.
One morning last week, he left the door in the garage open for air flow. I like air flow. So do the mosquitoes. They flow in on it. We had a heated discussion. I said "fine, leave it open. But when I get bit, I'll be miserable. And I'll make sure you know it. For as long as it takes, you will share my misery."
He walked into the office, then back into the garage and shut the door. Thank you.
Then I went over to Amazon and ordered one of these. It was put up yesterday morning, the cats are quickly getting used to it. The air flow isn't as strong as no covering, but there is fresh air and no bugs. And when it gets dirty, I can just toss it in the washer.
With more light in the garage, I washed the floor in the worst trafficked area and also washed the runner rugs that I have over the rubber pads (the ones in front of my storage closet and work table). It doesn't stink as badly in there now.
Like I said, it's overcast this morning, the humidity is higher. I've already had my first sweat of the day when I ran the vacuum (lots of fur gathering along the walls, under chairs and in corners - a bunch of shedding). Part of me wants to go take a shower, because it will feel good. but another part says you'll feel just as crappy in fifteen minutes so why bother, you're not going anywhere. Good point. Maybe I'll jump in the pool.
I worked on the store last week, kind of got burned out on it. I got a great price on the last version of the upgrade for my previous store and got it installed. I had a little (ha!) bump with doing the database import export, but finally muddled through it with advice from my Facebook friends and the X-cart team.
Then the CEO of the company offered to upgrade me to the next version for free. Free? I dunno. I had to think about it. I'd gotten as far as I had with the one I just purchased and had the store looking close to how the old store looked (different files for the style sheets and I'm in no way an expert in CSS coding, but I was able to muddle my way through them and make some changes). I was reluctant, but he sold me on it.
I upgraded. Did the import/export of the database. All the stuff was there, but not all of the pictures and descriptions, because I hadn't finished with them. My coding for the look? Gone. I'd have to start over again. I didn't want to. It's work, I did it already, I didn't want to do it again. Don't get me wrong, the software was awesome, much more powerful than what I had. Too powerful, I found out.
I checked my data usage for the domain and in less than twelve hours, there were three faults. Faults are not a good thing. It means I've used more than my share of alloted whatever. And when someone uses up more than their share of something, it affects the other domains hosted on that server.
I contacted the CEO and told him I had to pass. He was disappointed, kept trying to get me to keep it, said I could move it to their hosting, but I declined. I explained to him that I hadn't sold twenty dollars total of anything in years. That it had been so long since I'd had a sale, I had to set up a new account with my credit card processor. That it was a hobby store, it wasn't going to get big and make a lot of money.
He finally got it.
The price for their hosting? The cheapest is $19.95 a month. We pay less than $10.00 a month for what we have now and there are six domains on it. Four are live, one going to be live (the store) and the other one is resting. Yeah, no thank you.
Since I deleted all of the files and deleted the database, there have been no more faults.
That's about it here at the cathouse. Life goes on.
rain
mosquitoes
lvdesigns
geekstuff
