You are viewing ye olde monthly archive of November, 2009. Way to go!
It’s taken a few months but I have made a little progress. I coated my frame and fork in hot rod black primer after stripping all the paint off. I was rockin’ the raw steel but was noticing little rust spots appearing anywhere water had been for more than a few seconds. So I sanded it down, threw some paint on it and boom. Also got the bigger pink tires in. It’s still missing a few ingredients but all in due time.
I was gonna let thanksgiving go without the old creature slappin’ turkey makin an appearance??? DID YOU!!!!!??? WOMP WOMP WOMP WOMP
Lat night I was at a cool little Japanese food spot me and the old lady frequent and as I was slurping my Miso soup I noticed that as it sits it is perpetually in motion like a cloud that is constantly growing into itself but never actually grows in size. I stared into it and realized that is what it feels like is happening in my brain whenever I did psychedelics in the past.
In a sense the bowl of Miso was like a brain with lines in it, but after a while of growing into itself like my brain would on psychedelics those lines began to turn into holes. Xty pointed that out once I told her “this is your brain on psychedelics.” Then it hit us… Opening your mind = holes in the brain! Which we all know drug are known to make caverns in the brains if abused. If psychedelics causes the brain to grow inward and that causes the lines in your brain to turn to holes you literally open the space necessary for viewing life as it really is (whatever that means to you and your kinfolk) Either way love those around you, eat the Miso it’s delicious and enjoy your small estate on this planet < universe < time + space… our time is short… ummmmm… Flash Forward!
I woke up late for church this morning and decided to clean up around the house a bit. I got outside to my patio and noticed that my plant has again been covered in tiny orange balls with legs (??) For the past few weeks I’ve noticed these things attacking my plant. After a few minutes on Google I discovered these things are called Oleander Aphids. For a while I tried burning each one with a stick of incense but found that just hosing them off works fine.
These things are pretty weird. They only appear on one of my generic white flower plants(no idea what it’s called). I also have strange little black aphids on my Ficus but have yet to discover exactly what they are. These little orange guys reproduce really fast. Every few days I hose down a few stems on the plant. Peep this though:
Aphids don’t have sex. In fact, in natural colonies there are no male aphids. The females reproduce by cloning themselves (pathenogenesis). They also give birth to live nymphs, rather than lay eggs. When a colony lands on a host their population explodes. When it gets a little crowded, some of they aphids will develop wings so that they can fly to new host plants. If you have an aphid infestation the best way to get rid of them is soapy water or certain kinds of oils. Generally if you give them a good spray down with the soapy water they won’t be back.
Read more: http://www.ayavaya.com/bug-photos/oleander-aphids
I am apparently up against some shit right out of a sci-fi (or syfy) channel original movie. This is the stuff that keeps me happy we have yet to discover other lifeforms or alternate universes because there has to be one out there somewhere where these things are king. Maybe they even walk upright and resemble us in some weird way. Asexual beings that birth live miniature clones of themselves. Not only that but they also secrete some sort of nasty toxin so other bugs that try and eat them are poisoned and those who don’t die from it are condemned to a life of deformed wings and wonky web spinning (according to link above)
Oleander Aphids
Naturally my thoughts drift and I think back on how earlier this week the Vatican Observatory stated it would indeed consider extraterrestrial alien life part of Gods Plan. “If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs bio-chemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound… Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God’s creative freedom.” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes. This goes to show that humans are kind of greedy in their quest for knowledge, preparing to understand extraterrestrial life forms while our own is in shambles. There’s oodles on this out there, here is a nice starting point: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120291244
Which then makes me wonder, would the average Christian welcome an intelligent life form from another dimension before a person with a different lifestyle or ethnicity from his own universe. How pretty would said alien need to be? If it were more like the Predator would we just attack? Would we befriend the aliens if they were more like the ones form Earth Girls Are Easy?
Ya'll is welcome at my place anytime!
I mean who knows? I know most folks probably aren’t ready for that sort of thing. I like to think of myself as slightly ahead of the herd and I know I aint ready for aliens. I can barely figure out how to wrangle the remainder of my small family. Just the thought of aphids cloning live nymphs in my side yard is enough to urk me.
I totally dropped the ball this year on Halloween, I don’t really know why I just did not give a sh*t this year. I realized I was looking for costumes 2 days before it and just said fuuuuggit. What I did manage to do though was to take apart my bicycle and chemically remove the 6 layers of alternating orange and yellow as well as 2 layers of primer and burgundy spray paint from the frame and fork. It took a few coats of paint remover but I got all the paint off and was disappointed to see the crappy welds that hold my frame together, it’s all kind of crude. Paint remover is pretty radical though.
After a while it started feeling like a tank and the anxiety I had about going in and tinkering with the bike was replaced with a zen like comfort that it is just a bike. I mean you can see it all right there in front of you. No matter how bad I screw up there’s always the local bike shops.
I did all with an allen wrench set, a long flat head screw driver, a small hammer, two large phone books, one small phone book and two trips to the bike shop for a lock ring and bottom bracket remover ($30). I also had to snatch a bag of bike tools from my moms house (priceless).
It was really cool to be able to get it all back together again too. Banging on steel with a phone book and a hammer was ghetto but it worked out nicely. It’s all coming along, need to get a wheel set and a new headset and then I will paint the frame flat black and probably change my handlebars. For now I just have raw steel and I’m hoping it doesn’t begin to rust.
Bike are for tweekers. The tools are all tweeked out too. Grease smells like grease. I smell like grease.
