I wrote a long and pointless post on my antipathy to the literature of the extreme landscape here last night in the wee hours, prompted by my total indifference to a New Yorker piece about California’s Imperial Valley. But it was et by computer demons. I don’t think I’ll rewrite it.

This is my 21 mile week. I am at 13 after two days. I was trying to run seven miles yesterday and six today but I run barefoot on our treadmill and my left toe felt abraded after six miles, so I deferred until today.

My running companion is a DS9 rewatch (or watch) and the episodes this week have been s04, Homefront parts 1 & 2 and episodes to either side. I am glad I have been giving the show another shake.

Yesterday the weather was amazingly beautiful, but a tad hot at eighty in my yard. This is of concern to me. It’s far too early for such unconscionable heat.

UPDATE: oh, look, a Malcolm Gladwell piece.

Yesterday morning we noticed a big wave of sugar ants in the pantry, which is a huge pain the ass because to stem the tide of an ant invasion where they are targeting food you eat as well, it’s necessary to carefully disassemble the food storage area and clean the interior surfaces carefully with non-toxic substances over a period of a couple of days and as well find the access point and add borax-based ant bait to the area. If they’ve gotten into unsealed dry goods it’s best to just dump the food as well.

Knowing that we had about twelve booked hours for the day I made it clear we did not have time to deal with it until today. So this morning I chased Viv out of the house and started tracking the trails to figure out what to do.

Unfortunately, the ants had found a crack in the dry-box we use to store Logan’s huge 50-pound bags of dog food. They were mounting a full-scale assault. Happily, they were not interested in the human food at all, which was a relief – we scoured the pantry once this year already and I had hoped we were maintaining sealed-container discipline as it indeed appear we are.

So I moved the dog-food box outside and started cleaning up the ant trails with a vinegar-water-dawn solution, which works well but requires repeated application. The ants appeared to be coming from a spot toward the ceiling, which was odd. I started moving stuff out on the deck for ease of cleaning and to permit the simpler expedient of brushing the critters off of some objects that would not do so well if sprayed with a liquid.

As I did so, I noticed a few winged ants about the same size as the standard issue ant and pondered them for a moment, deciding they weren’t termites and so nothing to worry about. I noticed they were clustering near the top of the door and they they seemed to be well-integrated with the sugar ants.

Then I looked up into the skylight above our rear-entry room. There were thousands of both the winged and non-winged ants. I took a deep breath and started the process of cleaning them up, which involved the removal of about half the material we store in the mudroom, a couple hours on a ladder with goggles and a mask on, spraying the sides of the skylight with the vinegar solution and wiping the ants off, over and over.

Unfortunately, the numbers seen and the flying ants indicate that there is a likelihood of a nest having been built in the air gap of the roof that holds the skylight. I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that we may need to hire an exterminator to deal with the infestation, which means leaving our coats and miscellaneous other stuff out of the room until the situation is resolved.

Ugh.

I think back in the day I may have noted that the 1993 computer game Zeppelin – Giants of the Sky was available at at abandonia.com. I had hoped to find the the Internet Archive was implementing a PC gaming equivalent to the Internet Arcade, but no luck.

Someone has released an accurate looking, well-modeled implementation of the Zeppelin NT for the somewhat moribund Microsoft product Flight Simulator X. Also available: scenery for Cardington NAS in the UK, and the USS Macon.

The comprehensive mod – really, something akin to a complete recoding – of FSX called Wings: Over Flanders Fields has recently incorporated zeppelins. I am unclear if the zeps are pilotable by the player or if they occur as AI elements of the sim. It seems likeliest to me that they are playable.

Unfortunately, WOFF is a daunting product to buy and install, as it requires a valid copy of FSX in order to operate, and is relatively pricey itself.

In 2011 and 2013, Anders Gidenstam released several LTA models for the open source FS FlightGear. The models on his page describing them look fairly raw, but he has also modeled several interesting types including an early Great War UK Navy sub spotter with a simple open control car slung under the envelope and a free balloon, something I have never seen modeled in looking for FS LTA.

http://voar.io/ is back, it seems.

Ken and Mary attended tonight’s Mariners game but left before Felix closed out his 101 pitch complete game victory. We had dinner and drinks with Dan, but changed venues before the game started from Bill’s to Gainsbourg, where instead of the Mariners, the media fare was the last ten minutes of “Les Soeurs de Bellville” and Tarkovsky’s immortal “Solaris,” so even though I only caught the bottom of the ninth once we got home I feel bathed in masterworks.

I wish I knew why I added a PHP date-based function to my monthly archives here. It’s been tossing strtotime errors for years and I basically didn’t care enough to fix it, for now, it’s closed. Comments up next. Then reformatting all the Twitter dumps? Dunno. I liked how the Twitter dumps chased off everyone. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Yeesh, my hosting provider nuked permissions on short-form php tags a while back and I just took note of it. A bit of search and replace and things are all better but still, argh.

A series of scheduling needs led to the rare opportunity to drag Viv out to a weeknight baseball game, Iwakuma starting against the improved over 2014 Houston Astros. It didn’t start well, the second Astro knocking a 381 foot home run into the right field stands, and he struggled with control until getting yanked in the sixth at a mere 71 pitches. This is his third weak start, and I am thinking he (along with pretty much every M’s pitcher nit named Felix) is in for a spell in Tacoma or even Everett. Eventually the M’s lost after tying it at 5-5 during Kuma’s tenure on the mound. We left after Kuma was pulled (something I had promised Viv in order to meet her bedtime needs), and I watched the end of game at home.

Two Astros fielders slipped and fell while attempting foul catches, there was a crazy Astros wild pitch, and several times when fielding coverage sagged on the Houston side, the Astros players visibly drooped and slowed down in effort. I don’t know how many of them are new to the team, but even though they won they did not look like a team that thought they could or would.

Finally, just before Kuma was pulled, I noticed a sliver of a moon with a hugely bright planet crowning it some distance directly above – a conjunction, I believe it’s called. After looking it up on my phone I knew the planet was Venus. The day was unseasonably warm and gloriously clear and so the dusk emergence of the pair was striking, the occluded side of the moon warm and dim with Earthlight.

In high school, a kid I knew who had an international upbringing and I became friends. I don’t recall his actual name, but let’s call him Andreas and hope we’re wrong.

Anyway, Andreas was really into post-Police mod style, which included the provocation-intended appropriation of skinhead style as gay style. When I knew this kid, we were to young to really talk about it it in those terms, but oh man, that was his bag.

Anyway, we were pals, picked-on punk-rock buds. At the end of the school year when it had become apparent that I was the school’s punk-rock lightning rod, on the last day of school he gave me his 1980s green-exterior emergency-orange interior polyfill NATO flight jacket.

I wore it as an alternative or complement to my daily leather motorcycle jacket throughout high school and college. While a sophomore, I sewed a round “STIFF records” logo to one shoulder, taken from a tee shirt celebrating the US release of Ian Dury’s immortal “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll.”

With the help of a high school friend, I silkscreened the logo-of-the-moment for D.O.A. on the back (D.O.A. is a Vancouver BC punk band I still feel unabashed love for). A year or two later, and I had test-stenciled a line of similarly sized round insignia down the other arm. A year or two more, and I sewed the slightly oversized Lousma-Fullerton inaugural STS mission emblem on the opposite shoulder from the Stiff.

More patches and buttons came and went or stayed (such as the 1981 Black Flag patch). After moving to Seattle, The harsh midwestern winter’s need for a winter overcoat was gone, and eventually I stopped wearing it.

I could never easily dispose of it, of course. It is an element of my colors.

Recently, as I have noted here, I began flying a WWI combat sim game called Rise of Flight. I have lots to say about it, but elsewhere.

My rig is in the basement and is often somewhat chilly compared to the warm first floor spaces, and so I have taken to wearing a sweater when I fly the game. Mostly of late it has been an oshkosh zip-front turtleneck cardigan with twill shoulder panels in faded olive intended to refer to the design of UK paratrooper uniforms immediately after WW2.

Tonight, however, I realized that was upstairs and started looking through basement closets for an appropriate sweater.

I came across my NATO polyfill bomber jacket.

After flying it for a couple of hours, I will note that the jacket has the olfactory equivalent of a patina. As well as a kind of patina.

a message from the future, found in an elevator in 1969.