Steve and Judy's Travels!

It’s not a dog door.  The dog door is in the wall next to the screen door.  If something really exciting happens on the porch though, the screen door can become a dog door, unhinged at the bottom.  A free-floating screen.  That happened at our house.  All the dogs had to do was blow through the screen door one time and then they could freely go in and out their door or our door any time they wanted.

We decided to improve the appearance and have the door re-screened.  To mitigate the risk of another screen door blowout, we put some screen decorations on the door at the appropriate height.

The decorations are reminders to anyone charging toward the door at that height, that even though they might not see it in a moment of excitement, there really is something there between them and the outside where the exciting thing is.

The decorations make cool shadows on the living room floor in the morning light too.

Just for the heck of it, we put one more screen door decoration at an appropriate height, just in case any of the human persons in our house don’t notice that the door is there in a moment of excitement.

Instead of wondering how they could take an existing car and turn it into an electric car, Aptera wondered how they could create the best, most sustainable, way of getting people from one place to another, regardless of what’s been done before.  They came up with this:

It’s got the stability of a two-front-wheel trike.  It’s lightweight and has a drag coefficient of almost zero.  Powered by electric motors.  Every horizontal surface covered in solar collector tiles.  Fully enclosed and roomy for two people with plenty of cargo space.  Zippy performance and a 1,000 mile range.  Charge up 40 miles for free every day just by parking (or driving) it outside in the sun.

Aptera Motors

Yeah.  That’s outside the box.  This may not be a car that all of us want to drive, but a smooth silent runabout for the city, that never has to be gassed up or even plugged in?  That’s worth a look!

Perched on a silhouette of a chickadee!

An outbreak of house flies in the yard.  Don’t know what causes it, but it happens around this time of year.  It’s annoying.

Got an idea, researched online, and put out a fly trap consisting of a hanging two-quart jar with some attractant and water in it that draws the flies in and they can’t get out.  It worked.  It smells terrible, so we had to put it a ways away from the deck, but it works.  After a few weeks we had a pretty good collection of flies floating in there, but then things got weird.  It started collecting faster and faster until it was almost full.  I’ll spare you the photo.  That couldn’t be right because there just weren’t that many flies to collect in the first place.  I realized that not only were flies trapped in the jar and couldn’t get out, they were breeding in the jar before they died and the population was increasing exponentially!

Gross!  We now know there is a practical time limit on how long we can leave that fly trap out.  We disposed of the old one and put a fresh one out.