Changing goals and speed

[AClark]

Oh yeah, it was impressive. They were falling out of the eaves by the hundreds. They aren't actually nested in the attic, just chose that for a warm spot, he went up and sprayed it all, but they nested in the siding.
It was raining demons!

 

[CntryBoy777]

Glad he got em...I truly hate those dad-gum things....I actually smile when they die.... ...here is one that I won't have to deal with next Spring....

 

[AClark]

Those are what we had, and they are straight from Hell. There were also regular yellow jackets as well but they hadn't presented as a problem and are nowhere near as aggressive as those kind.

 

[greybeard]

we call that a red wasp around here. I'd be very interested to know exactly what pesticide the exterminator used to kill them.

Our roads used to be gravel, but then they covered with what is known as "Improved" road material....they drip tar and cover it with very small lime rock....locally it is called "Drip and Drop Pavement"....the big planting and harvesting equipment just eats it up and when they do get around to patching it, they use coldpatch....so there are many uneven surfaces...they train highway road repair guys back here when they do actually run a stretch of asphalt, but never a long stretch just a dump truck or 2 at a time....I guess it is better to keep down the dust and such, but it was a much better ride on gravel than this "Improved Pavement"

Uhh..uhhh.uhh, Call on me teacher, I know the answer to this!!
Many years ago, when the dept of transportation was rebuilding a road in front of my house, I asked the on-site engineer why they were using chips instead of gravel, and he took the time to explain it to me.
It's called chip and tar here, and we have nearly 50,000 miles of it--all the Farm/Ranch-to Market (FM) roads and most other Texas Dept of Transportation (TxDot) maintained roads are now made with it.
Those same roads used to be made as your state roads were, with pea gravel instead of limestone chips. The improved part refers to 3 things, in order of importance to the State.
1. Traction. The term gravel can mean several things, but most real gravel is round, more or less, and the part of the gravel that sticks out of the tar gave very little tire adherence. Gravel is just small igneous (fire/volcanic formed rock that has been eroded down over the eons by erosion or tumbling around in river or ocean current. It was very easy for tires to lose traction, especially in wet conditions. The tread just slid from pebble to pebble. Chips on the other hand, are always sharp edged, comes from breaking up large pieces of limestone in impact mills..something similar to a feed hammermill.
2. Cost. What anything costs is always determined by availability and there is a heck of a lot more limestone in the world than there is gravel. Pea gravel is almost always solely found in river and stream bottoms, tho in the NE US, there's lots of it left over from the last ice age and where the glaciers stopped even far from any river or stream bed. Those glaciers also account for the boulders and not so big rocks found all over New England.
Almost all the world was once covered in oceans, and limestone is generally formed on the ocean floor..an eon old process of skeletal and exoskeleton remains of dead sea creatures. Mostly calcium, mixed with sand and highly compressed by the many thousands of lbs/sq in of pressure created by the tons of water on top of it. As the oceans receded after the last ice age, the limestone layers that made up the land surface were eventually covered with clay and soil formed by rotting vegetation, but the limestone is still down there..somewhere. With cities ever expanding, concrete slabs being poured everywhere, and pea gravel being a major portion of concrete, and a finite volume of pea gravel being available only near rivers, most gravel is now earmarked for concrete use. Go buy a pickup load of pea gravel and you'll find the price of it has now skyrocketed. There are several gravel pits near me and the big dump trucks leave daily, headed for Houston and the readymix plants. The biggest cost for crushed limestone here is transportation/trucking, but go 100 miles north of here, it's dirt cheap because there is a lot more of it near the surface.
3. Adherence to the tar. Crushed limestone is multi faceted, with irregular shapes, sharp edges and not uniform in size sometimes. The same quality that makes tires grip better on limestone chips also makes the chips stay in the tar better. Remember when you were a kid and walked down a tar and gravel road, there was always loose gravel near the edges of the road? You may even have seen signs warning "Loose Gravel!" That happened because the round pebbles were so easily dislodged, especially near stops signs and in curves. Throw on the brakes or accelerate hard and the tires pop them little round pebbles right out of the tar--chips..not so easily.

Downsides?
1. Tire wear. The sharp edges wear tires out much faster than the gravel/tar mix did, even tho tire manufacturers supposedly reformulated their rubber compounds to make them do better. Motorcycle riders hate to come to Texas--their softer tires really wear quick on our chipNtar roads.
2. Road noise, internal and external noise. When they 1st started going to chips, everyone noticed more tire noise inside their cars and you noticed more noise from the roads while in your yard or even inside your house. With gravel, I hardly ever heard a car pass by, but now, I hear every one of them, and I can certainly tell the difference when driving on a chipNtar road when transitioning off a concrete or gravelNtar road. Much noisier on the chipped roads.
(and thats all I know about that...... )

 

[babsbag]

They call it "chip seal" here and they use it to resurface a lot of county roads, even ones that have blacktop. But instead of limestone they use ground up "recycled" blacktop.

 

[greybeard]

They call it "chip seal" here and they use it to resurface a lot of county roads, even ones that have blacktop. But instead of limestone they use ground up "recycled" blacktop.

The 'groundup blacktop' contains the chips of limestone or other aggregate, but almost always a crushed stone of some kind, which is why it's called 'chip seal'. You can see some pics of the aggregate here at cali DoT webpage:
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/maint/MTAGChapter7-ChipSeals.pdf

If you can't open the pdf file, here's what it looks like when it's first put down and right before the roller pushes the chips down into the tar. Might be crushed granite instead of limestone, since there is lots of granite out west, but it serves the same purpose as crushed limestone.
(cropped photo from the above Ca Dept of Trans website)

The reground stuff just mixes everything together when the big grinder pulls it off another roadway, which is why it looks black when it's reapplied elsewhere.
ChipNtar is the same thing and it too is often reused. I see huge piles of it in places where the highway dept stores it along side the roadways in preparation for fixing roads after construction or repair. In summer, they may not have to re-heat the re-used stuff but in winter, it has to be in order to make the asphaltic part of it pliable enough to spread.

 

[AClark]

@greybeard I did ask what he was using to melt the little beasties. It is a .60 Permethrin based pesticide (honestly had a discussion on how safe it was, since the fly spray I use on the horses, Absorbine EX is .50 permethrin, so pretty comfortable using that around livestock), that was a truck mounted sprayer so probably a concentrate mixed with water. The other stuff he had was in a can, I didn't get the label off it but another permethrin based one, white can, blue writing, think it said 88 something. It sprayed almost a mist of stuff, didn't smell, that's what he soaked the attic with, then went out with the truck and drenched the eaves. They are an environmentally friendly company thing - I don't know, I didn't pick them out but they seemed effective.
I still have those little red f'ers falling out of the eaves, they're getting the residual coming in and out now.

 

[Bruce]

That happened because the round pebbles were so easily dislodged, especially near stops signs and in curves.

Which I guess is why our dirt road reverts to a seriously potholed road not long after the grader does it's thing. We have no "binding additives". I would imagine it MIGHT last a bit longer if they followed the grader with a roller but they don't. And people just can't slow down so they start "new" potholes almost immediately. Road is posted at 35, some of us do follow that or less, might have less road rip up if they would do 25. And not gun the engine when they crest the hill just before my house. That doesn't even make sense, they are on LESS upslope, they should be throttling back but NO, gotta get down the road.

 

[CntryBoy777]

Sure glad it worked well for ya and the family AC, we sure don't have a shortage here either.

 

[AClark]

Friday night was chaos. I should just call our farm Chaos acres because when it rains, it pours.
So, DH's dog broke out of his pen, jumped into the goat pen and wreaked complete havoc. He attacked our new little buck and tore him up pretty bad.
I'm in the market for a new vet now. I called at 5:15, they weren't even closed as they don't close for another 15 minutes - I live less than 10 minutes from them. The receptionist told me "He's gone home for the day and isn't coming back, call" and gave me another vets number, this is after I told her I had an emergency and that our dog had torn up my goats face and neck badly. Seriously? Same vet as the horse incident except we are now clients of theirs and have been for months, and always paid on time. The other vet in town was out of town, but they called around FOR me and got me in to a vet 40 minutes away and told me they will always come in for emergencies unless their vet is out of town. He was great, He dropped what he was doing to come into his office and help, 2 hours after he was closed.
I'll be going down there today to talk to the actual vet and let him know what kind of BS this is.

So, here's me, my 14 year old son, and this poor 60-70 lb goat. My son and I are just covered in blood, back seat of my truck is covered in it since we just picked him up and sat him on the backseat and my son held him while I drove. I had wrapped JD's neck with a combat bandage (I have a full Army medic bag) with quick clot to stop some of it. Our vet knew not to sedate him, just doped him up with some painkillers and numbed it all up, flushed and stitched, while I held JD down and my son sat with his head between his knees in a chair. JD also got some steroids to help with the swelling in his poor little neck.


Like I told the vet that did help us, what good is a vet when they'll only do the easy stuff during business hours? He agreed and said it's part of the job to be called in from doing other things for emergencies.
We no longer have DH's dog. I don't know what got into him at all, he has never done anything like that, but it's not acceptable at all. Maybe it's been because he was sick (and over $300 in vet bills and they didn't know what was wrong with him still) but since he was sick and then decided that instead of herding he was going to destroy livestock, he was put down. Two of the punctures on JD's face were deep, all the way to the bone (vet put his finger in it all the way up to the knuckle, and my oldest son almost passed out), and he has bites on his back legs, one on the front leg and was having a hard time breathing.
One of my Nubian does has a chunk out of one of her ears, but nobody else is any worse for the wear.