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Well, on the bright side, if we have to have hurricanes and earthquakes, then I can only hope things stay so mild. We had thunderstorms last night worse than the hurricane! If it does begin raining frogs I'll fry up some frog legs!

Just when you thought this year couldn't get any stranger, a 5.1 earthquake just happened near Sparta, NC! The southern Appalachians experience frequent, small quakes - most can't be felt. This was the biggest earthquake in NC since 1916. Sparta is very rural - I grew up not far from there.. like two counties over, so I know the area well. So far, no reports of injuries or major damage. They say it could be felt as far away as Alabama. It woke me up around 8:10. So, that is a hurricane and an earthquake in less than one week.... the plague has been here for 6 months... presumably the frogs and locusts, rivers turning to blood and fire from the sky will be next!

@torey Around home, we have flocks 4 dozen + turkeys that just wander through the yard when out of season... I wonder how they know?

A little after I graduated from high school, back in 1990, but before I went to engineering school, I wanted to make a machine to eliminate fire ants without chemicals. I tried electrocuting them using a neon light transformer with jumper cables connected to copper probes. The ants just crawled all over everything with no apparent effect. I thought maybe I need a DC current that would get hot. But before doing that I remembered having success with 3 gallons of boiling water to destroy a fire ant hill that were stinging my pig and a small stable in the barn. I got $100 from each of 12 investors to help me build a contraption I came up with. I took my grandfather's old sprayer frame and got a local company to attach an LP tank to serve as a boiler and I mounted some LP burners under that LP tank. It was filled with water and I had a pressure relief valve a thermometer and the pressure gauge attached to the tank along with a valve connected to a steam hose at the end of the steam hose what is a half inch diameter pipe 3 ft long with many holes drilled in it. I would insert the pipe in the ant hill and open the valve of the 270 degree water. After about 10 gallons of superheated water had penetrated the ant hill which started caving in in a steamy muddy mess my work was done. A few hours later all the ants that were out foraging had returned and buried a bunch of dead ant carcasses all on the ground around the ant hill. There was no activity a week later. I paid my investors back over the next few months. A few years later a couple of them contacted me and told me they had seen my invention in the progressive farmer magazine and on CNN. Scalding boiling water does work on the ant hills if you get enough in there to cook all of the ants.

But I am looking forward to trying spinosad, as the machine I built took 2 hours to heat up enough water to only do 8 ant hills. Renting a steam genie might be a viable option.