"Mysterious 2"

There were quite a few white apricots left over from the last food giveaway.  I took them home and canned them.  Since some people seem to hoard my pint-sized canning jars, I had to put the apricots in quarts.  I dislike doing quarts as it takes more hot water and everyone eating my bounty is a single person.  A quart of anything is a lot for 1 person.  Whatever.  The apricots went into the quarts and my single people snatched them up.

I also canned some papayas, but that meant I had to do 2 batches of canning.  When I took the jars of apricots out of the hot water, the water level dropped when I put in fewer jars of papaya.  Again, whatever.  I was hot and tired.  I just wanted to finish the steam bath I was getting on the hottest day of the year.  The jars looked sealed when I was done.  Since I'd run out of room in the kitchen, I put them in the outside sunroom to cool.

A couple of days later, I decided the sunroom was probably too hot for the jars.  I brought them inside and ignored them for a few days.  After a while, a not quite unpleasant and mysterious odor seemed to be in the kitchen and I couldn't find the source.  I also got invaded by carpenter ants.  Now, I'm betting you see the connections in this story.  I didn't.  I went on an increasingly frantic ant murdering spree until I picked up a jar of papaya and saw it was swarmed with ants.  The lid had popped off and there was an interesting, bubbling science experiment inside.

Stomp, stomp, stomp, compost fermenting papaya, wash everything... there were still ants.  I was losing my mind about then.  I finally found a second jar had exploded papaya all over the crowded table, the chair, the floor... There might've been some cussing.  Sooo, lesson for the week as stated by one of my apricot recipients, "Don't experiment with the rules of canning!"  Excellent lesson.  I'm hoping the ants died from botulism.

Properly canned papaya and apricots

On a happier note, I've been painting more flowers.  Bro2 said my other flower painting made him think of chakras, so I did this painting with that in mind.  Per Google, chakras are "(in Indian thought) each of the centers of spiritual power in the human body".  You can think of that as energy flowing through your body.  When all is healthy and good, it flows in a direct line bottom to top and you radiate joy.

You may have noticed some people aren't radiating joy.  They probably have a blocked chakra(s) and ought to meditate on the blockage.  Chakras are like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  Each chakra is color coded.  From bottom to top:

root (red) - safety, stability

sacral (orange) - joy, sensuality, emotion

solar plexus (yellow) - will, power

heart (green) - relationship, love

throat (blue) - expression, communication

3rd eye (purple) - clarity, wisdom

crown (white) - transcendence

I have to wonder where black carpenter ants fit into the pretty chakra rainbow?  My flower has quite a bit of white in it though, so maybe I've transcended my cussing ant murdering spree?

Just in case

"Team"

Every time Bro4 comes over, he says, "You should get rid of the weeds in your driveway.  They'll crack the cement."  My typical response is some variation of "I'll get to it".  Lately, I've told him about my friend's eco-friendly method of killing weeds with bleach, which prompts Bro to say, "Just use Round Up".  This conversation is as predictable as the sun rising in the morning and setting every evening.  Even if he doesn't say it out loud, I know he's thinking about telling me to get rid of the weeds until I cave to the inevitable and get rid of them. 

If you're interested in the bleach method, saturate the leaves instead of the base of the plant.  Use a sprayer with only plastic parts (no metal).  Give it a day or two and the plants will die.  The bleach dissipates, so it's better for the environment, but it's better if you don't let your pets walk on it the first day.  I'd also recommend that you do it before the plants get too big because I still ended up scraping the dying plants with my dedicated driveway shovel, which is actually a coal shovel, but who has coal these days?  I even went the extra step and swept the drive (with the dedicated driveway broom) to get rid of the bzillions of maple helicopters.

My driveway looks lovely.  Well, it did look lovely before the winds and rain came and brought down several more bzillions of maple helicopters down.  But in that golden moment when my driveway looked suburban perfect, I noticed an ant colony swarming on my perfect cement.

Ants are pretty amazing.  They display excellent teamwork.  I resisted the urge to stomp on them and let them move house in peace.  I hope they remember my peaceful nature next time one of them wants to bite me when I'm weeding the garden.  Maybe they're trying to get back at me for burning their ancestors with a magnifying glass when I was a child?  Even then, I wasn't thrilled with murder for entertainment.  I took to burning paper and leaves instead.

I watched the swarming ants for a little bit because I found it interesting that they were passing up eggs and handing them off to each other.  The eggs (or larva?) were bigger than the ants carrying them.  Then one of the ants bit me, and I decided there were better things to do than watch ants.

I don't know if it's true though?  Perhaps watching ants is the absolute best use of my time?

Thoughts, creativity, inspiration, realizations happen in unexpected moments of quiet time, and we don't get those moments if we never slow down enough to witness our own lives because we're too busy watching tv, playing video games, or doing stuff we're "supposed to" do.  Should all of our discoveries be in childhood when we have endless time to watch ants?