IdyllopusPress Presents

Fortunate Discoveries by Accident described her ants as dividing themselves into morticians, executives and construction workers. Her ants, like those blogged about at Gearworks, were fully fledged up to fun not long after their arrival.

H.o.p.’s ants are nearly all executives, running around not doing much other than discussing discussing, with several racing over to look at us whenever we train the magnifying glass on them. They are curious, at least, but not diggers.

All the ants have ignored the holes we dutifully punched in the NASA-developed nutrient seaweed gel. Several explored down the side where there’s a natural gap between the gel and the casing. Only one went to digging. For hours she’s been at the bottom of the gel, on the side, far away from her fellow ants. Occasionally she stops and sits so still she looks dead. I’ll think she’s dead. Then she starts up again, digging, by her lonesome. While the rest congregate atop the gel, not doing anything but discussing and cleaning themselves, one or another climbing atop the few dead and looking ready to get industrious. Then the ant will tumble off the dead ant remains and get up and come over and look at me and my magnifying glass.

Later. The one lone ant is still down the side between the gel and container, digging, kind of. She’s not getting much of anywhere. All the other ants are up top, milling around. And once again, they are quickly aware of big alien creature standing there with magnifying glass and several come over and check it out.

No point posting a picture as it would look much the same as yesterday’s.

We sent off for H.o.p.’s ants from Uncle Milton Sept. 4th. The window for arrival had the latest date as Oct. 18th. Last week we received notice that they’d be mailing them out and they arrived today, first class mail, in an envelope marked “Temperature sensitive, Keep from Heat and Frost, Perishable, Handle with care”.

These being harvester ants, they arrive without queen, and ready to bite. Kind of. They weren’t moving much. As instructed, to calm them (they were already pretty out of it, only three appearing to be alive at the time) we put them in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes then transferred them to the ant farm.

Slowly, over the course of the evening, they have begun to revive. We think 24 made it and 3 or 4 were dead.

They’ve been exploring a bit. You poke three one inch holes in the gel to enable their tunneling but thus far they’ve not explored those holes. Instead they are up and down the top of the aquarium, and have begun to break up bits of gel off the surface and down one of the sides.

They have been breaking apart their dead.

Breaking things up into little bits seems what these guys are geared to do.

All in all, there’s not much else going on right now.

One isn’t supposed to move them much, and keep them out of direct light, in a place where they won’t be jostled. We chose a bookshelf where H.o.p. can easily observe them.

They’ll entertain us for one to three months and then begin to die and what we’ll then have on our hands is a depressing art installation on futile industry.

Here’s a guy with a pretty cool ant farm that has LED lights at the bottom that enable viewing.

An aside on how the hermit crabs are doing. After our last sand change a couple of weeks ago, Sarah dug down deep and hasn’t surfaced. There’s no dead fish smell so she must be moulting. Jerry and Climber only come out at night, spending their days holed up under the driftwood. After the last change of sand we immediately began having a problem with mold, which isn’t good. Since Sarah is down deep (we know approximately where she is, not exactly) we’ve not changed the sand as we worry about disturbing her.

I’ve been hearing about Rosetta Stone for years, that it’s the holy grail of language learning programs.

And it sounded great. Immersion learning. I thought it would be great for teaching Spanish to a child.

But it’s an expensive course. $499 for levels 1, 2 and 3 purchased together. At a discount.

Then I began hearing that there were libraries offering it online for their patrons, the whole Rosetta Stone shebang. I learned the Chattanooga Library was offering it and I sent for information on becoming a member of their library, but then opted to try the Spanish lessons at Cosmeo instead.

I learned on Thursday that the Fulton County library, as of September, is now offering Rosetta Stone online to its patrons.

Navigating the Fulton County library system website is hell, as well as getting signed up for various accounts (because not just one account will do you, for access to different things means not just furnishing a library card number but finding a PIN number that’s squirreled away in one of the back pages as well as a password that you can only access by going here, scrolling there, going another there from there and then another there again).

OK, well, it’s not hell but it’s aggravating enough that it can frustrate an experienced internet user.

I registered for Rosetta Stone Spanish. When I entered the program, however, I didn’t see the different learning levels I’d read about. Instead I saw…

TRAVELER.

I looked that up on the internet and found that Rosetta Stone Traveler programs, lightweight versions geared for individuals interested in learning a bit of a language for tourist purposes, have been discontinued. According to one review, however, they’re available under another name at Costco for $35 with an electronic pocket translator thrown in.

Sigh. I was less enthused, and was wondering why a large system like the Fulton County Library system would have picked up only a license to the discontinued Traveler version rather than making the full course available.

Oh well. Try it anyway. I figured even a little immersion style learning would be a good thing.

Before bringing in H.o.p., I tried out the first lesson.

Agh! The pictures! Yachts and planes and trains and buses. Yachts!

Yachts?

Oh, yeah, this is the tourist edition.

And the photos all looked so…homogenized. I checked out the French and Italian Traveler courses. They all use the same bland pictures that you view over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I did the first lesson and then sent for H.o.p. He is sensitive to imagery and didn’t like the photos. “These are boring,” he said. He finished the first lesson but exhibited less than any interest and ran off as soon as he was done. At least with the Cosmeo Spanish programs he likes the friendly-faced instructor and his songs and stories. He didn’t retain anything he learned but he at least enjoyed it.

I tried the second lesson and was feeling kind of glad that I’d spent my educational dollars on other things rather than purchasing Rosetta Stone.

Looking ahead (and at those photos), I felt massive doses of tedium.

I still planned on returning the next day, just to try out several more of the lessons.

Then completely forgot about doing so on Friday. And today. That’s how excited I was about the course.

This evening I looked up Rosetta Stone at Wikipedia and, interestingly, they address the photo issue.

The most frequent criticism of the program is its lack of sensitivity to the differences between the various languages it comes in and their respective cultures. All programs present the same concepts in the same order, using the same images taken mostly in the Washington, D.C. area a couple of hours northeast of Fairfield’s headquarters in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Oh, that explained the photos.

Oh, this has been going on a while, hasn’t it. On March 14 I blogged about a pipe feeding the radiant heaters that had apparently busted in our kitchen wall, in January, and how it was humidly wrecking havoc on the kitchen with steam pouring through the wall, peeling paint etc. And it couldn’t be fixed until the winter months were over as it would mean turning off the heat to everyone’s apartments for an unknown period of time. Rather than sacrifice everyone else’s heat, I figured we’d put up with the mess and then it would be taken care of in the spring and I’d get a new paint job in the kitchen.

They began working on the pipes yesterday. They’re now packing sand in the hole that was part of the kitchen floor and readying to lay concrete over it. And part of a kitchen wall is torn out. What was involved was replacing a series of busted pipes that feed the radiant heaters. Those pipes not only ran through the wall, but down into the concrete foundation of this old building. We’re the third apartment that they’ve had to excavate. I was hoping for a new kitchen floor (I wanted black and white checkerboard like in the apartment above) but they salvaged the old linoleum just peeling it back and will lay it back down over the new concrete. Which is kind of, well, gosh darn, drat, because I had my heart set on a black and white checkerboard floor after this mess. I don’t know when the wall will be repaired but I understand the kitchen won’t be painted probably for another couple of weeks.

Later. Now the concrete is setting. I don’t know if the landlord is gone or not. No, wait, his truck’s still out there. We’ve got mosquitoes inside from the back door being open all day long. They were trying to figure out how to rebuild a threshold. Or not. I said yes. Please. I don’t want a gap under the door. Looks like we’ll be getting a bump that should be painted neon orange so we don’t trip over it. I guess. I don’t know. I would occasionally make an appearance and ask a question and get vague responses. The landlord, usually a fairly cheery guy, hasn’t granted a smile once throughout the whole procedure.

It was smelly in here today, what with all the welding going on, and all this has been taking place really right next to my desk as my desk is right next to the kitchen and the kitchen is barely six feet long, if that much. So, six feet from my desk all this has been taking place.

The landlord went ahead and cleaned the walls in preparation for painting. They were a mess from those months of steam. I suppose I could have washed them all down myself this summer but I mean they were nasty and paint was peeling in places and I…didn’t. I kept thinking well they’re going to be in here tearing up the kitchen sometime soon, next week, the week after, when (?).

Then a couple of weeks ago the landlord said he believed that with the replacing of the pipes next door he thought it was all fixed and sounded vague on painting over what had happened in the kitchen, so I told Marty it was time to get some paint ourselves and do it and we almost purchased paint on Sunday but couldn’t decide on a color so we just got some flat antique white for me to touch up the walls in the other rooms. Then this week the landlord appeared at the back door. The problem wasn’t fixed. The pipes were tested and water poured everywhere. Right next to our back door. Right where I said I knew the pipe was busted. It was time to tear up the kitchen.

Fortunately they didn’t start work until Thursday. H.o.p. was sick with a bug and throwing up Tuesday and Wednesday. So we went from vomiting child to well child and kitchen being torn out. I had them hang plastic over the doorway (there is no door) because of my computer being right there, and because I was hoping to keep in the kitchen airborne dust and debris of deconstruction.

Later still. The landlord returned. Too late to do the threshold today as they have to level things. It’s too late to glue the floor back down and the concrete’s still setting and they have to level the floor some more it turns out because where the new concrete was laid in it’s uneven and doesn’t match up with the old floor. Besides, when he laid the linoleum back down, the new pipe coming out of it has been installed so it’s situated a couple of inches from where the old pipe was and now the linoleum has superfluous cutouts. The landlord didn’t mention a new floor. This is discontinued linoleum so if he’s planning on just patching it I’m wondering where the patch will come from.

I’m sympathetic. He’s exhausted. He wouldn’t look me in the eye and usually there’s no problem with that. Maybe because he knows I would prefer a new floor to a patched one.

It’s certainly not been chaos around here the past few days but it’s been…unsettled. Despite it all, I was in a great mood yesterday. Today, not so much. Last night would have been a great night to go to the observatory but H.o.p. said he’d prefer to go tonight when he knew it would be busy with people. But there’s cloud cover so no observatory tonight. Too bad. An excursion to the observatory would be welcome right now.

Last week, on our way back from Augusta, the sky was clear and there was no moon and the stars were bright and the milky way shimmering. I had Marty pull off the interstate and we found a place next to a cow pasture where we stopped the car, got out, and stood for a long time taking in the sky, cows on the other side of the fence occasionally making hulking cow sounds.