Donnie’s Blog

Lately I’ve been burning a lot of firewood - not strictly because it’s cold, but because there was a yellowjacket nest in the wood-pile, and that thing messed with my head all summer. The entrance of the nest was in the back of the wood-pile, so I couldn’t easily get at it with any poison. Plus, I’m deathly afraid of yellowjackets, having had a bad childhood experience involving accidentally finding a nest on a camping trip.

So, over the summer, I went to the hardware store several times and bought cans of yellowjacket spray, and launched several waves of poisonous onslaught on the beasts. Always dressed in heavy-duty defensive gear - sweats, with jeans over top, three layers of shirts and sweat-shirts. All topped with my heavy raincoat. I probably looked ridiculous to the neighbors. The yellowjackets probably would’ve laughed themselves to death, if they hadn’t been hit with streams of poison.

Now I am going through the wood-pile and fetching out all the pieces of wood that they were nesting in. And I’m burning them, and enjoying every moment of it!

Serves them right for not being able to live through the winter. Go mammals!

There’s a new show on the Discovery Channel that I’m becoming pretty addicted to, called Survivorman. The whole premise is that this guy gets dropped into the wilderness somewhere and has to live for seven days without any supplies or help. He has a couple video cameras that he uses to record everything he does, and then they put that together into a half-hour show.

I’m sure the guy probably pitched the show to Discovery, but it’s fun to think about what that job-description would look like. You’re surfing through monster.com and you find:

Required Skills

• Must be able to start fires without any matches
• Must be able to identify, catch, cook, and eat non-poisonous snails, frogs, and lizards
• Must be able to go several days without any human contact

Preferred candidates will also know how to spend the night in the wilderness without freezing to death, and how to avoid causing raging multi-state forest-fires.

Then there’s the folks who have to blur out all the scenes where Mr. Survivorman is “au natural.” That’s a job I’m really glad I don’t have…

I ran my Traveling Salesman GA program on a 200-city tour overnight, and unfortunately it didn’t get too far. That was a little disappointing. But, I have some ideas!

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Last night I wanted a treat after finishing my lectures for the week, so I went ahead and made myself a nice pizza. I wanted to try something interesting and new, so this time I just spread out some olive oil on the dough, and then laid down some thinly sliced tomatos, garlic, onions, and some capers! (Yep, no tomato-sauce.) Then I sprinkled just a little bit of mozarella cheese on it; just enough to bind everything together. I also (lightly) salted and (heavily) peppered the ingredients to give them a little extra flavor.

Now, a nifty pizza like that needs to be cooked right, so I put my pizza-stone in the oven and cooked the pizza on that. This made the crust just excellent.

That thing was good. Unfortunately, it was so good that I ate the entire thing in one sitting.