The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Other creatures in our world
Spotted after pre-season prep at Mary’s Vassar Farms garden:
It must feel really good up there atop the old barn, even if they’re sunning themselves to kill off parasites.
Taken with the Pixel 3a zoomed all the way in at 7× from a bit over 200 feet:
Then cropped and sharpened just a smidge. Not a great picture, but good enough for practical purposes; the Good Camera + Big Glass takes better pix and is too awkward to carry in my pocket.
Removing the seat from Mary’s Tour Easy revealed an unexpected sight:
A closer view:
An insect, most likely a rather large butterfly or moth, decided to pupate on the underside of the seat, tucked inside the old seat cover. We can’t fault the critter’s logic!
Mary is sewing up new seat covers for our Tour Easy ‘bents in preparation for the new riding season. Who knows what we’ll find under there in a few years?
Shortly after this season’s suet feeder deployment, the neighborhood raccoons emptied it. A few years ago, putting a 3D printed feeder at the end of a repurposed ski pole protected it for a few weeks, so I scrounged another pole from the pile, cut off the flattened top and battered tip, and put it into service:
The near end has a loop made from a pair of stainless steel key cables, because a single cable was just slightly too short:
The far end has what was once a hook, beaten straight to fit through the hole, then beaten around the curve of the pole:
Raccoons lacking opposable thumbs, this should suffice until the black bear(s) spotted around here take up residence in the yard.
The dried chestnuts looked undamaged in their husk, but three groups of weevil grubs surely left some damage behind:
Gingerly prying the seeds out revealed holes in all three:
The weevils converted the nut meat into what looks like solid frass:
Having eaten themselves out of house and home, they moved on to the next plane of existence.
For most of them, that would be bird food.
We found an industrious spider below one of the living room windows, tucked behind the furniture:
Considering the number of husks and the defunct fly, the spider has been eating like a king for quite a while.
It’s now in the flower garden by the patio, which may not be quite as good a location but definitely increases net happiness.
Spotted on a recent trip past the Capital Region Welcome Center, one of the banners seemed quite unlike the others:
Maybe if we were dog people, it’d be less offputting.
Puts me in mind of being So Poughkeepsie.
I spotted this little gadget chugging steadily across a table in the living room:
Nearby, two of its friends / siblings / clones remained near their landing craft:
They’re about 5 mm long and, although there are no larva-size holes visible in the chestnuts tucked inside the burr, that’s definitely where they started their journey.
A few hours later, the rest of the crew bailed out:
The exit hole must be on a nut under the curve of the husk, but they’re sufficiently squishy to wriggle their way out. The little brown dot over on the left belongs to the top larva of a pair queued in the exit corridor:
I lost count at 18. There’s surely more where they came from, so I replaced the plate with a bowl to reduce the quantum tunneling probability.
In an ideal world, they’d grow up to be chestnut weevils, but I put them out near the suet feeder and, a few hours later, my offering was accepted.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 