Termites, Math and Money... Oh My!

Coffee in the Alaska skyline mug, "Roundabout" by Yes on iTunes. Where to begin. It feels like I was just here. Oh yes, I was. It's Tuesday and it's already a week.

Termites: Dan the carpenter finished up the clean-up from all the renovation work on the studio on Sunday. As he was already hauling away a trailer and truckload of trash he offered to take the brown paper lawn bags full of the leaves and debris from the landscape crew cleaning up the yard. He loaded the bags from the back yard fine, but when he went to get the bags in the front he found the bottoms of all of them eaten out by termites. He found no evidence of termites in our under the house, but apparently they are alive and well somewhere in the yard (I am guessing that big old dead oak on the front corner of the drive--lots of the refuse came from there).

I am not inclined to pay a pest control company $600 to treat and put up monitoring stations which they will then charge me $200 a year to check (they pull the bait out of the station and look to see if it's been nibbled on once every three months). We already do that with our house because, well, it's a new house and it was under a termite bond when we bought it. The studio has already had termites (old tunnels and damage found during the renovation) and had them cleared out. How difficult can it be? Now I wait for my father the entomologist to read this post and have my mother either call me or send me email and tell me whether I can take care of it myself or if I have to break down and hire someone.

Math: A gallery in Florida I work with called and asked me to do a piece for a customer's custom stand for which the original piece had broken. The original spec said do a 19.5 inch diameter circle. But when I laid a 19.5 inch circle of glass over the template for the stand, it became clear the 19.5 inch measurement wasn't the diameter, it was a line crossing from one edge of the circle to the other some unknown distance from the center of the circle (see the drawing that looks like a happy face with underwear on its head--the solid dark lines are the sides of the stand, the dotted lines are the measurements I had, the thin line across the middle is the diameter of the circle).

What to do? Well, most people either would have paid attention in high school math or just done a lot of little paper templates until one of them fit. I had a better solution: I am married to a mathematician. I called him. Turns out (a2 + b2)/2b is the answer. And the answer is a circle 20.125 inches in diameter. Heh.

Money: It comes in, it goes out. Last week was a bit scarier as it went out in a flood and didn't come in at all. This week I got a flurry of checks and am solvent again (shoes for everyone!). Now I'm off to paint, and fuse, and paint some more.