Lucky day!

Victoria is found! Alive! She had snuck into the winter henhouse in order to steal food from the little chicks. Bad girl! Anyway, when we opened up the coop this morning, there she was playing “Nanny Hen” to the 40+ babies we have. Go, Victoria, go!

Alas, Victoria ...

One of our adult chickens didn’t show up at sunset tonight. Oddly enough, I’ve been outside since 4pm and I could swear I saw her at least once during that time. She’s been acting broody lately, showing up last at feeding time and not hanging out with the others. Of course the other one I thought might be broody never showed up either. So Victoria may have gotten snatched. I scoured the fencerow just now and could find nary a trace of the poor old gal. It makes me sad that something is snatching my ladies. They’ve paid for themselves three times over in eggs and with added enjoyment as well. I really like watching them. Yet they deserve a better fate than being carried off by some critter.

While I was out looking, a great horned owl was hooting at me from the trees. Victoria was not a small bird, but it’s possible she got carried off by the owl. I’ll check the trees in the morning when I can actually see something. Poor old gal.

Allow me to introduce ... someone else ...

I love this guy’s blog. He’s so much more lucid than I am. While I can only shake my fist at the sky and rail against things, he puts it all to pen in a wonderful fashion.

“These days many of our needs are actually desires fueled by a consumer culture. We don’t need most of the things we spend money on, but we are assured by the sellers that we deserve them, that it is good and proper to feed that particular desire, that the costs are minimal and the benefits are great, that success and contentment hinge on having them. Society at large depends on us to spend large quantities of cash on consumables, and will tell us whatever lies are needed to keep us doing so.”

http://www.cumberlandbooks.com/blog/

 

 

Compost Bin Built!

In usual half-ass fashion … I went to this lumber mill down the road and bought 6 pallets for $4.50 each. Then I nailed them together loosely out near the garden shed. I dumped rotting vegetables into one side and covered with some lawn clippings. Over the next few weeks I’ll dump everything else organic I can get my hands on in there. Slowly the compost pile will grow and by the end of next year it’ll be viable dirt. Go, Ernie! Save the planet!

An interesting thing ...

I’ve been so tired that I forgot to mention this and I was so tired it didn’t raise a bubble at the time. However, now that I’ve considered it in hindsight, it’s a pretty scary thing.

On my trip back from Seattle, the TSA screening agent pulled my backpack out of the x-ray machine and took out the books I had in it to look at them. He examined the covers and then placed them back in the bag. He didn’t open them or otherwise search inside of them. He simply noted what they were and replaced them properly. In the context of a busy airport when I’m already late for my plane, I didn’t think much about it, but do we really want government agents scrutinizing what we read?

Luckily this was a couple of books on gardening instead of something really seditious, like Che Guevera’s Guerilla Warfare or Mao’s little red book. Heaven forbid I should be carrying Army field manual 5-25 with me on that plane for a little light reading.

I am weary today in body and soul. I walk the earth like Cain. Traveling in crowds from Seattle to home.

I'm done ...

I’ve tuned and tweaked and optimized and I’m running into the same design flaw in this product over and over again …

When they want to add a new record, they need to find the next number. For instance, the first row is 1, the next row is 2, and so forth and so on. Their functionality for this is to scan the rows, find all the values and determine the highest one and then +1. Well, that worked fine when we considered maybe a hundred or so rows. But now I’m over 300 million rows and the whole thing chokes. I cannot fix it without rewriting the entire system. Bleh.

Proverbs

Train up a child in the way he should go;
   even when he is old he will not depart from it.

Ok, retraction.

Alright, not everyone showing up and bitching at me is a troll. So I’ll retract my previous statement.

Heh

Looks like my Jena 6 rant is bringing in the trolls. Gotta love that google blog search functionality. And how sad that people spend their precious internet time looking for random strangers to disagree with.

A product suggestion ...

How about an “Are you Sure?” dialog box in the software BEFORE it destroys the past 3 days worth of work? That would be handy.

A farming problem that exists when not on the farm ...

I ordered eggs this morning from the cafeteria. Just fried. Nothing special. Bleh. They are awful. It’s just an egg, so it’s the basic egg that’s screwed up, not the cooking of it.

Once you’ve had great eggs from the farm, you can’t go back.

Jena 6

This story is giving me the creep. SIX black defendants beat a fellow white student seriously. Very seriously. He had to be hospitalized. The provocation? Supposedly it was because some white students (no clue if the beaten student was among them) had hung some nooses from a tree, probably as a prank as opposed to some serious action. Anyway, three months go by with no problem, the white and black students get along fine, but then one day six of them jump this white kid. The judge gave them extremely high bonds and charged them with assault. One of them hasn’t been released because he can’t meet his bond, which was set higher due to his existing criminal record.

Now there’s a massive march in Jena, led of course by scumbags like Jesse Jackson, and it’s turned into a racial issue. I don’t believe it is. This is a simple matter of six THUGS committing assault against a lone victim. Painting this with the racial injustice brush is a criminal act, in my opinion. Justice IS being served. Racial fearmongerers like Jesse Jackson need to get the Hell out of the way and stop working people up into a frenzy for their own grandiose egos.

Thank you

Thank you, Lord, for all teachers and guides that you send us on these dark paths in this fallen world.

Alarmed yet?

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/19/lawn.dispute.ap/index.html

 

Yet another instance of America’s runaway police force.

Trickle Down Effect

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/18/student.tasered/index.html

 

So this student gets questioned because he asks a politician a tough question? True, it’s just local police officers but we’re all victims of the trickle down effect. No, I’m not talking about Reagan’s “trickle down economics” which runs counter to the basic concepts of greed and capitalism, but rather the trickle down effect of ideology. When our top government officials (*cough* Bush *cough*) don’t believe they should ever be questioned and resort to violence, then is it really surprising when the small officials start reacting this way? That “us against them” policy that our top levels of government are pursuing has a massive detrimental effect on society as a whole. You’re starting to see it in action.

The Invasion Begins!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20838944/?GT1=10357

 

You not only need to worry about a meteorite hitting you, but also contaminating the immediate area with toxic fumes, a strange virus, or alien parasites.

Your choice as to whom to believe ...

From a Moneycentral.com article:

 

“There's a huge debate inside the oil industry and in the commodity pits about the status of Saudi oil reserves. The Saudis, who produce 9.5 million barrels a day now, have announced they will boost production to 12.5 million barrels, a 32% increase, by the end of this decade and to 15 million barrels by the end of the next decade. However, some oil traders and industry analysts don't think Saudi Arabia can deliver and contend that the Saudis' big oil reserves are in far worse condition than they are letting on. The impact of any shortfall would be huge because the Saudis are the only likely global source of a major increase in oil production in the next five years, according to the International Energy Agency. Without that production increase, the world is headed for a very painful short-term oil squeeze, the agency has concluded. So you can think of energy traders' bets on oil climbing above $80 as a huge vote that the Saudis won't or can't deliver as promised.”

 

I don’t know about you, but I’ll put my money on greed versus what a government is telling us. Any government. The Saudi government is just as criminal as our own. If we’re not already hearing it, the next sound coming from the Middle Eastern oil fields is going to be similar to a child slurping on an empty milkshake. What I disbelieve in this article is the phrase “short-term”. Running out of a resource that takes 50 million years to recharge isn’t a “short-term” squeeze. We can’t even assume the human race is going to be around in 50 million years. And if we don’t learn other ways to survive beyond devouring all of the Earth’s resources, we certainly won’t be.

Nature's Cycles, And How to Avoid Them

To badly mangle and mix some quotes, “nature red in tooth and claw makes life nasty, brutish, and short”. People always say, “get back to nature” as if nature is something that exists elsewhere. Not where we live, but kept in preserves, like animals in a zoo or exhibits in a museum. Not so for the farmer. Nature exists all around me. I have an awareness of the soil beneath my feet and the life and death struggles that occur on a microscopic level there. Even worms have their lions to contend with. In order to be successful, I must be aware of what eats my plants, and what eats that which eats my plants. I watch the tree lines for coyotes. I keep an eye to the sky looking for hawks. I walk the fields at odd hours, looking for any signs of the predators that eat my chickens or might eat the young goats in my care.

There are circles of things in the food chain and my job as the husbandman is to make sure none of those predator-prey circles intersect with my livestock. And I fail this from time to time, with my livestock paying the price. I knew that raccoons would come after dark sometimes, but I was still too slow one night in shutting the chicken coop. That was back in the spring when we lost most of our existing flock. I learned an important lesson about getting the coop shut in time now, but at a cost. I knew raccoons would reach through wire or cracks in a coop to grab unsuspecting (and stupid) birds by the leg. At least I’d read about it. I even knew how to prevent it and had the materials to do so. Yet in my mind I didn’t weigh the risks appropriately. I thought they might get one bird, if it ever happened at all. I did not expect the raccoons to show up one night and pull the legs off of over 30 birds in a single session.

If a groundhog eats my carrots, well, I may curse and shake a fist, but it’s nothing like having to dispose of 30 young chickens whose only crime was in being stupid. Or even worse, having to put a number of maimed and legless chickens out of their misery. Animals have the potential of yielding more calories than vegetables, but they come with a higher risk. Here too, nature has balanced things for us. In addition, it’s harder to look into the eyes of a living thing whom you have failed. Veggies just get tossed onto the compost heap with a shrug of the shoulders. Animals must be buried or burned and there’s a higher financial loss as well.

All said, I think I’m going to try harder to take care of things in a more proactive manner. If something is a possibility, I need to work on it prior to it becoming reality. Not after the fact. Now that the summer is winding down and the garden is complete, it gives me more opportunity to focus on the livestock.

Scary

Off to Seattle for the week. Bleh. Only bright spot is that I get to have dinner with one of my favorite people.

I got crammed up against the window by a scary fat lady. She looked like Mike Ditka in a Dolly Parton wig. I should get a rebate on my seat fare since she used a third of it.

More Dead Chickens

I lost about half of my little chicks last night. Raccoons reached up under the walls of the coop and the stupid birds just stood there to be grabbed. I came out to find over 30 one-legged chickens, most of them dead but about 6 hobbling around. They managed to pull a couple out from under the walls and feast on them, but for the most part it was just maiming. What a horrible situation.

Today I’ve got to figure out how to raccoon-proof the coop. This hasn’t gone well this year, as far as chickens are concerned.

End of the Season

Well, the gardening season draws to a close now after last night’s light frost. This morning there was just a touch of it dancing across the Aster in the field. It was enough to wilt all the squash and cucumbers and the tomato plants were done in by blight, too much rain, and mismanagement. I spent the morning pulling up and burning the old dead plants to reduce the number of blight spores present in the soil.

I do have a lot of salad greens and carrots left in the ground. Those may produce, as well as I think it’s time to put in one last run of spinach. Potato plants and pole beans seemed to have survived, so there may be a few more of those as well. All in all it’s been a good year and a fantastic learning experience. I have high hopes for next year.

Arsenal of Democracy

In World War 2, Roosevelt called the city of Detroit, “The Arsenal of Democracy.” The big three auto industry retooled and started pumping out weapons. They made jeeps and tanks and motorized equipment of every sort. Everything came with armor and guns. There wasn’t much profit, but hey, we won the war. With Detroit on our side, we vanquished the Germans and the Japanese. Hey, we destroyed them, and then we built them. After the war, we spent an enormous fortune rebuilding their very industries that we had bombed out of existence.

Where does that leave Detroit? Ford is on the edge of bankruptcy, mostly through mismanagement. GM is in hock up to its eyeballs to the UAW and the legacy workers. Chrysler? Well, they got bought out by a German company. There’s a joke in Detroit … “How do you pronounce DaimlerChrysler? You just say Daimler … the Chrysler is silent.” As for the city, the only thriving enterprise is the home repo industry. Even the grocery stores are pulling out of parts of Detroit because nobody has any money to buy anything. They’ve got a cheap pimp for a mayor who is entertaining strippers in the city residence on the taxpayer’s dime. When you think Detroit, people think of miles and miles of gray slums. So much for the Arsenal of Democracy. Thanks, USA. Detroit is the “Slum that America Built”.

My secret love ...

I must drag this out in the light and face it … I have a deep crush on Cokie Roberts. I can’t wait to hear her voice. She’s been doing lots of commentary lately on the Petraeus report and I just can’t stop myself from listening. It’s a weakness.

If you’re out there, Cokie, will you please send me an email?

Burgering is not a crime!

http://www.cbs46.com/news/14078071/detail.html

 

This poor McDonald’s employee screwed up the burger meat, was told by her supervisor to serve it anyway, and then spent a night in jail for it. This quote cracks me up:

Union City public information officer George Louth said Bull was charged with reckless conduct because she served the burger "without regards to the well-being of anyone who might consume it."

Official Party Business

Last night we had the party under the Party Tree here at Tanglewood Hill. About 30 people came, about a half dozen or so children. We had an enormous amount of food and drink and it seemed that everyone had a great time. I ran myself ragged trying to make sure everything was perfect. That’s me … Mister Party. I got to know more of my coworkers, for better or worse, and some of them got more of a peek into my personal lifestyle than they wanted. I’m sure I’ll talk about that in days to come … let’s just say, I don’t think they realized that yes, we ARE serious about farming. The whole thing went off without any incidents.

As a side note, it’s becoming clear that one of my coworkers has a drinking problem. At every function he’s the first to consume too much and he becomes a rather obnoxious drunk. Not belligerent, just loud and incoherent. Last night he absolutely mortified his wife, probably not for the first time. I don’t know what to say to him. Maybe we could use a quiet moment together. He’s a fellow Christian and I have a very clear obligation as to what I should do, but I feel limited by the bounds of propriety and “work ethics”. What does that say when you’re prevented from following your personal ethics by the rules of the workplace? Anyway, I see that I need to pray about this and look for a path.

Been a rough couple of weeks ...

A chicken got snatched (yes, possibly by aliens), two cats died (one out of reach under the porch), a goat got the bloat, and now a large proportion of my chickens have some sort of gizzard issue going on … their gizzards are hugely swollen!

This bunch has just never been all that healthy looking. They are patchy, missing some feathers in places, and skinny-looking malnourished birds, regardless of how much we’ve fed them. Now they’ve got swollen gizzards and I’m not sure if it’s because they ate too much Styrofoam (I used it for insulation in their coop) or if we’ve fed them too much, or if they lack grit or what. They’re lively enough and seem hungry (probably because nothing is in their damn stomachs) but the enormous swollen bulge in their necks (a third of their size!) doesn’t look promising. I’m expecting half of them to drop dead any day now.

Remember … all of the raising chicken books have instructions that end with … “or they might die.” I think we’re about to learn that raccoons aren’t the only problems that baby chicks face.

And Now for Some Political Commentary ...

Homeschooler Back to School

I heard on the news the other day that the average family spends $525 per child for back to school necessities. I have a backpack I’ve been carting stuff around in since 1989! It’s army-green and made of canvas which never really goes out of style because it’s never in style. We buy winter clothes in the spring and summer clothes in the fall, planning ahead. Durability is key and we measure a shirt’s success on how many children it lasts through. We don’t insert our children into that mosh pit of fashion and angst called the public school system, and we teach them not to worry about such things either.

While we do have to shell out some cash for books and study materials, I don’t want to ever hear from another person about how homeschooling is “too expensive”.

A new career plan

If you’re in the finance industry, as I once was, then it’s probably time to seek a new job. If you have some skills that some other industry might use, then you’re in luck. A smooth transition might be going from the mortgage industry to the repo industry in one fell swoop. Otherwise, better start learning how to make a really good latte.

Really, I think the mortgage industry is about to go belly up. It’s been hedge-funded to death and propped up by all sorts of techniques (scams) to get people into a home they can’t afford. I need to get my own financial house in order somewhat, but spending too much last month on tacos is a little different from creating millions of dollars of wealth out of computer pixels and suddenly being called to task for it.

Recession or depression? It’s going to be a slim margin between the two. A recession is when we need to tighten our belts some, while a depression is when there’s simply no money to buy even the cheapest necessities of life. Things are not going to go well for millions of Americans, and then ultimately for millions of Chinese (when we can’t buy their crap anymore). Life is not going to be pretty for awhile.

When does this start? If you haven’t been paying attention, it started last year.

Farmer's Markets Article on CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/08/31/buying.local.food/index.html

 

A few memorable quotes from the article:

 

“Shopping at a farmers market, though, is not for everyone. For starters, the markets usually are held outdoors, once or twice a week, so convenience is an issue. Also, vendors sell what is in season locally, which means fragrant strawberries in the late spring but not in the winter.”

“’Experience with my own market suggests that there is a relative price advantage with supermarkets because of economies of scale. But I suspect price differentials vary widely from community to community,’ according to Duncan L. Hilchey, an agriculture development specialist with the Community and Rural Development Institute at Cornell University.

He added that ‘when you add up all the external costs such as environmental damage, the pollution generated by long-haul transport, water supply subsidies to Western farmers (who are large suppliers of supermarket produce), and the social costs of poorly treated farm labor, I believe you will find that food purchased from you local farmers market is much cheaper.’”

Interesting, eh?

 

The Horror Under the Porch

I found the dead cat. Four days dead, by my reckoning. It wasn’t pretty. I had to saw down through the porch in order to reach her. I guess a piece of plywood screwed down over a hole in the porch at the party is better than a dead cat under the porch at the party.

Coyote Ugly

There’s a fresh coyote track out in the back pasture, on the far northeast fence line. There’s a seep there that occasionally holds water and it may have been coming up there to drink. Either way, it’s too close to the chickens.

The Party

We’re hosting a party with my coworkers this coming weekend, so I’m working like the devil trying to get the place cleaned up. I don’t know how it can go from my dream farm (4 months ago) to looking like a bunch of hillbillies live here, but there we are. I’ve spent the morning burning trash and old bee frames (possibly contaminated so I won’t use them) and moving junk out of sight. Saturday calls for 40% chance of rain, our house can’t hold 35 people and a 60 pound roasted pig, I’ve now been informed that my boss’s boss is coming, AND it seems that the kitten who went missing may have crawled up under the porch and died somewhere.

I do not want to host a party with a dead cat under my porch.