Darkoshi

I finally took down the Christmas tree and decorations.

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The border grass (liriope) behind the house was tall and thick so I used the string trimmer on it. Swarms of mosquitos flew at me. Maybe that is where they hang out in the daytime, shading themselves from the sun between the thick blades of grass. Maybe that is why there are always so many mosquitos in the back yard. Now I'm tempted to uproot all the border grass back there and get rid of it. It's a pity as regular grass doesn't grow well back there, so it was always nice to at least have the greenness of the border grass along the house. Although it is very hardy, so it might grow back. Which is the bane of having a yard; even when you cut things down and cut out as much root as you can (and feel bad about how you're killing the poor things), they keep growing back.

Those darn hardy crepe myrtles. One of them which had the stump ground keeps getting a bunch of sprouts in the same place, apparently from old seeds. The other one which had the stump ground (or did it?) still has a big root underground which I was only able to partially hack away, and keeps getting a bunch of sprouts. The one which had the stump left, and in which I drilled holes to kill it, is no longer growing back in the middle, but keeps sprouting branches along the outer edge of the stump. This last time, I cracked off a lot of the stump's bark where the branches were growing from; hopefully that will kill it.

It's not even like I even had all the crepe myrtle trees cut down; I only had a few of them cut, to thin things out.

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Yesterday, fireflies and fireworks. Not many to see, only a few here and there. But a lot of thump boom pop sounds to hear. I did some taekwondo/stretch kicks down by the lake in the dark while looking for bright colors in the sky. I spied a mostly stationary light in the sky to my left, not too high up, partially behind some trees, which seemed to fade and come back every once in a while. I wondered if it was flares or a drone.

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Thinking about how gluten can be separated from wheat, to get low-carb wheat gluten, made me wonder if one could make gluten-free wheat flour (or rather, starch). The info at that link is what I found; ie. yes you can, or mostly gluten-free anyway.

Low (and high) FODMAP Foods for Vegans - for reference.

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I was surprised to read "While citric acid is usually made from corn, beet sugar or molasses, it can also be made from wheat." I had thought it was made from citrus fruit. Then, I was even more surprised to read that it is actually produced from a mold (aspergillus niger) (a black mold, but not the toxic one), which is grown on the sugary syrup produced from the corn/beets/wheat/etc. More details here: Overview of citric acid production from Aspergillus niger

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I was also surprised to read that several gums commonly added to foods are made, not from plants as I had thought, but from bacteria.

Carrageenan (aka irish moss) comes from a red seaweed. I had previously discounted claims that it could be unhealthy, but now I'm not so sure, as it seems to be linked to inflammation.
Xanthum Gum, gellan gum, and curdlan are made from bacteria.
Guar gum, locust bean (aka carob bean) gum, and tara gum are made from plants.
Gum arabic (aka acacia gum) is made from the sap of the acacia tree.

Sources/more info:
What is Carrageenan?
Carrageenan and Gellan Gum
Gums in Foods Causing Health Problems for Many - very informative about the different kinds of gums in use.

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This was interesting, as I had never heard about it before:
Alpha-gal allergy - can be caused by tick bites. Makes one allergic to mammalian meat products. Based on the comments on this page, it can also cause reactions to meat by-products like gelatin, dairy, and even animal-derived magnesium stearate.

Random thought today: Let's not count our sheep before they hatch.

I keep seeing little red mites running across my laptop. I threw a few outside but it is futile. Last year there were tons of them in this room for a number of days... I don't recall how long. Later on there were tons of tiny spiders. That is the main reason I caulked along the edges of the floor last year - hoping that would keep it from happening again. But they must still be coming from somewhere else.

I actually happened to get a USB microscope photo of a mite last week as it was scurrying under the lens. But I didn't realize that the microscope application re-used the same file names each time it was restarted, so the photo got overwritten. Phooey.

Anyway, I haven't seen any mites in the last couple hours. Maybe they went to sleep.

A couple weeks ago there was a lizard in the garage, in one of the round plastic bins. I thought maybe it had gotten stuck there, not being able to climb back up the walls of the bin. So I took it outside. But it behaved oddly. It didn't scurry off, and it moved its body oddly. The next day, it was still in nearly the same spot, dead.

Later, it occurred to me that maybe it had eaten some of the roach bait/poison I had put in the garage. Or maybe it had eaten a roach which had eaten the poison. That made me feel bad.

Last week, while using the trimmer to mow the lawn, I accidentally hit a cockroach. That made me feel bad too. It looked like I cut its head open. I didn't know whether I should stomp on it to put it out of its misery, or if that would make it worse. I never know.

There seem to be a lot of bugs scurrying around in the grass when I'm mowing, lately. Maybe because of all the rain. I've been having to mow the yard each and every week.

I have a new trimmer with a lithium battery which works much better than my old trimmer with the nickel-cadmium batteries. The old batteries took a long time to charge, and lost their charge pretty quickly. The new batteries charge in under an hour, and the new trimmer has a speed setting. At first I thought it was best to keep it on the lowest setting, so that the battery would last longest. But then I realized that using a higher speed lets you mow faster. You can swing the trimmer back and forth faster, whereas with a lower speed, you have to move slower in order to cut the same amount of grass. I was beginning to enjoy the higher speed settings, as I could get the same amount of grass mowed in less time. But then I hit that roach. And then I thought, maybe at a lower speed, the line would be less dangerous. Or maybe, with me moving more slowly on the lower setting, the bugs would have more time to hear me coming and to get out of my way.

I decided not to put roach bait in the garage anymore. It's too cruel. The bugs out there don't bother me much. It's not that big a deal to have to vacuum up their mess once in a while, compared to the alternatives.

A couple of weeks ago at work when I was outside for lunch, a mosquito was pestering me, following me from the bench to the picnic table. So I decided to kill it. The next time it landed on me, I swatted it. I felt my hand crushing it briefly, and then jerked away, shaken. Damn world, turning me into a killer.

Starting about a week ago, I seem to have gotten a case of adult-onset allergy against mosquito bites. I hope this is a temporary thing. Instead of having the bites stay pea-sized, they keep getting bigger until the size of a quarter or more, and the skin swells up. Sometimes the swelling itches and burns, sometimes not. Taking anti-histamines helps get rid of the swelling and itching somewhat. Otherwise the swelling goes away in about a day.

I'm wondering if my body's overreaction to the bites is somehow due to the chigger bumps which still haven't entirely faded. Or to the hot-pepper burn I got on my hands while de-seeding some peppers, the day before the swellings started.

This week I killed another mosquito, outside at lunch. Now it's not just defending myself from a bunch of itchy bites, but also from annoying swellings.

Actually, I'm still not entirely sure it's mosquito bites that are causing the swellings, as I haven't seen what's been biting me. The reaction is more like a spider bite reaction, but it doesn't seem likely to me that I've been getting repeatedly bitten by spiders several days in a week, both inside the house and outside.

I'm posting this not to complain about it, but so that maybe Google will index it, since I haven't found much info on sudden adult onset of mosquito allergies. Especially not in relation to chiggers or hot peppers.

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Last night, I saw a pale-colored, unpleasant-looking spider in the house. So I caught it and took it outside. But while descending the porch steps, preparing to release it onto the grass, I stepped on a large cockroach. Barefoot. Squish. Ugh. Poor cockroach. Sigh. Just can't win.