ErkkilaDotOrg

So I got a call from the post office at 6:30 am…”your chicks are here”…as I could tell from the insistent peeping in the background. Jumped out of bed, got dressed, grabbed my stuff, drove to the post office with the heat on full blast. Good news! Nobody dead in the box. And really colorful, what with 6 lavender guinea fowl (light striped gray), 2 black jersey giants, 2 rhode island reds, and 2 aracanas (one’s dark brown, one’s light). They quieted right down when I set them in the warm truck, but started up again when the truck started moving.

The keets, then the chicks, figured out drinking OK once I dipped their beaks. They’re already chasing around mosquitos to eat!

Do keets know how to relax or what?

This afternoon, Paul came in, distraught, saying all the chickens were dead. He had found a few corpses in the field and couldn’t find the rest. On my way to the barn I found a few survivors: Gus (Paul’s favorite rooster) near the barn, Randy (red cochin rooster) and Roadrunner (dutch bantam rooster) on the old kitchen cabinets inside the barn. Later Squeak (silver dutch bantam hen) ran from the field into the barn, too. We thought that would be it, but Red (a hen that looks like Gus) turned up with a little patch of her back skin missing, later (ran into the coop).

We found and had to bury Penny (red cochin hen), Tiny (silver dutch bantam hen), LBH (black cochin hen), and BlackTop (black cochin rooster).
Missing and probably dead: Gimpy (dark Brahma hen), BlackBob (black cochin rooster), G.G. (another hen like Red), Nappy (dutch bantam rooster), and Goldie (gold dutch bantam hen). We found feathers that looked like Goldie’s and Gimpy’s.

I’m not much surprised by the cochins and brahmas going. They are slow, heavy, and can’t fly well and were all the casualties up to this point. I’m a bit startled by all the more wild-looking fowl, which I know can roost and I would think could have gotten into the many trees, high brush, etc.
So the tally so far for the season: 14 missing or dead, 5 remaining. The kills came in counts of 1, 4, 9 (a geometric progression–next time would be 16). This is not good. I have 6 guinea fowl keets and 6 chicks coming on Friday, which I’m now much more afraid for.
Paul played (on a boombox) an mp3 of a distressed rabbit. At least twice afterwards, we saw a large fox run back and forth across the field, too fast and too far to shoot (we saw it earlier too but it was too far and moving too fast). So we know what probably did it. Paul’s been trying to plug that fox for a few weeks now in the evenings, assuming they wouldn’t be as active in the day (bad assumption; this happened between 1-4:30 pm). Hopefully Jon and Chuck (our hunting friends) may be able to get them (assuming more than one).
I know we’re taking our chances freeranging, but we are closing them in at night. It’s been rather startling losing almost 75% of the flock within 2 months. Our choices are: fence them in (we mostly want them for bug removal in the whole yard, so I think we’d give them up entirely before doing this), move or build a coop closer to the house (we really want to do this, but it’s more expense for an already expensive start-up season, plus it’s no guarantee against predators, either), kill all predators (we might take a few, but this is never over), give up (we really love having them), or buy a shitload of chickens every spring and plan to lose nearly all of them (ouch. I think if this is the answer we better stop naming them.)

Gettin’ ready for a dozen new birds…6 lavender guinea fowl, 2 Black Jersey Giant pullets, 2 Rhode Island Red pullets, and 2 Araucana pullets from Ideal Poultry. They should be here on Friday the 28th.

Hope this little guy doesn’t bother them.

Philips RC9800i:

things we like:

• color screen
• when it’s working, keys respond rather quickly

things we don’t like:

• think seems to lock up or freeze quite a bit. I’m rebooting it far more than I’d like
• battery consumption seems high. One evening of using it and it needs recharging
• when programming, you only get about 8 programmable keys. This, on an LCD-type remote, seems ridiculous; why can’t I at least change labels on existing keys? And why, if you don’t program certain keys, does it leave them on the display (so if you try hitting them you get a little ‘donk’ noise). After a few Pronto remotes, it’s incredibly disappointing not being able to program the screens exactly how I’d want to
• On the ‘watch’ screen, if you have more than one of the same kind of device, it’s not obvious which key to hit for which device (and of course you can’t relabel them) unless you’ve memorized the order
• the sideways form factor–Paul hates not being able to get at the soft screen and hard keys using one hand
• The ‘combined’ screens when using ‘watch’ do not always have the keys I want, such as the aspect ratio key for the TV. They’ve decided I only need this key when watching DVD, but I need it for the DVRs as well.
• No control over programming the hard keys–they can only be used for vol, menu, etc.
• I still haven’t figured out how the ‘double click’ on the menu keys are of any use since you can’t program them to do anything
• It’s cumbersome switching back to individual remote controls when the combined remote is useless (as with aspect key when not watching dvd). Paul hates this especially.
• The programming can be cumbersome. I would prefer a PC-based solution.

Cool but who cares?

• Program guide. That’s why I have DVR’s
• wireless stuff for playing MP3’s or looking at pictures. Useless for me as most of our stuff is on linux servers.

Apparently not expecting an open mike to pick up his remarks, Bush told Blair: “See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.” cnn.com

Heeheee…I’m not normally a fan but for today, I liked him just a little bit. And go CNN for not dashing it out. I guess that’s one less word left unmentionable by the news services.

That’s one tiny puglet, Dixie.

Now *that’s* a man-purse.

Here’s the whole album.

I recently was chided for linking to this blog on a site knowing that this blog contains the occasional profanity. At first I felt a little bad, and I even edited a recent post to clean it up. Then I started thinking about it and realizing, why am I censoring myself? I’m not one of those people who thinks the entire internet should be PG, PC, or safe for children. Does anyone really think their kids are seeing the word ‘fuck’ here for the first time? And if so, do I really care that it was this site that warped their fragile little minds? Well, no, because I think people take so called ‘bad words’ far too seriously. If everybody could just get over this taboo over a particular word which has been around something like 500 years, then nobody would get so upset over it. If you don’t treat it like a huge deal, your kids probably won’t be interested in ‘using it on you’ and the fun will wear off. So anyway, I edited the post back.
Think about it…here is a word that has many euphemisms with identical meaning and intent (hell, check out usage of ‘frak’ on Battlestar Galactica for example), and yet only that one (well, perhaps not the only one) is considered unmentionable. Why is that? Heck, read a few dry articles on its etymology and it loses a considerable amount of juice: wikipedia is one.
Talk about staying power. 500 years! Think of all the profanities that have been born and died in far less time. You almost never hear anyone use ‘Zwounds’ these days. Even ‘damn’ has lost considerable power. It must be because it’s related to sex; but then, why is it ok to use euphemisms to describe the same exact act? And, since sex being taboo in and of itself is largely a religious concept, why hasn’t the term itself become less taboo over time, as other religion-related profanity has?

Then we have ’shit’. Here we have a term that’s almost as old; it’s a bit less than 500 years. Now here we’re not talking about sex at all, just a bodily function that everyone does, and which you can’t really help doing, and which has many MANY substitute terms. So what is it about this particular word that makes it any more filthy than say your occasional ‘poo’ or ‘ca-ca’ or ‘crap’?

I’m also tired of this argument that you are somehow revealing yourself to be less educated or coarse by using words like this. They have a long, storied, colorful history and really, are no less distinguished than any other words in the English language. Should I not say them, just because a series of somewhat superstitious people has been passing down this urban legend that some words are ‘bad’ and will somehow affect the quality of your afterlife (if one exists)? Well, I say, what other words are so powerful that they could get you arrested in small towns just for wearing them emblazoned on a t-shirt (free country my ass)? And it’s not as if the presence of these words in my vocabulary is crowding out more sophisticated terms like ‘fornicate’ or ‘fecal matter.’ I think they’re just attempting to apply guilt and shame, effective tools in the past. Fuck that shit! Let fly with a so-called ‘bad’ word every so often! As long as they’re still taboo, they’re still fun to say!

And that leads me to a certain irony. If, suddenly, every ‘filthy’ word became acceptable to say, they lose their power to shock. Sure, nobody will be offended anymore, but then, the language becomes a bit less colorful. So I extend a hearty thank you to those who are sensitive to the profane–you make life fun for the rest of us!

We might be ordering some more chicks this year to replace our losses. We’re considering guinea fowl to act as alarms for the other birds, and also for their bug-eating ability, but will probably mix in some chickens as well (Ameraucanas, Rhode Island Reds, Black Jersey Giants maybe…) Haven’t made up our minds exactly yet, but did buy some chick brooding supplies just in case (and spent less at Country Max than we would’ve online at McMurray…)

The current flock has decided Paul is their main man. Yesterday for the first time, while we were sitting in chairs at the back of the barn watching them, they all came up and he ended up with a chicken through his ponytail (Tiny), one on his back/shoulder (Gus) and two roosters scrabbling on his head (fortunately the very small Roadrunner and Nappy). He didn’t know whether to laugh (Tiny was snuggling in and pulling out neck hairs, while the roosters scratched his scalp) or scream (ahhhhh! get them off me man, get them off me!) Unfortunately I had no camera, and it was a bit too dark (dusk) to have taken any without flash.

I totally chick-phoned him while he was in Montreal at IETF. I have my meeting alarms set to play ‘Under the Sea’ from ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Disney). Of course, it went off during the conference and his boss laughed uproariously at him. Then we he got back we got a load of stone delivered and the guy came in for payment while I was playing the Little Mermaid soundtrack at full volume on the speakers (to overcome the air conditioner). Yes, I am a nerd.

Montreal from hotel room.

I’m back from IETF in Montreal. It was exiting in a nerdly kind of way. And I totally forgot to update this blog entry :).

Well, we’re down to 14 chickens. Yesterday during all the rain, I happened to see a fox take off into the woods near the coop (of course, no gun handy). Somehow the fucker managed to make off with our four largest birds–all three white Brahmas and GrayBob 2, the blue cochin. Must have been a tasty meal. All I found were a couple of small piles of white feathers. God damnit! At this rate there won’t be enough to keep each other warm in the coop, unless we keep some bulbs running all the time.
Not sure whether to go for bigger chickens or smaller, more nimble, more feral-looking ones. Don’t really want to start more chicks this year, at any rate.

Watched “The world’s fastest indian” tonight via netflix. It was awesome.

Not gonna ruin it =), but we’ll probably buy it.

Since I’m on the netflix topic. My current movie is the early batman serial 2 disk DVD set. We’ve watched the first one and it was pretty neat. Some of the dialog was a bit of a shock, blunt anti Japanese wartime propoganda and slang, for some reason I just didn’t expect it. Can’t wait for disk 2 =). We’re still trying to figure out if the evil guy in the movie is supposed to be japanese…

Is there anything better than Japanese toys?

This little guy was probably my first such toy. He is Boh, a character from ‘Spirited Away’. I picked him up at the Japanese pavilion in Epcot a couple of years ago.
These are Walkie Bits. I bought these from EBay in April. They’re little robots you can get to walk, sing, race, or move in specified rhythms. As you can see, I swapped the shells on these.

Part of some Star Trek toys collections available only in Japan. I picked these and the next thing up from J-List, which, by the way, has the coolest advertising emails ever–a little bit of Japanese culture in each one.

You can’t start a Japanese toy collection without some Domo-Kun, best known in the U.S. from web humor about spam or various other topics.

Cute Overload has said it, and it bears repeating. The Japanese are handing us our asses when it comes to cuteness.