Inktrails from Alaska

Die, Hornets, Die!

I hope I've gotten my wasp traps out early enough. I saw one hornet yesterday, which means I might be too late to catch the queens. Unless the one that zoomed past me was a queen. It's hard to tell when they're going the bug version of just under lightspeed. Plus you hear them coming and you jump away as fast as you can anyway!

Three big bomb-shaped soda pop bottles (these held tonic water), with their heads cut off and inverted create the perfect wasp trap. I chose to experiment this year with a plum syrup that smells so yummy and is so sweet I doubt the evil yellow ones will be able to resist it. No one keeps bees in my neighborhood, and they are not native to my part of Alaska so I won't be killing any innocent honeybees. Just yellowjackets and hornets.

Last year these traps worked very well as I had no wasp nests near the house, in the shed or on my eaves. But we had a weird year last year. Something killed off the wasps early in the season, and we had a blessed few of the buggers around. The year before it was like some kind of horror film. When we stepped outside there were yellowjackets every four inches on the ground, just buzzing, just waiting for you to make a false move... I've never seen it so bad. I hope I never see it that bad again! They came into the place I was renting at the time. My landlord got very angry when I told him they were in the walls. He didn't want to deal with it. He did, finally, but not until my bathroom had become too scary to use... Scary Bathroom

A five gallon bucket filled with soapy water, a stick across it with a bit of bacon on a string, and you've got the Industrial Hornet Trap. I'll be putting one of those out there soon, too, as soon as I score a bucket.


Since all honey bees have to be imported, all pollination is done by other insects, among them yellowjackets and wasps. To be fair, they do eat bugs that eat your garden. And of course they scavenge, as well. However at present I have no garden, as I haven't lived her long enough to build up any soil (I start that process this year, with peat and so on), and these wasps proliferate like you wouldn't believe. Seriously, you wouldn't. Not unless you've been up here and have seen the insanity of a bad wasp year. We had people DIE year before last from getting too many wasp stings. Not that they got swarmed, but they would get five or six in a week. Turns out your body can't handle that. The eighth (or so) sting in a week can send you into anaphylactic shock, depending on your immune system. And of course this is the land of the Tough Guy. A couple men died because they didn't go to the hospital. So all I have to say to those hornets is DIE DIE DIE!

Brother MFC-465CN: Splendid! Even with Macintosh

Brother is better known for typewriters. At least that's where I first heard of this company. Perhaps that dates me. Regardless, the Brother company has been making printers for a while now.

Has anyone ever gotten an Epson printer to last more than a few years? My old  Apple Stylewriters still work, and those were based on Canon printers. But the folks selling computers switched to Epson as the printer-of-choice for Mac users some time back and I think this was a big mistake. I've had three Epsons now, and all of them have gone kaput in varying time frames, some as quickly as one year, (just past the warranty, naturally) and others have hung in there until I had to do something simple, such as move them ten miles. Even packed up nicely, they never recovered.

It's a far cry from the days of the Applewriter and other dot matrix printers, which I think could handle being dragged down a gravel driveway on a string. Noisy as heck, slow as government, but they were the workhorses of the Mac printing world. Heck, my old Laserwriter 360 will fire right up, and it did the Alaska Highway!

Finally becoming disgusted as I tried to rotate between the variously functioning and semi-functioning Epsons (and one Canon, too) I went to Orofice Max to roll the dice and make an educated guess as to what to purchase.

Hewlet-Packard (known to us Irish musicians as Planxty Hewlett-Packard), Epson, Lexmark and Canon all had various models offered, but all were made of thin, bendy plastic that just didn't bode well. If they don't feel their miraculous computerized guts don't warrant a decently solid case, then I just have to wonder if they build them to fail. Standing out above the crowd was a Brother printer that was built like a little tank, and did everything but take the garbage out. Somewhere on the numerous explanatory labels it had a happy Mac face. Hmmmm, interesting, I thought.

So let me tell you what this baby does:

Faxes
Prints
Copies
Scans
works on a network
More stuff that I haven't even needed or tried

Since I'm a music teacher I find it annoying to go to the local copy shop all the time to print out my handwritten music. With this printer I can scan in my music, and then print it out whenever I need it. I have begun digitizing most of my sheet music and this is wonderful for both me and my students.

It has a document feeder so that I can put five or six sheets that I need copied, tell the printer how many dupes to make, push the button and walk away. I LOVE this.

The scanner gets good use with my old photos, too. I haven't set the fax up but once. I don't have a separate line and faxing is not a big priority, though sending a fax out is something I occasionally do. 

The print quality is good, not super excellent. It's far better than my blotchy Epsons, though! Those were forever getting some kind of microscopic detritus in them and then smearing ink everywhere.  You can choose the quality level, naturally, and the Brother puts out some very nice color. I make Christmas cards and various projects, and it hasn't failed me yet.

I also like very much that you can buy the ink tanks separately, and replace them separately. It will keep printing until that last moment when all the ink runs out. Instead of having to replace the entire unit when, say, magenta is all out, you just replace what is empty and keep going.

The downside of Brother is that they really don't know much about Macintosh. Their software is only partly-built! Every time I turn on the computer with the Brother printer on, I have to type in "mac-boot" to finish booting up. It's not my computer, because this happens whether I'm on the portable or the desktop.

If you start up with the printer off, and then turn it on, you get a window that says the printer didn't connect, with an OKAY button that doesn't work! First of all, it's a lie, the printer did connect and will work fine, and second of all, you can't dismiss the window! Very stupid! So you just drag it away so most of it is off the screen.

I called Brother about these things. They tried to tell me that my ROMS were going bad because I had to type in "mac-boot" but of course that is nonsense. The Mac tech told me that she just drags the annoying window aside and continues working. Which is what I do, too. I haven't checked lately with Brother, I suppose it is time to do that again.

Those two things can be annoying, but they don't make the printer unusable in my book. I'm going to keep bothering them to fix their software, but for now I am very, very happy with the performance of the machine.

Oh, and the price was right! Around $100, even up in Alaska!  You can't beat it with a stick!

Scary Guard Dog

Pretty frightening, hunh?

We Might Have Turned a Corner

Most of the snow in my yard is gone. It's rained a few times and the forecast is for temperatures hovering around 60 during the day and 35 for the nightly lows. If you recall, 35 is ABOVE FREEZING! Whoopeee!

But I'm not committed to Spring yet. I made that mistake before...and it snowed like crazy. No, I'm going to be cautious with my engagement with the season. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature, but Mother Nature sure does like to fool US!