I've ridden my scooter over 600 miles already

My scooter had a scheduled maintenance service at 600 miles yesterday. This seemed awfully soon to me. It involved changing the oil and filter, going over the entire bike to check that nothing was loose, checking the brakes, the steering head bearings and checking the valve clearance. That last item was the expensive part. The total bill was $284. That is much too high - it's more than one tenth the price of the scooter itself. Would you want to pay $2,000 on the first service for a $20,000 car? This is the one thing I've found that I don't like about my new scooter. Everything else is wonderful - it gets great gas mileage (about 97 miles per gallon so far), it's fun to ride and gets me to work more alert than I usually am when driving the car to work. It is fast enough to keep up with all the traffic I encounter but not too fast to tempt me to go on high speed highways. Everthing else about this scooter is terrific but if you are considering a Honda Elite 110 scooter, also consider this early and expensive first maintenance service.

Emma's birthday

Our daughter Emma turned eight years old today. Here's a picture of her with one of her gifts, a panda from Build-a-Bear Workshop. Notice the fairy costume and shoes she picked out for "Pandy". Emma's new favorite color is light blue (as shown by the top she's wearing) but she also likes pink and purple - and she makes sure to update us as these change positions for her. Oh, the importance of color in her life!


Also notice the importance of Barbie. The party had a Barbie theme with cups, plates, napkins and favors all having Barbie's picture. I've been pleasantly surprised at some of the Barbie videos Emma has received as gifts over the years. They usually take a classic story like Swan Lake, The Prince and the Pauper and The Twelve Dancing Princesses and use Barbie in one of the starring roles and add some nice music. She's learned a lot of good stories that way. As well as our being introduced to the classics by first seeing it in a Barbie video. For instance, another of Emma's gifts was the original book for The Twelve Dancing Princesses as you can see in the picture at the left.

There's always a chance to learn

I took this picture a few days ago. Besides the color contrasts between the blue wasp and the yellow Goldenrod, I liked it for its strangeness. In my mind, the wasps were the tigers of the insect world. They are ferocious and back down to no one. They eat everything from spiders to caterpillars. They'll attack a bee hive where they are outnumbered. But here is a wasp eating flower nectar. That's like seeing a tiger eating carrots or a Klingon eating tofu.

But then I took the time to learn a little more about what wasps eat. I thought I knew a lot about wasps because one of my degrees in college was in biology (my other degree is in electrical engineering). Also, I'd done a lot of outside reading on the insects and I enjoyed studying them. But as I read more now, I found that most adult wasps feed on nectar and pollen! They only attack other insects and spiders to feed their young. They are indeed fierce predators but they aren't the tigers of the insect world. It's thought that their ancestors may have eaten the insects and spiders they caught but over the generations have become vegetarians.

This is yet another reminder to not think I know everything. You can't check every fact and you can't put off making decisions too long but it's so important to keep learning. It's so important to keep an open mind. That's what a wasp taught me this week.

Intelligent people are always ready to learn.
Their ears are open for knowledge.

Proverbs 18:15 New Living Translation

One method for flawless program behavior

I was so excited Friday afternoon. I'd been banging my head against the wall trying to get our program to build in a new way and I kept running into problem after problem. Then, I found what I'd done wrong and fixed the problem. I built the program one more time and got no errors. And it wasn't too long after 5 PM so I wouldn't be too late getting home, either. What a great way to end the week! I went home secure in the knowledge that our program was building flawlessly and I'd be able to start fresh on Monday.

If I came in this morning and that was the case, there would be no reason for this post, of course. I came in and found that the version of our program that was being built had old code from earlier last week. The code that was being used to build the latest version of our program was dated from the time before I started changing the way our program was being built. As I looked into it, I saw that the change I'd made late Friday afternoon just kept the major part of the build process from running. So, no wonder there were no errors - most of the process wasn't running. After correcting that, I built our program again and all the errors I was seeing on Friday returned. But now I was fresh and could tackle them one by one. Now I've fixed them all and the new way of building our program works and actually uses all the latest changes made by everyone in our group. Will wonders never cease.

I hope this is a trend

I seem to be seeing more honey bees on my walks this summer. Previously, in posts on September 2, 2009 and on September 23, 2009, I mentioned that I was seeing more bumble bees than I'd ever remembered seeing. I attributed this to the loss of honey bees due to Colony Collapse Disorder (this is a newer article on this - see my September 2, 2009 post, "Lots of bumble bees",  for a pointer to a Wikipedia article). While this article says that things are not getting any better and are actually getting worse, I hope I'm seeing the first signs of hope. Of course, things can vary quite a lot region by region. Perhaps this is only local good news because our winter wasn't as bad as some other regions.

Then again, I'm not doing a scientific count. My impressions may be way off. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention last year. Maybe I was distracted by all the butterflies and bumble bees I saw last year. Since there is nothing I can do about this problem and what I write here won't really make any difference, I choose to be optimistic. I choose to see improvement. I choose to have my impressions see a turning tide. If you are a lawmaker funding research into correcting this problem, don't listen to me!

Sorry this picture isn't very clear. I had a hard time focusing on this worker as she flew from flower to flower (here on a thistle flower). Forgive the pun but she was as busy as a bee.

More on poison ivy

I forgot to mention something in my last post. Besides the things the doctor prescribed, the Prednisone and the hydro cortisone cream, I was using Burt's Bees Poison Ivy Soap to help with my poison ivy outbreak. I'm not usually one for natural remedies but this stuff is great. It not only relieves the itching but it dries out the skin with the rash and helps heal it. This is good for washing up when you think you've been exposed to poison ivy (I wish I'd done that in the first place) and good for when you have a poison ivy rash. It won't do the whole job of curing it in a severe case but it sure helps.

I got it because it was recommended by a friend who in turn had it recommended to him by some landscapers. And they should know all about poison ivy! That's one of my criteria for trying something new:

Does someone who needs and uses the stuff a lot recommend it?

That's only one of my criteria, though. I know a lot of people who use a lot of things that I would never try. Let's just leave it at that.

Burt's Bees Poison Ivy Soap is not cheap. It costs about $8 for a 2 ounce bar (as in the picture) and I've not seen it cheaper anywhere. I find that it lasts for a long time, though. I've had the bar I used for a couple of years. But then, I only seem to get poison ivy once a year.Once I get it, I'm pretty wary for the rest of the summer. Maybe that's the best thing for poison ivy - be aware and don't get into it in the first place. This site and this site are helpful in learning what to look for. The scariest thing I found on those and other sites is that poison ivy is quite variable in how it presents itself. On one hand, you could say, "Stay away from anything with three leaves that match the general description of poison ivy." On the other hand, there are so many plants and vines that have three leaves and appear similar to poison ivy that you could never go in the woods again! I think it's worth studying a little. I enjoy the outdoors too much to just stay out of the woods.

Poison ivy

I'm behind on my posts this month. Part of the reason is that I had a bad case of poison ivy and I'm just now recovering. When I look back at how I got  it, I have to say I was pretty stupid. But it didn't seem like I was taking a risk at the time.

We have a large area behind our house that was overgrown with bushes and weeds. I used to get poison ivy when I would work back there but that area was cleaned out by a landscaping crew. So, I figured the poison ivy was gone, too. So, when the weeds and bushes inevitably started to grow back, I wanted to keep it open so I'd run the lawnmower back there as often as I could.

The problem was that part of the area was very steep and the oil in the lawnmower engine would get into parts of the engine it shouldn't and you could smell the oil burning. So, I figured the way around that was to use our weed wacker. It worked well but as I went along, I noticed pieces of the weeds getting on me. I washed off when I got in the house but, obviously, not well enough. Due to the weed wacker throwing things everywhere, it even got on to my face and very close to my eyes.

So, when I started to notice itchy areas, I had big trouble. My eyes puffed up so that I had trouble seeing and the rash was in so many places that I had trouble treating it. I ended up calling the doctor and getting a prescription for Prednisone (to fight the allergic reaction) and a hydro cortisone cream to help stop the itching. The biggest problem was that the itching was worst at night and I didn't sleep well for over a week. Lack of sleep makes everything harder. It was so bad, I had to take some time off from work.

But I did get better, of course. As I mentioned before, it's too bad we don't get better all of a sudden. Getting better always seems to come in waves. I'd feel less itchy for a while and then a few minutes later, I'd be scratching like a mad man. But then, one morning, I woke up and realized I'd slept through night. What a great feeling. Now if could just keep our cat Henry from crying outside our bedroom door in the middle of the night because he is bored and wants someone to get up and play or talk with him or feed him.