Iowa – Page 48 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

What’s Up with No Critter Cam Pictures Last Night?

Things did not go according to plan last night with the critter cam. It took zero pictures. What gives? I’m sure I had the timer settings right. It’s a 24-hr. military time clock and it was set for 1930 to 0730 starting yesterday evening. The grate was undisturbed and maybe that’s the explanation.

Could there be a problem with taking night time pictures? I checked a web site about that, “Trail Camera Not Taking Night Photos? 7 Things to check.” As far as I can tell from the list, there is nothing seriously amiss.

The area of interest is well within our camera’s 65-foot detection range. I suppose the problem might be the alkaline batteries, but it took pictures in dim light of me just fine. The memory card is brand new, formatted and I deleted any test pictures I took so there was plenty of storage. The camera is rated to 13 degrees below zero and it didn’t get close to that last night. It’s not shooting black pictures—it’s taking no pictures.

I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t think it had anything to do with night time. It took pictures of me in dim light and daylight just fine. The camera was pointed in the right direction according to the daylight test shot I took this morning.

No pictures might just mean no action. That doesn’t mean unusual things can’t happen. I ran across a headline today on the web, “Mountain Lion sighting in South Central Iowa.” The animal was filmed in Madison County, which is not far southwest of Des Moines.

Anyhow, I got an idea about a different approach today. I think I figured out how to mount the camera on the stand with base included in the box. Feel free to point out any mistakes I made putting it together. The manual didn’t include instructions on how to assemble it. I also could not find any YouTube or other internet guidance. It’s like nobody else thought it was important enough to tell newbies how to do basic things with trail camera field mounting.

I know the stand is supposed to be secured to something with screws, but I couldn’t find a suitable place to install the tiny wood screws with funny looking plastic sleeves.

Instead, I placed the camera with the stand along with a couple of heavy rocks on the base on a patio block. I took some test pictures, which looked OK. You can tell which pictures are which by the time stamp. The post mounting shot was at 9:46 AM; the stand on the block picture was at 11:23 AM. I think the latter would be as secure as the post mount.

There were either no trigger events or there was a malfunction. I doubt it was the latter, but I’m not the handyman or modern age Daniel Boone kind of guy.

For now, my new plan is to use the critter cam stand and rocks setup and try again, maybe tonight. I can just hear people groaning, “Rocks, are you joking? Extraterrestrials will just blast them with their ray guns!”

I would like to try video, but for now I want to just make sure it’ll take photos as programmed.

Critter Cam Tested and Ready to Go!

We’re trying to catch a glimpse of whatever or whoever has been removing one of our tile drain grates in our back yard for the last few weeks. It happens only at night. We bought a critter cam and it’ll go live tonight!

Today I ran the critter cam through a few tests to see if it would work in the dark. I set it up on a footstool, turned it on and clowned around in a dimly lit hallway. It wasn’t completely dark, and it seemed like I had to dance a fair amount to trigger the Passive Infrared Sensors (PIRs)—but it worked! Check the slideshow below.

I have no experience with these things and I don’t know whether the PIR Sensitivity might be set too high because we’re in autumn and the leaves are falling. It makes me wonder if the camera will trigger too much, making the image yield low. But there’s only 3 settings: high, medium, and low. Because I want to make sure I catch whatever is messing with our drain grate, I plan to leave the setting on High.

Sena and I mounted the camera on the nearest post supporting the sun room. She clowned around while standing next to the drain tile grate and it triggered and got her picture. We hope the rigging holds. I’ve set it to come on at sunset tonight and turn off at sunup tomorrow. It’s set to take photos, not videos for now.

It’s chilly out there; only 49 degrees. I don’t know how that’ll influence Bigfoot activity out there tonight.

I removed the rocks but left the worm gear clamp attached. Keep your fingers crossed!

Extraterrestrials Want to Cut a Deal with The Daily Crave

We tried The Daily Crave Spicy Sriracha Lentil Chips and they’re pretty good. Extraterrestrials like the snacks and are apparently interested in cutting a deal with Jared Edy, who I think owns the stores. They want a piece of the action. They are bringing satchels of cash to the table along with proposals to cease and desist corn tassel abductions, which are old-fashioned in any case.

Their history of the corn tassel controversy is complicated. It’s based on the aliens’ misunderstanding of detasseling. In their corner of a galaxy far, far away, corn tassels are alive and kept as pets. They think they are rescuing the tassels by abducting them. They think walking corn fields to detassel corn, which involves yanking out the tassels at the top of the plant, amounts to cruelty to animals.

Time for the short story about detasseling from an Iowan who has done it. The tassel is the male part of the corn plant. It pollinates the corn ears, which are female parts. To make corn hybrids, farmers and seed companies must cross pollinate the corn. To make sure the right pollen from one type of corn gets to another, they must hire hundreds of people (often college students) to detassel the corn which isn’t earmarked (get it?) for cross-pollination.

I’ve done detasseling and it’s one heck of a chore. At the end of the day, my hands and arms were so sore I could barely lift them. I was exhausted, but when I tried to close my eyes at night, all I saw were endless acres of corn.

It turns out that careful explanations of what detasseling corn is all about on this planet cleared this up for aliens.

There are many stores across the country selling The Daily Crave chips. Several are in Iowa, mainly in the Des Moines area. That may be why some Iowans occasionally see UFOs.

The Screaming Barn of Iowa City!

The other day we went out for a walk on Scott Boulevard. There is an old barn right across the street from the Harvest Preserve entrance. It’s picturesque but on that day, it was festooned with Halloween decorations including goblins and ghouls and the ground was covered with gravestones inscribed with comical epitaphs.

We’ve been in the neighborhood for a couple of years and the old barn never looked like this. I recall reading something on the web about it undergoing this transformation in the past, but I can’t find it now.

I got in touch with Harvest Preserve and they told me that, while ACT owns the barn, they let Harvest Preserve decorate it. That is awesome!

The skeleton flying near the top of the barn is a spooky spectacle. What’s just as creepy is the mannequin inside the barn. There is a big door in the back that’s open and when the wind blew it creaked horribly.

If this were permanent, it would probably qualify for listing on the Roadside America web site.

Scouts Food Drive Pickup Today

Today is the bag pickup day for the Scouts food drive. Bags were distributed October 1-5. They’ll be picked up between 9:00 AM to noon. According to the Scouting for Food website,

On average, the Scouting for Food Drive typically collects over 93,387+ pounds of food from Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and its neighboring areas. This translates to over 77,823+ meals that will be served for those who need it most during the winter season.

The Friday Night Big Mo Blues Show

I heard this on ‘da Friday Night Blues on KCCK 88.3 earlier. I took guitar lessons when I was a kid. I was real good at buzzing the strings. Not everybody can make the audience clap their hands to their ears and howl in pain. It’s a rare talent-thank goodness. You’re welcome.

I heard Iowa Blues legend Kevin B.F. Burt tonight. I’ll never be able to prove it, but I think he was D.J. for KCCK Friday Blues Show for a short time in the distant past. I’m pretty sure I listened to him. I can’t find that in his interviews anywhere, not even in the biggest one I could find. Sena saw him and his wife at an optometrist clinic a few years ago. He was trying to pick up a pair of eyeglasses. He was in a big hurry and kept saying he had to get to his gig. Sena even spoke to him, asking him if he was Kevin Burt. He very kindly confirmed it-but he was still in a hurry.

Tile Drain Grate Off Again!

Last night something removed our tile drain grate again! This time it wasn’t flipped. Something lifted the grate off the pipe and set it on the ground beside it. We were flabbergasted.

Recall that I thought I had secured the thing with a worm gear adjustable clamp on October 1, 2022. Up until that time, something (or someone) was flipping the grate upside down off the pipe every 2-3 days and lately every day.

I looked around and could not discern any animal tracks. The two crossed rods and thread over the grate were not disturbed. The worm gear clamp was still in place. I figured I had just not placed it close enough to the top of the grate and not screwed it down tightly enough.

So, I put the grate back on the pipe, pulled the clamp up so it covered the seam between the pipe and the grate better, and really cranked the screw tight enough so I could not move it at all.

Now we’re shopping for a critter cam. I favor the idea that a raccoon could be the culprit. Another outside possibility is a woodchuck. Both have fingers and are strong. This lid removal caper looks like it only happens at night. Sena checks it in the evening when she comes in from working out in the garden. That would tend to focus on the raccoon suspect since it’s nocturnal and the woodchuck is not.

Sena is going to get a brick or two to set on the grate and we will see what happens. Raccoons can lift 10-20 pounds, though. I’m thinking it’ll just move the bricks one at a time.

The other possibility is that the culprit might not be an animal. What if this is a kid playing games? There are not any kids in the neighborhood old enough to pull this off, though.

I’m pretty sure it’s not Bigfoot. The sod is loose and soft around the grate. Bigfoot would leave obvious tracks.

What about extraterrestrials? For example, some people think aliens are behind all the cattle mutilations. Others think it is some ultra-secret government agency running experiments (which have been going on for decades) to see how much nuclear radiation cows are absorbing from all the atomic fracking these bozos are doing to discover more fossil fuel energy resources underground all over the country. They cover their tracks to hide it from the public using the usual conspiracy tools—they just tell enough to investigators who get TV producers to make expose shows about it. They tend to air them in October to make you think this is just all about Halloween. I saw this show on TV last night.

Of course, if the government were doing that, there would be nobody living in the country by now because everybody would be dead from cancer from all the radiation.

But what if the extraterrestrials are trying to steal all the tile drain grates to use them as cooking grills to make barbecued chicken? The only problem is that aliens are so puny, they cannot do more than barely move them off the tile pipe. They get all out of breath and exhausted, which leads to them just giving up and going to a good BBQ joint like Jimmy Jack’s Rib Shack in Iowa City.

Where was I? Oh, I need to hire a new guard for the grate now. Obviously the first two bozos were incompetent. The zombie was too busy eating his own armpits and the wolfman started pooping on the grate and clogging up the slots, because even though they may be hundreds of years old, you still cannot potty train them.

And the sword the wolfman carried got stuck in the grate slots, leading to a hernia, the surgery for which veterinarians charge a lot. I could get them from passing zombies, but they are touchy about their stuff.

So, the tile drain grate saga continues. Aren’t you glad?

Update: Sena bought 3 big rocks, the total weight of which might exceed 20 pounds. We set them on top of the grate. And I called the Temp Agency and hired 3 new guards to make sure that grate stays on. Depending on what history you believe, either good things come in threes—or bad things come in threes. We’re going to go with good things.

Hand Battered Catfish Nuggets Packed with Nitrates!

Sena cooked up some breaded catfish nuggets the other night. They were not May Reese’s hand-battered catfish made famous by John Heim aka Big Mo on KCCK radio 88.3 on the Big Mo Blues Show every Friday night—but they will do.

They’re packed with nitrates, as Big Mo always says.

We’ve never eaten catfish, so this was historic for us. We made a little tartar sauce using Miracle Whip (not mayo!), pickles, and chives. Sena made faces while placing the nuggets into the oil for frying.

I thought they were very tasty. Sena found several little bones in her nuggets, some of which she transferred to my plate. My pieces didn’t have any bones, but I found a few in one of the pieces she gave me. Chick Filet Polynesian sauce was good with catfish as well as tartar sauce. Tartar sauce does not contain cream of tartar, I finally found out. It’s just mayo-based sauce (if you don’t have Miracle Whip) and the name comes from the Tartar family. We don’t know them.

Sena really did want to try catfish. But we’ll never have catfish again. What with bones and a fishy smell (which I didn’t notice), we’ll be sticking with fish like salmon, perch, sole, haddock, and the occasional Leviathan which, incidentally, is mentioned in the Old Testament Bible in the Book of Amos. Usually, I just arm wrestle them until they surrender from exhaustion and obligingly collapse into a very large frying pan.

I found out that some people proclaim on the internet that catfish nuggets don’t have bones in them. We found out that’s not true. They are trimmings that aren’t big enough to sell as fillets, which are also said to be strips of boneless meat. Some people like to stretch the truth. Others need a polygraph test.

I don’t know if Big Mo would endorse catfish nuggets. They are breaded. I don’t know if they’re hand-battered. Evidently May Reese is not involved in their production and sale.

I suspect they might be packed with nitrates, but we ate all of them and there are no nuggets left for scientific testing.

Autumn Whisper

We were walking the Terry Trueblood trail on October 3, 2022 during the balmy early autumn weather. Sena and I had been looking for a decent picture of Goldfinches all summer long and didn’t catch any.

Sena gently alerted me to a female Goldfinch foraging on a tree right next to the walkway. She was trying to snatch bugs out of the air, and her olive feathers flashed in the sun.

That was right next to Hilde DeBruyne’s orange steel sculpture titled “Wings.” How lucky can you get?

KCCK Hand-Battered Catfish Lore

I listen to the KCCK radio station (88.3) Big Mo Blues Show on most Friday nights and the host is John Heim, aka Big Mo. He always mentions a sponsor he calls May Reese hand-battered catfish. There are a couple of slogans which make it sound real.

“It’s better because it’s battered!”

“It’s packed with nitrates!”

“Coming soon to a river near you!”

Nobody but Big Mo ever advertises it and I’m not even sure I’m spelling “May Reese” correctly. In fact, I doubt there is such a person. But it’s fun to listen to Big Mo talk about May Reese’s hand-battered catfish.

Sena bought some breaded catfish nuggets from Hy-Vee, which is about as close to May Reese as we’re likely to get. They’re IQF, which means Individually Quick Frozen. Sena’s just slightly dubious about trying them. But she’s going to cook them, just because Big Mo talks about hand-battered catfish (better because it’s battered!”) and it’s mainly because I get a kick out of the legendary May Reese.

We can’t remember ever eating catfish. When I was a kid, I used to fish for bullhead, which are in the same family as catfish. In fact, they are sometimes called bullhead catfish, which I didn’t even know until today when I looked it up on the web.

I fished for them in a creek in East Park in Mason City where I grew up. I would catch them and throw them back. They were almost always small and sometimes one would manage to squirm enough to sting me with the very sharp spine on its fins.

I never brought bullhead home because Mom made it abundantly clear she would never clean them.

I doubt Sena would ever cook hand-battered bullhead, even if you could find them IQF in the grocery store.

I’m not sure if bullhead would be “packed with nitrates” and I don’t think May Reese would hand batter them—unless she used a baseball bat.