Tropical Storm Imelda II

Crap. Imelda came back strong overnight. School’s been cancelled and this is what my street looks like right now. I’m a little worried. It never even got this bad during Hurricane Harvey. Hope it lets up and recedes soon. I’m still supposed to go to work today.

Tropical Storm Imelda

The big rain storm that we only first heard about yesterday is already hitting today, and it got big enough to be worthy of a name.

Tropical Storm Imelda is going to give us all she’s got today and tomorrow.

Working in news makes my experience of big storms so different from other folks. I’ve got a blanket and a pillow and some changes of clothes in my car in case I need them, but it’s looking like I probably won’t.

The storm is moving fast enough that it probably won’t do as much flooding damage as they originally thought it might. I’ll be here late tonight, but probably won’t need to sleep over.

Week Sixteen Update

Here it is. Update number 16. Things didn't go as swimmingly as last week, but it wasn't horrible either. Check it out.

Minifigs

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Found the new series of Lego minifigures, and got started collecting the ones I like. . . . . . #toy #toycollector #toyhunting #toyhunter #toyhunt #lego #legominifigures #legominifigs #legominifigure #toycollection #toycollecting #toycollectors #toylife #toysaremydrug #actionfigures #actionfigure #actionfigurecollection #actionfigureaddict #actionfigurecollector

A post shared by Bigg Anklevich (@biganklevich) on Sep 14, 2019 at 5:35pm PDT

Leiningen Versus the Ants

I don't know if all y'all had to read this story in high school English class, but I did. And the other day, I had my own Leiningen Versus the Ants adventure.

We had been really neglectful of the section of our backyard behind our garage. It had gotten really overgrown with weeds, and it was getting to be a huge pain to ever go back there to mess with the pool filter equipment if we needed to. I decided that it was time to clear that place out.

I started with a big pile of railroad ties that were stacked up on the ground. We'd dug them out of the yard from some old garden boxes that the previous homeowners had installed. I started picking up the wood, and the ants came boiling out. So I got the raid, and sprayed the whole thing down. Then I tried again, disturbed the ant hill further, and had to spray more raid.

I thought I was done finally, and started lifting boards, but it turned out the ants had a back door that just so happened to be right underneath my foot. I realized this when they started biting me. I've been bit by fire ants a lot since coming to Texas, so I was well aware of how awful this could be, and I immediately sprayed my foot down with raid.

I don't know if that's even safe or not. I may have given myself cancer by doing that or something, but I didn't want the painful, swollen, pus-filled sores that come along with fire ant bites. I went and got the hose after that, and hosed my foot down, just in case of cancer or something. Then I had to change out of my sopping wet shoes.

After the third raiding, the ants mostly went away, or at least stopped bothering me. Their nest looked like this, in several different places.

I did find another nest of them in the root ball of a tree we'd dug out of the ground but not disposed of yet as well, but I stayed away from them enough to get rid of the root ball without getting attacked.

Now, here's the before picture of the rest of that section of the backyard.

The kudzu vine had grown so much that all the weeds in the whole area were sort of woven together by it. I pushed my way back underneath the vine, and started ripping it out on the left side of the picture, and once I got that started, I was able to basically roll the whole thing up like a carpet. The weed roots would be exposed as I rolled it, and I could easily pull them as I went. It was pretty cool, except for the fact that it was over 100 degrees at the time with feel like temperatures at about 110.

In this picture, you can see I had a problem when it came time to dispose of the weeds and vines though. There was so much that I definitely couldn't fit it all in one garbage bag, but they were so woven together that I couldn't separate it into smaller bag-sized pieces. I tried clippers, but ours were all too old, rusty and dull. I tried a hedge trimmer, but the vines were too thin and squirrely to cut with that.

In the end, I had to use a freaking steak knife, and saw each bit of kudzu vine bit by bit to separate it into bags.

This picture shows the section when it was half done. The vines mostly gone, but still a bunch of weeds.

I decided at this point to get the lawnmower, and take out the rest of the weeds with that. This was probably the worst part of the job, because I wasn't in the shade of the garage anymore, and the heat was double if you're in the direct sun. And here it is, finally all cleared out:

So, Leiningen managed to defeat both the ants and the kudzu, and even the heat. It was quite a triumphant feeling to be done with it all.

Bumbling

 

Rish went out and saw the new Bayverse Transformers movie. I did not. For some reason, however, Rish thought it would stil be worth talking with me about it, so we did a nice little episode of That Gets My Goat about it. Check it out.

(EDIT: This one was on the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine feed. Now that the feed is gone, the only way to hear the show is over on the Dunesteef Podcast YouTube page, which I am embedding below).

Nature's Morning Star

Have you ever heard of Jackfruit? Is it like what this guy is talking about?

A jackwagon must be the thing you haul the jackfruit out of the jack orchards in, right?

Well, I'm going to guess that you probably haven't heard of jackfruit. The other day I was at the grocery store, and found that they had jackruit in the produce section.

$1.25 a pound sounds like a reasonable price, right? Except that a jackfruit is a massive, watermelon sized fruit that probably weighs twenty pounds, so one of them will cost you $25. That's a lot to just try out some kind of exotic fruit. And it's pretty exotic. Take a look at this thing:

So, it's just a giant watermelon with spikes all over it. It kind of makes me think of those medieval weapons called morning stars. I just finished reading George R. R. Martin's Fire and Blood the other day, so they're on my mind. This is a morning star if you're not familiar with it or didn't realize what it was called:

I believe that is also called a mace. This is a morning star flail:

So, we have the starfruit, and then there's the morning star fruit, right?

I bet you're saying to yourself, "come on, Big Anklevich, it's just a spiked watermelon, how can you compare it to a morning star. Nobody worries about getting hit over the head by a watermelon, no matter how big they are. They're harmless." That's what you were saying to yourself. Admit it. I didn't just put words into your mouth. That was all true.

Well, let me disabuse you of this notion. Jack fruit are not harmless. They most definitely are nature's morning star. Here's a picture of some growing on a tree.

Yes, that's right, they grow on trees, not on some ground-dwelling vine.

And no, the trees that they grow on aren't little trees, they're massive trees that grow sixty feet tall and taller. I've seen them myself when I lived in South America as a younger man. And they were often right there on a normal street, like some kind of shade tree. Except this shade tree had fruit that gets as big as 120 pounds hanging up there, just waiting for its stem to finally deteriorate enough that it comes tumbling down violently and destructively on the heads of the person who just happens to be walking down the sidewalk at that moment.

Not only are they possible death from above, but crack one open, and I'm pretty sure what you actually find inside is alien spore:

So, what you eat is that fleshy yellow stuff around the seeds.

You strip that stuff off, and spit out the seeds.

What does it taste like? Well, it's kind of sweet, gooey, mushy. I can't really say. It tastes like jack fruit. Not like chicken, we'll just say that. I wasn't particularly fond of it, of course I was nineteen years old when I tried it, and I wasn't yet of that adventurous of a mind. I might have dismissed it just because it wasn't what I was used to. Though I didn't feel the same way about mangoes when I first tried them. So, I'd prefer to say that jack fruit is objectively so so, and mango is objectively amazing, because I am completely objective.

Anyway, this was a long silly post about nothing more than a weird fruit that I remember as a very interesting oddity from South America. I couldn't believe it when I saw it at the store right here in my own town. I guess the world is becoming a very small place.