Don Thorp Meandering Out Loud

I woke up at 4am, no idea why, if anyone does know, please fill me in. Anyway, I decided to catch up on the world around me so I fired up my FriendFeed and started browsing.

FriendFeed is a wonderful aggregation service that simplifies keeping in touch with friends and family. FriendFeed lets you publish the data from your blog, social network sites, photos, and other places for others to see without them having to visit each site individually. It also has an interesting twist in that you can create Imaginary Friends where you put in the services you want to watch even if the person doesn’t have a FriendFeed account.

While catching up on my brother Michael’s feed I stumbled upon two separate pictures of my niece and nephew that had to be mashed. Enjoy.

The Disappointed Princess

Some days it all comes together like a Seinfeld episode; you don’t know why your seeing what you’re seeing, but you hope it leads somewhere. Today was one of those days on Twitter. It started innocently with a single tweet and ended up with me laughing uncontrollably. Maybe it’s because it was Friday or possibly because I like slapstick humor, or most probably I’m a little further off the beaten path than I think. Anyway …

@Natallini was putting off mowing the yard. Feeling all considerate, it is a Friday after all I, suggested a Tyvek suit or a cabana boy.

If she just wanted to stay clean, then the suit should work great.
With a handsome cabana boy to work the mower, she could sit on the porch and have her favorite beverage.

Then she was attacked in her own home, by vicious little creatures.

For those of you fortunate enough to have never encountered the painful little creatures, count yourself lucky. The rest of you understand the primitive need to squish them all. If you’d like to know more about fire ants check out the Wikipedia article on Fire Ants If you’d like to see them in action, there is a short video below.

Then we had a slight burst of misunderstanding between me @donthorp, @Natallini, and @eeUS

And then the Serendipitous tweet.

Trust me we’re getting there. My first thought, obviously, was Google. Surely someone out there has fire ant proof suits; but sadly, I couldn’t find one. I did find a patent entitled Insect resistant geotextile. For the very curious among you it’s actually interesting how they tested for insect resistance, so give it a quick scan. The connection to this story is provided in the following quote.

EXAMPLE I

[0034] An extruded nonwoven, such as Tyvek® was used to form a bag which was sealed to prevent the ants escape. The ants penetrated the extruded nonwoven within two (2) hours.

Although it only gives her a two hour window to escape, that should be sufficient if she also tapes the cuffs.

Now you’re wondering why Grizzlies. Occasionally we’re granted a Google gift during a search that provides fodder for posts such as this. I originally searched for ant proof suit. Lost in the search euphoria, I didn’t save the set of keywords brought me to this, but here is the video that brought the laughter.

There is just something about the testing of that grizzly proof suit that brought me to tears. My first thought was, “That’s a whole lot of Mondays”.

Some of you may have recognized the source immediately, but I had to research to discover that the footage comes from a movie, available on Amazon, entitled Project Grizzly by Troy Hurtubise. It documents “Hurtubise’s diligent work to improve his homemade “grizzly-proof” suit of armour, his efforts to test its resilience, and his forays into the Rockies to track down the grizzlies he dreams of meeting.”

I really don’t know if the grizzly suit is fire ant proof or not, but I’m convinced that the testing of the suit for use with fire ants would provide hours of painful video.

The shower has been draining slowly for a few days. On her way to work this morning, Laura called to remind me to pour Drano down the shower drain. Having a little extra energy this morning, I decided to go the extra mile and see if I could clean it by hand before using chemicals. That way, the Drano would be much more effective and have much less work to do.

Click for Larger Image

I’ve wondered for years how the drain cover stays in place, but I never bothered to actually look. On close inspection there seemed to be four tabs holding it in place, so a little pressure and it popped right out. If you look closely, you’ll see a little bump on the tab that helps keep it below the rim.

After successfully pulling the cover off, I peered into the drain and was greeted by a glob of stuff that honestly, was probably alive. Reaching in the drain, I SLOWLY pulled and pulled and pulled, until finally with a soft plop, an ENTIRE ponytail looking creature was resting peacefully on the shower floor. Thankfully, it didn’t spring to life and attack.

For the squeamish among you, I won’t embed the pictures, but for the rest of you crazy people, head over to my SmugMug Gallery Drain Life.