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Based on recent events involving power tools in the barn not working because critters chewed on the cords, today I am listing for you the worst animals to have on your property.

These are listed in order, with the first animal being the worst (most annoying).

• Woodchuck : They seem to have a knack for knowing which items near them are the most important to humans and then damaging them. Such as ignoring the cheaper 25′ extension cord and chewing through only the 100′ extension cord. And digging under the concrete slab floor. And digging behind the car tire so the car gets stuck when I try to move it and I have to get another vehicle to pull it out of the very small ditch. And so on.
• Deer : Deer are very damaging, but only to plants. Especially fruit trees. They are high on this list because their physical range requires so much work to defend against. You can’t just put up any old fence, it has to be high and sturdy.
• Chipmunk : These little guys like to dig. Whether it’s under my brick walkway or through the flowers I just planted, they get just about everywhere. I expect about a 10% loss of any flowers planted because chipmunks can’t help but go through new dirt (they seem attracted to freshly-dug dirt) and they don’t put back any roots they may unearth in the process.
• Raccoon : These are not as annoying as chipmunks – although it was a close call – because they are easier to get. Chipmunks are too small and fast. Raccoons do damage property, but there are fewer of them and they are large and slow. If I kept animals, such as chickens, I would put raccoons above chipmunks, since I know they go after small farmyard animals.
• Canada Goose : Noisy and messy and mean. They don’t specifically damage property like the critters I’ve listed so far, but they could damage you if you let them get settled and they start feeling territorial.
• Mouse : Messy, and they chew holes in things. Not a big deal, except we have a corn stove. I have to keep a tight lid on the corn storage, otherwise we end up finding little stores of corn in weird places, like in someone’s hockey skate that apparently looked inviting to a mouse to use as his pantry.

Note that this list is tailored to the Midwest. I’m sure there are worse things to have milling about the grounds in other places, such as mountain lions or chimpanzees.

Also note that I do not mind having skunks around at all. They avoid people and stay away from my stuff. I’ve never had a problem with them. I’ve run into skunks 3 times in my life, and each time the skunk had skedaddled out of sight by the time I realized it was a skunk and not a large cat.

This is your annual reminder that the term “summer solstice” means “the solstice that occurs during summer”, not “the start of summer”.

It is an astronomical term having to do with the position of the sun relative to the earth, and while it does affect the seasons, it is incorrect to assign June 21 as the start of summer.

It has felt like summer for a few weeks already. What is summer? What is any season? A season is a grouping of days with similar weather features. For example, winter: temperatures are low, plants are dormant. And fall: temperatures decrease, plants lose their foliage. And spring: temperatures increase, plants grow their foliage. And summer: temperatures are high, plants are fruiting/seeding.

From the viewpoint of an observer with no calendar, how would he know when spring ends and summer begins? It’s a fairly slow transition with no defined border, so people have tried to assign that border. But the summer solstice is the wrong border.

The summer solstice has historically had a weather-related association. Think back to the time of Shakespeare. I would hope that you, dear reader, would recall the title of one of his plays (no expectation that you’ll know the plot or characters, just the title): A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When, historically, was the day of the year that was called “midsummer”? The day with the most daylight, of course. A lot of European countries still celebrate Midsummer in late June.

Anyway, my preferred time for summer is the 3-month block of June, July, and August. An acceptable alternative answer is Memorial Day to Labor Day, or perhaps from the first 80-degree day to the first 40-degree day after that, or perhaps from when the first rose bloom appears to when the chrysanthemums start blooming.

I have a disagreement with the people who decide on the color for the mute button for online meetings. The particular incident that brought the color problem to my attention happened to be Google Meet, but other programs such as Zoom also have the same issue. Of note is Microsoft Teams, which does not change color for muted versus unmuted, so it does not have this issue.

The problem is that the color was decided by extroverts.

Before getting into that though, a little bit of background: red is the color that has been chosen by society to mean “unsafe”. Whether it’s the color your car door locks change to when unlocked, or the color revealed on your firearm when it can be fired, things like that are considered unsafe and show a red color in that condition.

Now back to Google Meet. It was my first day back from a vacation, and it was my first meeting using Google Meet that day, so I was out of practice and my actions on the laptop were not back in habit yet. I wanted to be on mute, I saw the mute button was red, so I clicked it to make it not red, then I started talking to Some Wife (I think asking her what her sister-in-law called about) because it wasn’t my part of the meeting.

To me, an introvert, the unsafe mode of an online meeting is when my voice is being broadcast to everyone. Since red means unsafe, red to me means unmute. Not red should mean mute, because mute is safe.

But to the designers of that button or user interface, unsafe must mean no one can hear them, or whatever it is that extroverts want. Because when I clicked the mute button to make it safe, I actually unmuted myself and then everyone could hear me. I was glad other people had the option to mute me, which they did before too long.

On a related note, I’m glad for the programs that put a red border around your screen when you are sharing your screen to the meeting. That is unsafe too.

We have reached the end of the track season here, and one of the later meets reminded me of something that I feel like posting today. On certain events – I think this one was the 4×800 relay – the first 1.25 laps will have the runners stay in their lanes, but then on the back straightaway they are allowed to move over to lane 1. And there is usually an official standing at that point to both make sure people don’t cut over too early and also to remind them to cut over.

My experience as someone who understood math was that I did not cut over very quickly. And that frustrated the official, who thought I didn’t hear him yelling “Cut over!”, so he yelled more and louder at me.

Even all these years later, not many high school kids realize how much extra they are running. They just know that lane 1 is the shortest lane and thus they want to get to it as soon as they can.

It looks like this (not to scale, wrong number of lanes, other disclaimers):

The yellow star is where most runners aim to get, and the blue star is where I was aiming to get, and the green line is the start of the back stretch when runners could leave their lanes.

And now I’m going to add some geometry.

As you see, the distance I ran was line segment A, and other runners were choosing B+C.

Now let’s put some numbers in.

It doesn’t look like it, but the yellow dashed line is supposed to be a 45 degree angle. A standard high school track has 8 lanes of 42 inches each, so segment D is 28 feet

D² + D² = 1568, the square root of which is 39.6, so C = 39.6 feet.

Segment B is going to be 100 meters – 28 feet, so we end up with 300 feet.

Now for segment A. The Pythagorean theorem only works with right triangles, so this one is a little trickier. It’s also not enough just to know two length, we need an angle also.

Since I made angle CD to be 45, I know that BC is 135. So now we’re stuck using the Law of Cosines. I was hoping it would be easier, but that’s what I got.

A² = B² + C² – 2BC cos(A)
A = sqrt(90000 + 784 – 2*8400*cos(135))
A = 320 feet

So I would run 320 feet, and the opposition would run 339.6 feet, so I would get an advantage of 19.6 feet.

Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re not always in lane 8. And yes, it should be 7 lanes of width because no one runs on the outside of the lane so the 42 inches of lane 8 should be discounted. I’ll let you run the math on what the more appropriate number is. Just consider the 19.6 as the highest value it could be. Also, the opposition was not also in lane 8 with me, so no their distance would not be from the same point I was, as shown on the diagram (for illustrative purposes only).

I wish I would have started working on cars earlier in life – it would have saved me a bunch of money. Here are some things I’ve learned over the last few years of working on my own cars.

• The speedometer in our 2007 Cadillac stopped working. A bit of internet searching revealed that the motor for the speedometer needle is known to go bad. So I ordered a replacement dash gauge from Ebay, and while I was waiting for it to arrive I noticed the mileage on the odometer wasn’t increasing either. I actually looked around the car then and found some mice had chewed up some wires. I spliced them back together and the speedometer and odometer started working again.
• Also in that Cadillac, the right rear brake caliper was locked up – that brake was always noticeable hotter than the others after a drive. I installed a replacement caliper and it still had the problem. It turns out the cause was a bad brake hose leading to the caliper. A little bit of extra investigation before installing parts can save extra work and part costs.
• The old minivan (2012 Chrysler Town and Country) was a little wobbly, so I went to replace the back shocks. The bolts for those shocks are not very user-friendly, especially the upper bolt and especially after 8 salty winters. I gave up on the shock bolt and ended up unbolting the shock bracket from the frame. That’s 4 bolts instead of one, but they’re more accessible. The problem was that one bolt snapped off rather than move, but I reinstalled it with 3 bolts and figured that was good enough. Then I went to do the other side and only one bolt came out and 3 snapped off. We drove that van with one shock missing for a few months and then ended up junking it due to other problems.
• For that generation of minivan, if the dashboard display “Key in ignition” when the key is not in the ignition, the problem is the TIPM not the WIN module. I bought a WIN (several hundred dollars), installed it, still had the problem, but was able to return the WIN and get my money back (minus a restocking fee).
• A couple years back, I bought a pressure bleeder for the brakes, but I was using it wrong. I finally figured out it’s a lot less messy and quicker too, to not put brake fluid in the bleeder. I think you’re supposed to do that, to keep the master cylinder filled with fluid. But now I just top off the reservoir, then attach the pressure bleeder and just pump it full of air, run the brake bleeds while checking on the reservoir, and if it’s running low on fluid I start over, without spilling brake fluid out of the hose because all it has is air.