Odds & Sods For Monday, October 14th

Item The First: The raccoons have (I hope) been evicted! Last week’s windstorm caused some minor damage on the roof. While making those repairs, I checked out the “hidey-hole” that the raccoons have been using for an occasional home for the last year or so. I hadn’t heard them in a couple of days so maybe they were off causing problems at someone else’s house. On close inspection, the hidey-hole was found to be vacant, so I nailed up some screening over the opening again. (Don’t worry, I checked, double checked, and triple checked. There aren’t any raccoons or raccoon babies in there to be trapped and starving to death.)

They can still eat our oranges and dates and run around on the roof and in our trees, but they can’t live under our roof.

Assuming they’re not clever and/or strong enough to simply pry the screen off…

Item The Second: On my mother’s side, I come from a family of practical jokers. Nothing malicious mind you, just enough to keep you on your toes every now and then. (Other stories, other days.) On the other hand, The Long-Suffering Wife doesn’t much cotton to that sort of nonsense.

We recently had need to buy a new washer and dryer set and it got delivered and set up while The Long-Suffering Wife was out of town. It occurred to me that this was an ideal setup for a most wonderful prank! Since we had gotten machines with lots of new bells and whistles, I needed to sneak into the laundry room before she could after every load was finished in the dryer. If I fold everything and then put it stacked neatly back into the machine, maybe I could convince her that this was a new automatic setting on the fancy, schmancy dryer!

Discretion (and a desire to not sleep on the proverbial couch) was the better part of valor, so I did not pull this trick on my lovely wife. I did tell her about it, but while I was giggling and enjoying the story, she was not amused, so I guess I had made the correct choice. This weekend, having let her in on the joke, I did go in and do it for one load, but got only a, “Cute, dear!”

Proof that I’m easily amused. But we knew that.

Item The Third: Following up on my posts from Saturday and Sunday, Biology-Online.org has responded to Dr. Lee with an apology. It appears to be earnest and sincere. Good for them!

In addition, as a subscriber to Scientific American I receive a slew of their email newsletters, such as “Scientific American Daily Digest”, “Scientific American Basic Science”, “Scientific American Space & Physics”, and “Scientific American Weekly Review”. I find these extremely useful and valuable for keeping me up to date on what’s going on in the sciences, as wells as providing easy links to the full length stories. Since many of the Scientific American blogs are included in the stories featured in these newsletters, I was wondering if anything regarding this weekend’s events would be mentioned there.

I wa pleased to see that his morning’s newsletter includes a link to yesterday’s blog post from Mariette DiChristina. Transparency, openness, and communication are all really good things.

Item The Fourth: With yesterday’s win over the Hated Raiders of Oakland, my beloved KC Chiefs are now one of just two undefeated NFL teams at 6-0. This is a source of considerable joy and happiness in our household, so for that I would like to thank the entire KC Chiefs organization. In these trying times, it may be simple escapism, but it’s not meaningless. As for the future, our next three games are against teams that are at or below .500, then we have our bye week. Dare we hope that we can go into that ninth game against Denver (the other team currently 6-0) at 9-0, quite possibly facing another 9-0 team?

One game at a time. But it’s great being a Chiefs fan this year.

Item The Fifth: Since the last couple of weeks seem to have had a lot of stress, let’s start the new week with some role models for breathing, relaxing, prioritizing, and keeping things in the proper perspective.

Jesse, asleep under my desk.

Joey, asleep in her sunny bay window next to my desk.