no kiln, no rain, no worms, and other miscellania of my life

We've determined that getting the newer kiln fixed is really our only option. The old kiln is old, rusting out old, door falling off old, really no point in trying to replace the controller, a $600+ part, even if that part is still available. The problem with the newer kiln is a wire became disconnected from the harness that is attached to the motherboard. I've got the names and numbers of two people in Houston that do kiln repair and it turns out we knew one of them from way back. So now not sure what happens next. Marc may go over and take another try at getting the wire in the notch to hook it back up but it's so hot in that part of the shop especially with the high temps we're having. I'm for just calling those guys and hauling it in to Houston. I have to empty the truck bed of downed limbs and branches first though which I guess I'll do tomorrow if the truck starts. We don't use it much so the battery tends to go dead. Marc had it hooked up to a battery charger the other day. We've sort of been putting off unloading the tree debris until we burn what's already there but it doesn't look like the burn ban will be lifted anytime soon. Still dry dry dry.

So dry the cotton is shriveling in the fields. It perked up after that inch of rain we got weeks ago but looks even worse now.

I took Lily, for want of a better name, to the vet Monday for a general check-up. She was not happy being shoved into the cat carrier and yowled and tried to claw her way out practically the whole time in the car and while we were waiting. I thought this is not good, she's not going to be at all cooperative with the vet but when he opened the door to the cat carrier she came out and was fine, let him examine her. She's less than a year old, not pregnant yay, she has ear mites which they will flush out when they spay her. I thought she was going into heat because Monday, she was a demon to get out, yowling now and then, so I scheduled the spay for the 17^th but yesterday and today she's just been her laid back self, not a peep out of her, no fighting her back from the door every time someone went in or out so I'm going to call and see if I can get her in sooner.

The other thing I accomplished so far this week was finally getting my email accounts on the desktop squared away. You might remember that I updated some things weeks ago and one of the results was that to make my mail accounts active I had to enter the password which I ignored hoping it would just fix itself. Well, it didn't and fuck all if I could remember what it was and of course it was one of the few I don't have written down so I tried the current, nope, I tried the one before, nope, and the one before that, nope. Well, fuck. So then I googled how to find passwords stored on your computer which ultimately led me to a window that listed the account and a box that said 'show password' and when I clicked on it the box it opened another window that wanted the password to show me the password. Really? Went through that rigamarole over and over, went through system preferences over and over. After about three hours of frustration I had managed to somehow at least download the mail from the business account but it wouldn't let me send. One last try, I opened the internet accounts window in system preferences one more time and typed in the current password we're using and...it worked! Unfuckingbelievable. I bet I typed that password in over a dozen times for each account to no avail. Well, whatever, the computer gods got tired of fucking with me I guess and let me have access to both my email accounts though it wasn't like I didn't have access at all as I could get it through the mail function on my phone. Anyway, glad that's been dealt with.

Sunday, I cleaned the filter to the turtle pond. I admit it had been way too long but when I cleaned the muck off the charcoal fiber layer and the foam layer both were just filled with little red worms about 1/2” long. Ick, never seen that before not in all the years we've had that filter so I set them out in the sun to roast their little hides. 

Went out later to see if they were shriveling up and ants were crawling all over both pieces. Monday morning I went out and those ants had cleaned out every single speck of those little red worms. Good job!

So, I had to go to Walmart to get dog food since the grocery store hasn't had it in weeks, supply chain problems I guess, and I walked through the women's clothing section to get to the dog food and saw this.

What decade is this? In the women's section no less.

A few garden shots...

Spider lily

Gulf fritillary on the Mexican bird of paradise aka pride of Barbados