Category: Strange World

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Bleeding tree stump

I’ve described sap as “tree blood” before, but this seems a little too apt.

There are a bunch of tipuana trees mixed in with the jacarandas and palms around the area where I work. (One fewer now.) They look a lot like jacarandas with yellow flowers instead of purple, though the leaves are a little bit wider and the bark is just a bit different. (They make just as big a mess, too.) Tipuanas look close enough that I actually mistook them for jacarandas until I saw them flowering — which, oddly enough, I haven’t seen any of them do yet this year.

And now I know that they have blood-red sap.

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We’ve been joking about feral tomatoes for years, but recently I’ve started observing them in the wild.

Feral Tomato turning orange

So to speak.

Sometime last spring, a tomato must have been dropped in the planter next to the parking structure near work. One of the seeds sprouted, and that plant somehow survived all the remodeling and landscaping.

Feral Tomato by the parking lot

By June it was growing its own tomatoes. In fact, it was growing more tomatoes than the plants in our garden. Continue reading →

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After four ant-free years, we’ve been invaded by ants that smell like nail polish when you squash them. Some of the stranger things that we’ve found ants going after over the past few weeks include:

  • Children’s medicine. The ants don’t care about the antihistamines, just the sugary syrup. We washed everything out and now keep the liquid medicines in a ziplocked bag.
  • A forgotten party favor with a bundle of jelly beans in it, in a box at the top of a bookshelf in our bedroom. From our wedding. 11 years ago. D’oh!
  • A poster frame. More specifically, the dead bugs that had crawled into the open spaces in the tape who-knows-how-long-ago and gotten stuck. Eeew.

And of course the more typical targets like the kitchen trash can.

Now, while ants are new to this apartment, the place we lived before gave us a constant struggle. Some of the more spectacular cases were:

  • The pantry and liquor cabinet. Ants were trying to crawl through the threads of every screw-top jar or bottle they could. We got in the habit of wiping the tops before closing them.
  • The refrigerator and freezer. There was just enough room for them to crawl in, but they couldn’t handle the cold. The ants in the refrigerator got progressively slower farther from the entry point, and a pathetic swath of frozen ants coated part of the freezer door. We patched the gap using model magic.
  • Underwear.

…yeah, I can’t really top that one.