Darkoshi

When you think maybe you should give away this small pan you never use, but there's a speck of dirt on it so you wash it. And then you rap your dish-washing-gloved knuckles on it to see how it sounds. And then you keep banging and tapping on it for the next 5 minutes because it sounds so nice and reminds you of certain church bells in Germany, and because you got into a rhythm that is hard to stop. No, I won't give this away. But maybe I should put it somewhere else to remind me it's a music instrument rather than a cooking vessel.

I've never heard so much owl hooting as in the last few days.

And actually, as in the last 10 minutes. It Keeps On Hootin'.

During most of my school years, I brought my own lunches to eat.
In the first few years, my mom fixed my lunchbox for me. Later I fixed my own lunches.
One school during the 5th grade was so close nearby that I could walk home for lunch (my memory is hazy, but I think that is what I did).
So I think it was at most two years that I ate the lunches that the school cafeterias provided.

Yet just now, shaking my almost-empty half-gallon carton of soymilk and hearing the distinctive sound of ice flakes sloshing around in the liquid gave me a flashback to those little half-pint cartons of milk that were part of the school lunches. They often had ice flakes in them like that.

I discovered an amazing and wonderfully relaxing auditory experience.

It requires a cloth headband and a pair of something to cover the ears with under the headband. If you have multiple headbands, try them all out as different kinds give different results.

For the 2nd item, I used an old worn-out contoured foam eye mask cut in half. I had wondered if sewing the halves to the inside of the headband on each side might make good ear-warmers. That was why I shoved them under the headband over my ears to see what it would feel like, and how I discovered the neat auditory effect.

The soft and curved shape of the foam I used seems to contribute to the best effect. If you have something else soft that can cup around the ears, you can try that. As an alternative, I tried folding over a pair of socks and placing them over the ears under the headband - that works too, though it doesn't sound as great and isn't as comfortable.

After putting that on your head, simply run one or more fingers lightly across the headband. You can follow a swirly path around the ears, up to the forehead, around to the back of the head, etc.

It makes a sound like roaring winds in a storm, like the roaring of the ocean, like airplanes taking off or flying directly overhead and then into the distance. You control it all with the path of your fingertips.

I tried wearing over-the-ear headphones, running my finger along the outside of the headphones, but that did not give the same nice effect like the headband.

Yesterday was a very nice and breezy day. I sat on Qiao's back porch in the sun for quite a while, working on my laptop. Pollen cones kept falling on me and the laptop.

Later while I was working inside, I heard a loud sound through the open windows, like something metallic had fallen down. I thought the wind must have knocked something down. So I checked the front and back yards, and looked all around but didn't find anything. I finally decided that a falling pine cone must have hit the metal shroud over the chimney.

The rose bush is full of roses and looked beautiful in the late afternoon sunlight. I took photos.

Today when Qiao wanted to drive his car out of the garage, the garage door wasn't working. It would lift up a few inches, but that was all. We weren't able to manually lift it either. Then we noticed that one of the big springs had snapped apart, and that was why it wasn't working. We got a repair person to fix it.

So, that metallic sound I heard yesterday was actually the spring snapping apart! We have a cam in the garage which even caught it on video.

Now I'd like to include that video clip and a rose photo in this post, and also photos of purple pine pollen cones which I took last month (had never seen purple ones like those before!)
But it's too late. Maybe another time, maybe.

A mandolin cutter put some gouges into my thumb yesterday. That's what I get for ignoring the warning to always use the food-gripper thingy with it. It was bound to happen eventually. Maybe I won't ignore the warning anymore.

With the waterproof bandages they have nowadays, the gouges hardly bother me. It would be nice if they made smaller mini-sized ones so that I wouldn't have to cut them in half for cuts on my fingers. The cut side makes it easier for water to eventually leak in, when washing hands or taking showers.

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One reason I like the sounds of katydids and cicadas and such is that they speak of another world right in the midst of this one. The human world could disappear and they'd still be there, singing those same songs.

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I discovered that one of Notepad++'s dialog boxes has a button labelled "I'm going nowhere". At first I was perplexed, then amused.

I don't like the sound of pianos. Or at least, I often find myself not liking songs which have a regular acoustic piano (or a digital recreation of that sound) as the main musical instrument. I'm not sure why; the sound of the keys sounds sort of unpleasant to me. Clunky. Muted. Old-fashioned. The sound of each key decays too fast.

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It seems that ucky isn't a word? Hmm. To me, yucky conveys bad-tasting food. Icky conveys dirt or contamination. Ucky conveys some other general unpleasantness. I suppose I should use the word 'unpleasant' instead.

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Nearly every time I use the self-checkout at Kroger, I have my 2 cloth bags with me. After swiping my Kroger card, I always select the option to "Use my own bags", and I always put them on the top shelf. They always weigh the same. Considering that, you'd think that their system could be smart enough to remember that about me, and allow me to continue checking out, rather than EVERY SINGLE TIME giving me the "Someone will assist you shortly" message and making me wait for an attendant to come and verify that my bags are really empty, and I'm not trying to steal anything. Grr.

Several times during each check-out, I also get that "Please remove the unscanned item from the bagging area. Remember to always scan each item" message, even though I *do* make sure that each item has scanned successfully before placing it in my bag. I also get "Please put back the item you removed from the bagging area" fairly often, even though I haven't removed anything. I ignore these nagging messages, and continue scanning.

Yeah, Kroger's computers think I'm a crook. Whatever. It doesn't stop them from sending me coupons.

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SC Congressman-Elect Joe Cunningham Clenches an Historic Win

The Charleston attorney and ocean engineer narrowly defeated first term state house representative Katie Arrington, making him the first democrat the first congressional district has sent to congress in nearly 40 years.
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One of the key issues Cunningham’s camp was able to capitalize on is offshore drilling. He made it clear he was against it while pointing out Arrington supported the president’s decision to lift the ban. The first congressional district runs along the coast from Charleston to Hilton Head and several republican mayors endorsed Cunningham over Arrington on that issue alone.

Here in my district 6, the Democrat incumbent (since 1993) Jim Clyburn won re-election with 70% of the vote.

That thing where a familiar word all of a sudden looks unfamiliar and wrong. Today it happened with the word "school".

I was reading the "sch" as pronounced in German, "sh". And thinking to myself, surely that's not how the word [school] is spelled? No way, it looks too odd, it couldn't be. (Even now it looked weird again for a moment.) Little school kids shouldn't be subjected to such an odd word right off the bat.

I am. I am. Not superman. sigh ditty boom boom.

I feel. Like there's no one else who shares my mindset. I know there are people out there. Maybe not sharing all the same bits & pieces of it, but at least a subset. Yet they seem harder to find than in the past. Doing a search on DW interests, and only a few matches are returned, and most of them haven't updated in years. People aren't as active on YouTube anymore; I know I'm not either. Tumblr; I've never been able to get comfortable with that site. Forums, bah. No time. No fun.

boom ditty boom.

The gate was going ka chunk ka chunk for a few months ka chunk ka chunk every time I walked on by, ka chunk ka chunk ka chunk I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm trying trying trying to switch back to switch ka chunk ka chunk.
Every time I thought to myself, I should report that; it should be fixed. It's wasting electricity. Every time for more than a month. When I walked by, or drove by with my car windows open.
But it was one of those things which wouldn't stay in my mind long enough for me to actually do something about it. It slipped out of my mind, until the next time I passed it again. ka chunk ka chunk ka chunk. I should report that, I thought. I need to remember this time. When I get to the bench I will write a reminder note to myself. But by the time I got to the bench, it had slipped away away. Until this morning I finally ... I thought about it on the way to work, before even passing by it, and I wrote myself a note then, while stopped at a stop light. So I finally reported it. And they must have fixed it right away. No more ka chunk as I walked by today at lunch.

Thumb guides. Like the scooped out curves of paper on the side of a big dictionary. I was reading something today about print books versus web media, which described thumb guides as "expensive", in terms of producing books. I hadn't considered that before. But yeah, I guess they are rare, and probably even more so now in this age of fewer paper books.

Frog song in thunderstorm. A lightning strike 37 seconds in, repeated in slow motion at the end of video.



Video title: Frogs, thunder and lightning
Posted by: Darkoshi
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77r6Gzx332I

When I went to bed last night after 3am, Serena was outside barking at something. I told her to hush, but she kept at it. I figured she'd stop soon. A few hours later I woke up, and she was still barking, or again barking. So I put on shoes and went outside to check.

She was chewing on something. Uh-oh. I fetched a flashlight. She was sniffing at a cicada shell on the ground. Maybe she ate a cicada? But wouldn't that be buzzy and unpalatable? She started barking at something else in the same area. On a thick blade/root of grass, were another 2 cicadas... or rather one cicada and one shell. I didn't want her to eat that one too, so I detached and carried the blade of grass to a safer place (on top of the trash bin) out of Serena's reach. The cicada was motionless the whole time.

I petted Serena to calm her down, and went back inside. Before I even got back to bed, she was barking again, in a different part of the yard. I opened the window and told her to hush. She ignored me. I turned the volume up on the sound machine, though her bark being a higher pitched noise, it didn't help much to cover it up, and went back to sleep. At least her bark is quieter than Zorro's and doesn't carry as far.

Later after getting up, I checked the top of the trash bin. The live cicada was gone; presumably it made a safe get-away.

I got to thinking - the live cicada had been much larger than the empty shell. Yet it must have just molted last night from that same shell. How does that work? I wondered why the one I moved hadn't simply flown away. Are insects in a stupor state after molting, making them easy prey?

Here is a Cicada Molting video. The part about 2 minutes in where the wings start to unfurl & extend is fascinating.

This animated gif shows the same process, though with much less detail.

Cicada Molting/Eclosing Process - this page describes each step of the process. It explains why a just-molted bug might not be as unpalatable as I had imagined.

"The Soft and Chewy Cicada Teneral Stage, Yumm!!"
The teneral stage is that stage in a Cicada's development where the Cicada has just finished carrying out it's molting process but it is still relatively soft. Like the consistancy of a newly molted soft-shelled crab. ... It's at this stage where the Cicada is most vulnerable.

A comment on the same page mentions that nymphs begin to emerge from the ground to molt, when the soil reaches a certain temperature. So maybe many nymphs emerge around the same time. I sure hope Serena didn't eat a whole bunch more. I like hearing the buzz of adult cicadas!

I still plan to post some cicada and katydid sounds that I recorded.

I often hear cicadas up in the trees in my yard, but not katydids. Katydids must prefer more wooded areas. I noticed several times while driving home from work at night, that I could hear katydids singing most of the way along the ride home, from the parking lot at work and along the main streets. But as I near my neighborhood, the katydid sounds decrease, until finally there are none at all to be heard. There are only the cricket and other night-time insect sounds. In spite of there being a good amount of trees around here.