The season for invading ants arrived, and the best defense I’ve been using for decades is an environment friendly attack with help from Trader Joes.
For decades, I’ve suspected it was the weather and years ago I stumbled on the best method, for me, to control the ant invasions. I spray the ants with Trader Joes Fruit and Vegetable Wash. It kills the ants the instant the spray hits them and ants that enter later tend to avoid the area that was sprayed because it appears that just walking across TJ’s F&V Wash while it is still wet is enough to not only disrupt the trail but kill those ants too. If you can find the entry point and spray that, it forces the ants to find another way in or they don’t return.
I don’t use pesticides inside my house. Can’t stand the stuff. Instead, I use TJ’s Fruit and Vegetable Wash and it is non-toxic. I learned about this product designed to safely clean what we eat by accident. I grabbed the only spray in sight and haven’t stopped using it since. The neat thing is: it is formulated to remove waxes, pesticides, and chemicals.
After decades of winning these invasions and driving the ants out of my houses, curious, I finally Googled the topic to find out if my suspicions were correct, and discovered from a study out of Stanford that they were.
The Stanford News Service reports, “Household ant invasions are determined by weather, not pesticide use, new study finds … “Ants are most likely to enter homes in cold, wet conditions, typically in the winter in Northern California,” they write, noting that a smaller peak in the level of infestation occurs during hot, dry conditions — typically in August and September.”
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Beware yee who are closed-of-mind and lovers of Trumpism for that is the ultimate blindness.
Who is the real Donald Trump, and did the media have a reason to lie about that Donald for the last 70 years before he ran for and became the President of the United States thanks to being the only republic with a flawed and outdated Electoral College? The rest of the republics and/or democracies in the world use the popular vote, the one Trump lost.
Because Trump is a malignant narcissist and psychopath that craves attention and his cult of worshipers, he has a long history documented by the media and the courts.
Listen to Trump bragging about kissing and groping women without permission. He said, “And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Politico reported, “Donald Trump might be one of the most deeply studied presidential candidates ever. Beginning in the early 1990s, as the real estate mogul dealt with corporate calamities, and until last year, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, a half-dozen serious biographies have been written about a man who has imprinted himself on American culture in towering gold letters. But those biographies—which dig into Trump’s family history, his early business successes and later financial disasters, his tabloid sex scandals and the television showmanship that saved him—had largely receded into the depths of Amazon’s bestseller list. Now those books—which have not always been to Trump’s liking; he sued one of the authors unsuccessfully for libel—have become precious source material for those eager to explain Trump ….”
In fact, Trump is not a great negotiator. The evidence he is a failure is the fact that he has been involved in more than 4,000 court cases. Great, honest negotiators rarely end up in court and seldom if ever lose when they do, because honesty works.
USA Today dug deep in Trump’s court history. He doesn’t win them all and many of them came about because he is a horrible negotiator and often breaks the contracts he signed. There are words for that: liar and fraud.
In addition, Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist and this makes him very dangers as the President of the United States.
The American Psychiatry Association has a nine-point checklist for narcissism – if someone displays just five of the traits, they have Narcissistic Personality Disorder:
Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
Requires excessive admiration.
Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognise or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
Shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes.
Even Trump’s most ardent supporters will have trouble denying at least five of those characteristics. I think there is evidence from Trump’s long history of behavior for all nine. For more about Trump’s dangerous mental illness, read The Mind of Donald Trump.
Then there’s Trump’s long history with organized crime from the United States to Russia. Politico reports, “Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.”
Then there are the biographies written before 2016.
“Somewhere there is another country, far beyond the pale, known as Bad Taste, and Trump has devoted his life to racing through it and staking as many private claims as possible, pausing only to yodel back to the homeland songs of himself.”― Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball
“As chief operating officer at Trump Plaza, O’Donnell was in almost daily contact with his boss. If familiarity did not breed contempt, it eventually led to distaste. Trump at work emerges here as a cocksure boor who pays precious little attention to detail and pins the blame for his own misjudgments on subordinates. While he seems surprisingly dumb when it comes to weighing a deal’s downside risks against its potential rewards, he apparently suffers from near- terminal overconfidence. … And Trump at play with his yacht, helicopter, and other trophies is an equally unappealing eminence. A lover of gossip, The Donald has a phobia about germs, which makes him reluctant to shake hands with high-rolling customers or mingle with the celebs he adores and caters to. Nor does the abstemious Trump have a talent for extramarital flings. A long-running, oddly joyous affair with Marla Maples cost him his marriage to Ivana—and a good deal more.”
Let’s hope the next time Trump fails and falls, and he will because he had a history of failure, he doesn’t take all of humanity with him.
There might not be much time left to read these books. If Trump is the Anti-Christ, and even he doesn’t know if he is (he is that ignorant), then the Trump Apocalypse will take place and that will lead to the Biblical one and the end of our species. Who will inherit the earth after we are gone: dogs, cats, cockroaches, ants, or rats?
This post was written lest we forget who the 45th President of the United States is because too many Americans are becoming globally infamous for being citizens of the fattest country on the planet (while a billion people around the world face starvation), for their short attention spans, even shorter memoires, and their ability to be easily fooled by false facts and conspiracy theories. I wonder if all that fat has anything to do with it. After all, too much body fat is bad for the brain. If true, maybe we can blame the rise of Trumpism on fast food, and The Donald loves fast food.
History.org says, “A 1786 essay refers to an early, non-English form of the familiar saying ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’”
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
I think that Father’s Day is another state sanctioned consumer holiday, without a day off from work, to profit corporations, but it isn’t as profitable as Mother’s Day.
Why do we spend less on Father’s Day than Mother’s Day asks the BBC. The BBC reports that the average amount spent on Father’s day is expected to be $135 per person vs $186 for Mother’s Day or $15.5-billion vs. $23.6 billion.
Does this mean mothers win and fathers turn to their trusty six-pack of beer to forget how unimportant they are and squat in front of a TV screen to watch the latest popular sporting event to help them forget?
In fact, of the nine major holiday seasons, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF), Fathers Day is ranked #6 above the Super Bowl, Halloween, and St Patrick’s Day. The Winter Holidays are lumped together as one and bring in about $600 billion annually. Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Easter all beat Father’s Day.
The NRF explains why “Mother’s Day is so much bigger than Father’s Day: the types of gifts people typically buy mom tend to cost a little more, and dad even admits that he doesn’t like all the fuss anyway.”
If the Super Bowl and Father’s day were combined, since more men watch the Super Bowl than women, maybe fathers would move up in the rankings to tie with Valentine’s Day.
What about Parent’s Day instead of one for mothers and another one for fathers, or we could cheat and move Father’s Day to Christmas?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
After sixteen years of marriage to Anchee, we divorced in early 2015. It wasn’t easy going public on my blog about the divorce. Anchee is the best woman I’ve ever known, and there will be no details beyond this.
Anchee and I remain friends, and she still cooks me great tasting pies without adding any sugar. Before I wrote this post, I had a slice of one of her apple pies for my dinner. Anchee’s pies don’t include sugar and they come with a lot of other healthy ingredients than just fruit. Imagine a fruit pie that, I think, tastes great and is a nutritious meal too. In fact, she’s in China now and I’m driving to her house once a week to water her yard for her. She has a big yard and many trees. I’ve written about her house on this Blog before when we were still married.
After house hunting for several months, I bought a fixer upper at a reasonable price in the far-east bay an hour from San Francisco, and since the move, I’ve been renovating this abused abode. This post shows a few before and after photos of some of the renovation projects, and I’m planning more. It will take years before I’m done with what I plan to do with this house.
My first project before I moved in was to fix the garage so I could use the space for storage, my woodshop, and a place to park my car. A younger former Marine and Special Forces combat medic, a friend, helped me hang the drywall and reinforce the side door. He also removed one of the trees in the backyard and cut back the remaining tree by a third. I installed the shelving in the garage alone.
Before
After
The second project was on my own. I removed the existing floors (cheap carpet and laminated flooring) to install solid, hardwood floors (not the engineered variety). I started with the living room, moved to the hall and master bedroom, and then tore out the cheap laminated flooring in the family room and replaced it with solid, tongue-and-groove ¾ inch cherry-stained oak. I finished the family room with a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall entertainment unit that covered the old fireplace. That took several months to complete. The following photos are the before-and-after family room.
Before
After
Next was the backyard fence project that I started on February 25th this year and plan to finish before the end of June. About 3-to-5 hours of work remain on the fence. A few facts before I let the before, during, and after photos reveal this one-man, me, job.
Digging the holes for the fourteen metal fence posts and the ditch between the posts for the fence’s concrete foundation took about 100-hours of labor and 12,000 pounds of concrete (this includes the 160+ concrete blocks) reinforced with rebar. Each fence-post hole was two-feet deep and about a foot square. I moved, mixed, and poured about 300-pounds of concrete for each fence post. The other 7,800 pounds of concrete went into the foundation between the fence posts.
The above ground redwood and wire fence fastened to the metal fence posts and on top of the concrete foundation added another 150-hours of labor to the project.
Before
During
After
Working on the renovation isn’t the only thing I do with my life. I promote my four published books on a monthly basis, write and publish posts for my four blogs, and I finished my next novel (the first one in a planned five-part series) that I’m currently putting through revisions. I limit watching DVDs to after 8 PM (I’m currently watching the first season for Blindspot), and I’m usually out of bed around 6 AM, but I don’t get to work on the house until after an early morning hour of exercise with weights, aerobics, stretching, and meditation (four times a week). I feel a need to mediate more than four days a week.
This post is a brief and incomplete snapshot of my vegan, no fast food, booze or beer lifestyle, and I turn seventy-two in a few weeks. I find time to read books and magazines too.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Recent government leaks reveal that Russians hacked voting machines in some U.S. states to revise the results. If true, Trump could be America’s first illegal president, but will the Republican Party that holds majorities in both Houses of Congress allow an investigation to find out the actual facts and not the alternative facts? The Intercept reports, “RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.”
Donald Trump, the allegedly first illegal president of the United States, recently returned from the Middle East where he made a deal to sell more than $100-billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia, a country that has been linked to financial support for Al Qaeda and ISIS. Fifteen of the 19 terrorists that took part in the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City that brought down the World Trade Center came from Saudi Arabia, a country that is not on Trump’s list to ban Muslim immigrants (Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia). People.com reports, “Of this list, zero fatal attacks were carried out by immigrants from the seven (the 7th country was Iraq but Trump later dropped it from the list) Muslim-majority countries targeted by the ban.”
Trump then flew to Europe where he alienated the European Union and NATO, America’s long-time and most trusted allies that are also all democracies.
It is obvious that the United States could not have a worse enemy than Donald Trump. Thanks to the Kremlin’s Agent Orange, that serial lying, fraud, and malignant narcissist in the White House, who Tweeted credit for the latest crisis, a country in the Middle East that hosts a large U.S. airbase with 10,000 American troops, the U.S. now stands on the brink of losing that base and possibly seeing a new war break out that will be fought between its own allies.
OZY News reports that “US Says Russian Hacking May Have Sparked Qatar Crisis”.
The FBI’s reportedly confirmed that a Qatari news site was hacked last month to plant a story falsely attributing inflammatory remarks to Qatar’s leader, prompting several other Gulf nations to sever diplomatic relations. Officials say Russian sources were behind the hack, attempting to destabilize the region.
While Foreign Policy Magazine (June 7, 2017) breaks this news: “Qatar fallout. Operations at the massive Al Udeid air base in Qatar, which houses over 10,000 U.S. military personnel, appear to be running as normal despite the harsh — and unexpected — economic blockade put in place this week by five other Gulf countries, and president Trump’s Tweeted approval of the move, in which he took credit for the action.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam combat veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
What would happen to the U.S. dollar if Trump and Bannon succeeded in “Draining the (U.S. Constitution’s) Swamp”?
Trump has never defined what he meant by “Draining the (U.S. Constitution’s) Swamp,” but his closest advisor Steven Bannon has. Bannon has said, “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
The Lenin that Bannon referred to was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, who was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist.
And in the United States, the state is defined by the U.S. Constitution. That document is the law that guides America. To destroy the state means the end of that Constitution.
As long as the U.S. dollar is viewed as a stable currency, it will remain as the world’s reserve currency but trust in the United States is being quickly eroded by mentally ill, twitter fingers Donald Trump with advice from his handler, Leninist (Communist) Steve Bannon. But if Trump, and Bannon, causes the world to lose trust in the United States and that reserve status is lost, the results would be a major currency devaluation and a drastic standard of living adjustment down. That could well be a catastrophe for the United States and for the nations that hold their wealth in American dollars.
What is Trump doing to lose trust in the United States?
Roger-Mark De Souza, writing for the Wilson Center, says, “A lack of U.S. government support for the Paris climate agreement will mean that the United States will further isolate itself from international collaboration and cooperation on multiple fronts. It will affect U.S. security, the provision of jobs; U.S. business operations, and U.S. diplomatic efforts. The agreement, because it has a broad basis of support, will continue with or without the United States.”
What else has Trump done to destroy America’s relationship with its long-time allies and friends around the world? Watch the videos to discover answers to this question.
Oil Price.com reports The Clock is Ticking On The U.S. Dollar As World’s Reserve Currency. “Nobody plans to give way as keeper of the supreme currency, so there is no schedule to follow and no way to know when the torch will be passed from the dollar to the Yuan … history has shown that the shift comes suddenly, usually in the heat or aftermath of war. … It should be clear now that the reserve currency status is neither a birthright nor a privilege that stays forever in one place, which means it isn’t a question of if China will replace the U.S. as title holder but when. … What should no longer be unthinkable is that the clock is ticking on America’s status as the holder of the reserve currency.”
“The demise of the dollar will also bring radical changes to the American lifestyle,” Victoria Crowmberg says. “When this economic tsunami hits America, it will make the 2008 recession and its aftermath look like no more than a slight bump in the road. It will bring very undesirable changes to the American lifestyle through:
Massive inflation,
High interest rates on mortgages and cars,
Substantial increases in the cost of food, clothing, and gasoline and
A much harder time financing its debt.
Right now, there is a huge demand for U.S. dollars and for U.S. government debt since countries around the world have to keep huge reserves of U.S. currency lying around for the sake of international trade but what if … the appetite for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt dried up dramatically? That is something to think about.”
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
