Your Today in Pictures...

[Steve Klare]

Hi Matt,

The Shalimar's pool is basically an Ocean when you are 1 inch to the foot scale!

It includes plastic palm trees for that whole "Pacific Islands, 1944" atmosphere. ("There aint nuthin' like a dame!, nuthin' in da' world!")



The striking thing is how athletic this can be! Usually my son is there and we send it back and forth Tennis style. This first time at our new venue I was solo and I had to keep running around to the other side of the pool to turn it back before it clunked into the pool wall. This included a vault over the diving board midway around.

The next one I build will be radio controlled! (Here's hoping my wife stops me!)

[Douglas Meltzer]

Now I wish I still had my rubber band wind up Seaview sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

[Steve Klare]

I dunno, Doug!

It has torpedoes: I might feel a little insecure!

We come in peace!

(1/4 Ton Capacity?)

[Steve Klare]

A Little Vocabulary

Last week one of our friends was cleaning out some clutter and found a Duden, and she gave it to me. These are very popular among German speaking people. They kind of work the opposite the way a dictionary works: you don't start with a word and learn what it means, you start with a situation and find out the words that apply to it. There are about a thousand pages: everything from the Machine Shop to the Garden Shed with hundreds of other stops along the way. What's nice about this one is it's also in English to help people like me, still slogging through A2 German one night per week!

I'm sure we can all relate to this situation!

German is famous for making new nouns by taking a bunch of existing nouns and stringing them together. This is how you wind up with words like "Magnettonabnehmersystem". What's neat about this is if you know each of the pieces: Magnet (magnet), ton abnehmer (sound pickup), system (system), you can pretty much work out what it's trying to say. (I'll have to admit every so often when I'm reading one of these out loud I feel the need to take a deep breath first.)

My favorite in this list is "Bildfenster". Busted into pieces it's literally "picture window". In English we call this a film gate. My house has a picture window, but it has nothing to do with this.

[Steve Klare]

There's a WAR on!

The enemy is always out there! -always watching! He's been fighting this battle for generations and he knows all the tricks. It's a war of attrition too: their tactic is to force you to spend ever greater resources trying to fight, until the day you've lost all hope. The longer bracket on the tree doesn't stop them, neither does building an elaborate cast iron tree. The Bird Feeder Industrial Complex lures you in with ever more elaborate defenses: it becomes a mania!

Someone out there is even now perfecting some computer-guided laser, I'm sure! ("You killed another BLUE JAYYYY!!!!")

-still: ever present, ever patient, the enemy is always waiting!
.

[Mathew James]

@Steve- Great pic of squirrel Steve!
I think bird feeders are rare! Not birdfeeders, the object, but US bird feeders...who have the 'need' to spend time and money and their own expenses, just to hear/see birds
I am a bird feeder...and I have changed 6 models of feeders over the last several years in order to combat the squirrels. Not that we don't like squirrels, nor do we NOT want to feed them, but rather, like Grackles(big birds up here that don't play fair), they will basically cast a weeks worth of food to the ground in a matter of minutes.....
I learned over the years that the best route is to let them eat as well...but the trick is to get them to eat 'on the level', and on their own platform. If you dangle another level down lower(or even higher) than the feeder, depending on which way the squirrels get to your feeder(in my case it would be higher as they climb down from the trees), you can prevent them from going to the bird feeder, because they have a level, and personal feeding space that is not precarious to hang off....They only hang ten because there is no other solution. If we give them what they want, they become happy, and so do we

Yesterday was cool here, but BEAUTIFUL and SUNNY....but I resisted putting the feeder out because it is still too early this far North. In fact, this morning, we are snow covered again...meltable snow, but snow covered none-the-less...and equally BEAUTIFUL! I was able to prune the big apple tree this weekend, just before the snow....so we are ready for apples!

[Steve Klare]

Thanks, Matt

It is snowing here: big, wet flakes. Doesn't make much difference in so far as nobody's going anywhere today anyway.

We consider ourselves "low level outdoorsmen" (and woman). We will never attempt Everest, studiously avoid adventures below freezing and ruled out the Appalachian Trail pretty much as soon as we learned about it, but we camp, we canoe and we hike just enough to get some joy out of it!

-of course we like a little nature at home too!

You do things like this, you learn things you never even suspected. I bet you knew by experience that a regular old gray squirrel can leap a Meter straight up! I sure didn't!

Last week we bought a "squirrel baffle". It hangs around the pole and prevents our opponents from climbing. So far it's only "baffling" most of them and I plan to move it up about a foot! (These are the ones that were Track and Field in Squirrel High School!)

[Steve Klare]

We've escalated up past the point of chemical warfare here.

It turns out the little S.O.B.s were climbing up the pole just below the baffle, leaping up next to it and grabbing onto the bottom of a low hanging feeder! Raising the baffle up would have actually made their leap easier.

-so I decided to grease the pole!

Now, I didn't want to use anything poisonous, so I needed a lubricant that I wouldn't feel guilty feeding even to a friend. I thought about vegetable oil at first, and then hit on it's weaponized form: cooking spray!

Not only is it effective, it's hilarious! They skitter up and then spiral down the pole like a dancer at a strip club!

We have now added comedy to our bird-watching!

(Someone has a little too much spare time...could be me!)

[Brian Fretwell]

In the UK we had an advert that showed a squirrel negotiating what was almost an assault course to get to a treat so we know what they can do to get food. It was set to the Mission Impossible theme tune.

[Steve Klare]

I saw one this morning walk up to the bottom, eat some spilled seed and just walk away: sounds like a truce.

In a way, animals are in business: they have finite resources and they can't waste them on something that isn't getting them a good return. It seems our bird feeder is becoming a bad investment!

[Ed Gordon]

The ultimate solution to squirrel problems:

[Mathew James]

hmmm, what else can we fling.......

[Leonard Goss]

That's a bit cruel though isn't it?

[Tom Photiou]

You wouldn't say that if you got them in your loft space,

[Mathew James]

It is not the method I would use, but it makes me laugh that this guy was so bothered by them that he made that.
I don't think this would hurt them at all, they fall farther than that on occasion and walk away, as long as they were not aimed directly at a close tree.
I would be curious if the exact squirrel would ever try again, or would that be it for him
I love animals, and prefer to feed them all.