renovate

Just changed around the look here at the web journal. The old title has bugged me since day one. I can never think of good titles, and the idea of a dog eating corn was just too much. I love dogs and I love eating corn, so perhaps putting the two together made sense at one time, but dogs don't eat corn.

I had been hoodwinked. Somewhere along the line I thought to write a blog, you need to have some kind of clever title that doesn't really make sense. One of the fun things about this blogger site is that you can hit a link that takes you to random blogs... well, most of them have random titles.

Not here anymore though.

A funny story about this site you are visiting right now. It was started in attempt to get PR people to send me free music. In exchange for a blog post, I would reach out to press folk and see if they would send me music I wanted to hear. Brilliant idea! But as the blog blobbed into its current shape, I have learned that writing about music is more for pompous dickhead know-it-alls. I have a very hard time judging someone's art, and could only write about music I liked. Although I did piss on the Kooks a few years ago, I think music should be celebrated 100 times and critiqued zero times. Let Mel Kiper Jr. do all the critiquing in the world on college football prospects. Run the well dry Mel, run it dry.

So here we stand. A simple little blog written in a simple little home, that has an important purpose as it allows me to every now and again reflect back upon old posts and say, "wow- on August 20, 2008- I must have been feeling like a dick."

Chick update

So the chickens are survivors. We sighed a breath of relief this morning as all the cluckers still had their heads. There are a few bets going around the farm as to what date the first chicken will get killed. Chicks just gotta say, "That's pretty fucked up."

So, with all these thoughts of predators and losing bets swirling in my head, I drank a bunch of cold ones last night while watching the Flyers game and every time I had to whizz, I moseyed out to the coop and pissed a nice little PBR smelling perimeter to help a little. Badger pitched in a few times. At slumber-hour, Badger stayed up at my feet looking out our bedroom window at the coop. I don't think he slept at all. At around 1am or so, he woke me up barking up a storm. "Oh geez, here we go," I thought. I looked out the window and could see a little light coming from the coop. While half asleep, I imagined the whole back wall had fallen out. I cursed and ran out in the yard in my bare feet and boxers through the urine swamp, only to realize the light I was seeing was the window of the coop and a little crack on one of the door hinges.


I had forgotten that feeling of bursting awake and jumping out of bed into action. It was awesome. By the time I realized the chickens were safe, standing half naked in my yard, my heart was racing. I took a deep breath of fresh air and something came over me. I lifted my head, staring up at the stars. The moon was shining and a slight breeze tickled my chest hair. Badger and I stood there, planted like two sentinels. With our heads lifted toward the final frontier, we both let out a primal scream. Howling at the moon I became one with Badger and the chickens and the great mother.

I no longer fear the predators. Weasels and foxes know. Snakes and rats know. Bearded dragons know, and now I know. We are all little chickens waiting to get eaten. Standing under our heat lamps and pooping in our food. Waiting for our big boy feathers to replace our little baby feathers and then laying eggs to be scooped up and served with Canadian bacon and English muffins:

one world.

Out of the laundry Room into the Fire

So it's a big day over here at blog HQ. The chicken coop has passed the home inspection and we are dumping our 2 week old chicks into it. We aren't exactly sure how old they are, but we bought them when they were bite sized and that was 2 weeks ago.

Since I have gained a good bit of knowledge from other bloggers writing about their backyard chickens, I thought I would take a moment to write about my coop building and chicken raising experience thus far.

We went with seven, which has proven to be difficult. I always count them to make sure they are all there and regularly only count six. I have a short panic until I spot the seventh, usually huddled up in a corner or blending in underneath one of the others. They all fit much nicer in the coop we have been working on for them then they do in a metal tub atop our laundry machine.



Perhaps my favorite part of our chicken experience thus far is watching Badger, the puppalupagus, obsess over the birds. They are his new best friends. He watches them endlessly fascinated at their every move. He will lick them and nudge them with his nose, but he has never hurt them. Below are a few shots of Badger over the last couple weeks:

saying hello in the living room

saying hello in the laundry room (their usual home)

and guarding the chicks in their little temporary pen.

Badger and I helped the chicks move into their new home today. I've read a good bit about chickens over the last couple weeks and the one consistent fact is that they regularly get eaten by any of the following predators; raccoons, foxes, opossums, owls, rats, weasels, pterodactyls, and snakes. It is a tough life. With this in mind, we tried to build a safe home for the chicks, but at the same time realize at least half (if we are lucky) of these little buggers will probably end up being the punchline in a Roald Dahl story. That is what makes the move a scary one.


As you can see above, the structure is nearly finished. We just need to stake up some chicken wire in the run area, and bury the extension chord (for the heat lamp). Badger is standing in front of the door. Once the pen is wired, you will be able to open up the small door, to allow the chickens to come and go, or the two large doors to clean the coop and collect eggs. We built the coop off the ground to protect from predators and allow more space, underneath the coop, for the chickens to muck about in the pen. The whole structure is 10 feet long, 4 feet high (at the corners) and 4 feet wide. The coop itself is 3 feet by 4 feet.

Here are the front doors. We salvaged the awesome wood from the barn on the farm when a good bit of it collapsed under the snowmageddon. The hinges were donated from a friend and are one of my favorite parts.

This little door will be open during the day with a ramp down to the ground so the chickens can come and go as they please.

Then when it is time to clean out the coop or collect eggs we can open up the whole wall. The chord in the back is for a heat lamp and the hanging feeders (one for food and one for water) may end up underneath the coop once the chickens grow a bit more. Behind Badger's head is a nesting area with 2 boxes and a little roof. We haven't installed the roosting pole, but we did add the little roof deck above the nesting boxes for some more chill space for the chicks.

You can see the nesting area a bit better here. There are two wooden slats that slide in so you can either have one big nesting area or two smaller ones, whichever the chickens prefer.

The chickens immediately seemed to enjoy looking out the window which is good. I am a bit worried that this window will be the weak link when predators come looming, but I think it is totally sealed.


Here are a few more photos I took today of the chicks moving in:

I believe this is an amber link. We have at least 2 of them, and maybe 4 of them.
Maebe came to say hi, but I think she would eat them, so I drop kicked her.

I'm not sure what kind of chicken this is, but she is much smaller than the others.

I think the one in the back there is a Rhode Island Red, but I can't be sure of that either. She is also pretty small.

shake it
Wish us luck.

What Jeni said

I think there is a fine line between "criticism" and "judgment". To me, a critical person has room to alter their perception. A judgment has weight and permanence.

I don't get many comments here on the blog, so I wanted to thank Jeni for chiming in with the above statement regarding my "critique" of Alice in Wonderland. She makes a great point and I feel a bit better about it all.

I think what Jeni meant to say though is that judgment day is coming- a day when critical minds and judgemental minds will all be stepped on by terminator feet. Giant waves of napalm will be viewed at and no one will take the time to update their blog about how the napalm should have been hotter or the wave taller or the ashy skeletons more ashy. We will all just run for our lives and hope our loved ones don't become terminated too tortuously.

Critics are cartoons, judges are jokesters and we are all just people pointing in different directions. There is no reason for me to write this. It will only be scanned for vitals by the mother-terminator and then used against the human resistance. It is obvious to me. On a day like today, the sun was shining, the blossoms were falling and not once did I breath in and say, "man, this air smelt so much better in 1997." This is because I can't time travel! I am not from the future and can't go to the past. I will not crouch naked and awaken atop a crater in a seedy part of 1997 telling myself how awesome the air smells. If I could, I would make a bet on the Phillies to win it all in 2008.

I just looked it up. Judgement Day isn't until July 11th 2029. The Phillies could win another one by then. I will have just celebrated a 48th birthday and would not have judged anything in a good 20 years. I will be telling my niece about how happy I am she became a Phillies fan despite growing up in Boston and maybe we should travel to the moon when the Phillies play the Moon Men in an upcoming Orbit-League exhibition. She will probably tell me that she prefers a good pitching matchup and dislikes all the 4,000 foot home runs that are hit in low gravity. On this day air will smell of injected fragrances that remind us all of ex-girlfriends and people will constantly be cringing. The wave of napalm won't be so bad after that.

Luckily for them, the Phillies will be on the moon on judgement day hitting homeruns and the napalm will only look like a fireworks show from their vantage.