Friday, November 16, 2007
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Beating the frost south
My immediate goal is to get south of the encroaching cold weather before my tanks freeze. The fresh water tank should be no problem - it's nestled inside under the kitchen counter - but the gray water and black water tanks are hung under the floor and I'm afraid they might freeze and burst. The last couple of weeks I've been keeping an eye on them and so far so good even though we've had a few nights in the low twenties in Red Rock there seems to be enough thermal mass to keep them from freezing.
On toward Ikea
Friday took me as far as Clarion PA, on my way to visit an Ikea store. The nearest along my route southward is the store near Pittsburg PA. I'm looking for some light weight cabinets to serve as a pedestal for the desk top I've built in the back living area of the Lazy Daze.
Night camp: Wal-Mart parking lot in Clarion PA
Five Trillion Spiders
Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69