"The real menace in dealing with a 5-year old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a 5-year old." - Jean Kerr

It was a beautiful day with lots of sunshine and temps in the low 80's, and I took advantage of it by getting lots of stuff done in Fred and elsewhere around Baker Rd.

When I got the electrical all done the outlet I put in the coop didn't work. I pretty much knew where the problem was and it didn't make me happy. Without going into all the reasons why, I made a connection inside the wall - something that's not allowed if you're following code - and that had to be where things went wrong. That meant using my Dremel to cut through the bead board wainscoting and drywall, opening up the connection box, and...yep, one of the wires had pulled out of the wire nut.
That's now fixed, the outlet works, and I'll make a removable cover for that hole in the wall out of a bead board patch that will meet code by providing access in the future. And it will be behind a cabinet, so nobody will see it anyway.

Fred is now ready for flooring. All the stuff that was stored inside has a (more) permanent place or went into the trash, all the leftover pieces of lumber and sheet goods have been cut up for next winter's kindling, and both porches are now clean and spiffy.
Wanna come over for a picnic?

After last night's post about the carpenter ants my older brother sent me an email about having used boric acid to solve an ant problem. I'd used it in AZ to solve our seasonal cockroach problem but didn't see anything about it when doing my internet search for this problem. When I included the words boric acid in my search last night I saw several entries. The bad guys walk through the stuff, ingest it as they clean off their feet, and DIE.

This is a bad pic because I was in the loft on my haunches with bad lighting, but there you see two setups of strawberry jam with boric acid around and mixed in. And when I took out that insulation to the left I was a little grossed out by the swarm of carpenter ants behind it. So I put more boric acid on the top of the 2x4 and got some inside a gap that I think leads down to the nest.
Now we wait, check daily, and hope this does it.

The president of Harvard has announced a new policy beginning with students entering in 2017. If they join an organization limited to one sex or another they will be disqualified from any leadership position on campus, including things like team captaincies. They also won't receive school endorsement if they apply for post-grad fellowships like a Rhodes or Fulbright Scholarship. These kind of gender specific groups are exclusionary and contradict Harvard's values of openness and equality.
This new policy applies to fraternities and sororities as well as the "final clubs," the off campus men- and women-only clubs, some of which date back centuries.
The administration at Harvard thus illustrates that you can be really smart and totally silly at the same time, and that a pile of letters after your name don't mean a pile of brains between your ears.
(As of press time there was no word on the status of students who join a trans gender club.)

Tomorrow we'll go back, together this time, to the church I visited last Sunday. I'm curious to see how tomorrow compares to what I experienced last Sunday and what Pam thinks of it.

Is the Republican part in the process of a schism?