I spent this weekend engaged in three very different activities: programming, gardening, and our ongoing war against ants. Somehow these three things blended and meshed in a way that was quite...comfortable.
At my job recently I've been working on making our SNMP-based discovery more efficient and much smarter. This weekend I implemented a kind of filtering that can reduce the amount of data we gather, transmit, and process by a factor of hundreds. The idea is simple: only gather the stuff we actually need. Implementing it was considerably more challenging, as it required making our “probe” (the piece of software that actually does the SNMP querying) much smarter than it has ever been before. I got it all working, and tested at home – a very satisfying accomplishment...
On Saturday afternoon, Debbie gave me a ride down to Rancho Jamul Auto Care to pick up my truck (we'd left it there Friday afternoon for routine maintenance). Dave took my $48 (about a fifth of what Toyota of El Cajon charges for the same maintenance) and returned my truck in tip-top shape. Then Debbie and I stopped at Simpson's nursery and picked up some supplies, a couple small pots of blue fescue (very decorative in pots on our patio) – and a couple five-gallon potted Cape Honeysuckles. We were looking for some handsome plants, something on the order of five feet tall and about the same width, to place in pots along our home's north-facing wall bordering our patio. We looked in the tree section in vain, and were about to give up when we spotted these Cape Honeysuckles growing in pots right by the trunk of an enormous old pepper tree (and therefore mostly shaded). These things had obviously been there a while, as they had huge roots growing out of the pots into the sandy soil beneath. They were very reasonably priced, so we bought two of them. I covered the exposed roots with wet newspaper and headed home with four-way flashers going, never going more than 25 MPH...
On Sunday morning, bright and early, Debbie and I went to work on the patio. It was already looking very nice, but now it is working on fabulous! First we potted our new Cape Honeysuckles, replacing one dead and one ailing lilac. We trimmed them up, wove a few of the branches into different directions, and voila! – two beautiful (and big!) additions to the patio. Then we went a little crazy, repotting somethings in bigger pots, raising a lot of pots up on log segments (these look really nice, adding some needed three-dimensionality to the plantings), rearranged a lot of things, added soil and mulch to many of the plants, and fertilized some of the wan-looking plants. When we were finished, I could hardly move – I pulled and stretched and over-extended just about every muscle and tendon in my body. But oh, what a nice-looking result! I'll post some pictures during the week...
Finally, the ongoing ant wars. Last weekend I sealed up all the places I could find where ants were sneaking into the kitchen and livingroom. I used nearly an entire tube of silicone caulking, and it was very effective. However, in the kitchen we were still finding ants somehow getting in. We tracked them down to the area of the dishwasher – somewhere behind there they were getting in. So Sunday afternoon I pulled the dishwasher out, and discovered several cracks between the countertop and the cabinets that the ants were using. I also spotted a crude hole in the wallboard, through which the electrical cable for the dishwasher was protruding. A few more cubic inches of silicone, and the ants will use this no more! This morning we found just a few ants in the kitchen, and Debbie spotted their entry point: a teensy little crack in the frame of our bay window. We're taking that as in indication of antly desperation – and I will pop a little silicone on that tonight.
Just another weekend in Jamul!
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