Archive | August, 2008

How to get your vinyl floor to shine with potatoes

by on August 3, 2008 in General

I’m afraid the dog ate most of the visuals before I could get pictures, so please just imagine if you will….

To start, go out to your potato patch and dig up enough red potatoes for dinner. We’re roasting them, by the way. If you liked mashed, this method of floor shining won’t work.

Scrub your potatoes clean and cut them up into small pieces…the smaller the faster they cook, but don’t make them microscopic or you’ll end up with mashed taters anyway.

Assemble your ingredients…. olive oil and your preferred herbs and spices. I like rosemary, thyme, pepper, salt, some garlic and onion powder and whatever sounds good at the time. Get a one gallon ziplock, dump the taters in, followed by the oil and herbs/spices. Seal the bag and start tossing.

The key to this though is to make sure the ziplock isn’t fully sealed. While you’re tossing, the bag will open, spilling the oily potatoes all over your vinyl floor. Your dog might help with clean up and go outside to throw up, it’s ok, dogs are dumb like that. What she doesn’t eat, either throw away, or wash off, making sure to remove all the dog hair, and retoss, this time actually sealing the bag.

For the floor, get a mop and scalding hot water with a little floor cleaner and start scrubbing…your floor will shine in no time. Maybe it’s from not being scrubbed in a month, maybe it’s from the oil, but thanks to those potatoes, and maybe a small part your inattentiveness with a ziplock zipper, your floor is now shiny and clean!

Colony collapse

by on August 2, 2008 in Green Living

To take my mind off more trivial things (in the grand scheme of all things, everything is trivial), I was thinking about the bees in my garden, wondering if their hive had a chance and I started to do some research to see what was new with CCD. Last I heard, something like 30% of the US’s bees had fallen from it.

I found this article, where it gives a number of 1.1 million colonies (each colony has tens to hundreds of thousands of bees) died last winter. Bees are very suseptible to disease, illness and bugs like many species are, but they seem to be at most risk of dying from something called “Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus”, which is transmitted by mites and other bees. Another article gives information about IAPV that doesn’t paint a good picture for bees worldwide, and claims that 50-90% of US colonies have died:

IAPV was first described in 2004 in Israel where infected bees presented with shivering wings, progressed to paralysis and then died just outside the hive. Importation to the U.S. of bees from Australia began in 2004, coinciding with early reports of unusual colony declines.

So the virus seems to come from Austrialia, but there’s no cases IN Australia, according to this CNN article, possibly because the mites that transmit them are a Northern Hemisphere problem.

Snopes isn’t sure if Einstein actual said it, but many people believe it to be true anyway:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.”

Since many world crop depend on bees to pollinate, if they disappear, it would go along with it that food does too.  Scary stuff.