Melted, Transdumber, Free ranging, “Raining” fire

I had a busy, busy Saturday.  Outside my first waking hour spent playing some Hearthstone the rest of my day was spent with the foot on the gas pedal.  After weeding the property and filling the bird feeders I hopped in the truck.  I needed to pick up some stuff at Home Depot and Rural King.  One of the things I was hoping to get was some new chicken wire to redo the top of the run where the plastic coated chicken wire is starting to break.  I was surprised that all Rural King had was plain old galvanized chicken wire.  I wound up ordering some pvc chicken wire with Amazon on my phone as I walked out of the store.

When I got back I hopped on the mower to complete the now necessary weekly grass trimming.  I was very thankful for my mower canopy as it was around 1PM and broiling hot outside with stifling humidity.  There was not a cloud in the sky to provide even momentary relief otherwise.  I was then doing work on the west side of the house, the sunny side,re-securing the sprinkler control box that was pulling loose from the wall.  The sweat was rolling off me non-stop as the sun baked me twice, once on my back and then again on the face is it bounced off the wall.  It was miserable, I felt like a piece of a meat in the broiler.  I had to go in several times to gulp down water as it felt dangerous to not do so.

I then grabbed the container of Thompsons water seal I bought at Home Depot and got busy with my annual protection of the bar park and other wood objects in the landscape.  This time I didn’t get the plain water seal, I got stain/sealer, the color was listed as redwood.  The stain made everything look a different shade. I think it looked the best on the bar park support posts and the worst on the border around the dog deck.  I was out there till almost 6PM brushing the stuff on.  My lower back was pretty much locked up by the time I was done after painting the ramps for the two sheds.

Cindy and I had plans to go see the new Transformers movie Saturday night.  My non-stop work day made me doubtful of my ability to stay awake for a nearly 3 hour long movie, especially with us not being able to get there until the 8PM showing.  I took a shower and we headed out anyway.

I had expressed my thoughts on prior Transformer movies in the blog last week.  Those feelings were not lessened by several HORRIBLE reviews forwarded to me by my buddy Sean, who was unable to see the movie with us.  I told Cindy about the horrible reviews but she said she doesn’t like to pre-judge a movie by others opinions.  Granted, there have been movies I have enjoyed that some critics said were shitty so surely I am a supporter of forming your own opinion.  However since I had already formed an opinion on the previous Transformer films, seeing more bad press didn’t give me much hope.  I did hope that adding Mark Wahlberg to the cast and eliminating Shia LeBouf would make a significant difference, it didn’t.

After watching a ridiculous 24 minutes of previews, the movie starts up.  The first 30 minutes or so was fine but then things went right down the established Transformers path, horrible writing, ridiculous, awkward insertion of one liners, and explosions exploding on top of explosions.  In my conservative estimation, at least a 100,000 people would have died in the collateral damage from these robots gone wild.  Marky Mark takes on almost Superman-like aura as the film progresses.  By the end of it he is somehow able to go toe to toe with an evil robot that is 100 times his size.  At times I had to hide my face in embarrassment for the actors on screen, it was soooo stupid.

Cindy thought I was overly harsh in my criticism of the film.  SHe wrote off much of the stupidity with “It’s Transformers!”, meaning that the series is supposed to have a lot of stupidity in it. After the movie I commented that I felt like I lost IQ points watching it but to be honest, I think I felt the same leaving the theater after all Transformer movies.  Transformer movies make tons of money despite their plentiful idiotic aspects.  People like robots that turn into cool looking cars and explosions.  If it isn’t broke don’t fix it I guess.  Personally I give the film a C.  If you saw the other films, you saw this one.

Originally Cindy and I discussed getting up and going running Sunday morning however the late movie, “sleeping in” until 7:30, already warm/humid weather and both of us feeling sore and stiff discarded that plan.  Plus we had a lot of things we wanted to get done.  We did our coffee run followed by a trip to Target where we saw some good deals on clearance patio furniture.  We talked about coming back later to pick up a cool heavy metal picnic table and 9 foot umbrella to restore some functionality to the dog deck.

While we were out I got a call from a woman I spoke to earlier in the week regarding buying the original chicken coop I bought.  She actually is up in New Jersey right now but is moving down to Cape Coral in about a month.  She had chickens before and is looking to pick up 3 hens when she moves back down.  She really liked my coop, especially for the money.  She had made arrangements for her ex-husband to come pick up the coop for her by proxy and he was available to do so that moment.

I told the woman that was fine but I had wanted to use the animal safe wood sealant I bought on the coop.  Since her ex was coming from Cape Coral as well which is a pretty long haul, I figured I would have time to get it done before he arrived.  As soon as Cindy and I got home I cracked open the can of sealant and got busy.  I was in the full sun the entire time and despite it still being relatively early, I was drenched in sweat in no time at all.  Just as the guy backed his truck into the driveway I was finishing up.  The coop looked very nice when I was done, despite it’s lack of structural integrity.

The guy worked in farming all of his life and definitely looked the role.  In addition to the wood coop he was transporting I showed him my chicken tractor out back. He thought it was really cool and took down the web site address to show his ex-wife, perhaps she will be upgrading to a tractor down the road. We loaded the wood coop on the back of the truck and I collected my two $100 bills.  I felt a big sense of relief as the truck pulled out, meaning my initial purchase had at least not been a total loss and that the large section of garage floor space it was consuming was now available once again.

Speaking of the garage floor, Cindy made a rather disgusting discovery Sunday morning, maggots crawling around on that same floor.  I found the corpse of a dead frog nearby, I assume that is where they came from.  There were a ton of them up and down the side of the garage that leads to the house.  I used the shop vac to eliminate them, it was really gross. In general, the flies have been very oppressive the last couple weeks.  I was happy to eliminate at least a few dozen potential flies from reaching adulthood.

One of the things we wanted to get done on Sunday was cleaning out the smaller shed to utilize it more for chicken accessories.  I had not gone through that shed thoroughly in years.  As a result I wound up pulling out a ton of stuff that I no longer wanted/needed.  Most of it went out to the road to hopefully be adopted by a local pack rat, the rest went in the trash.

The chickens got their first taste of true freedom yesterday as wel let them loose while we were doing work on their housing.  As we expected they were scared at first but it didn’t take long for them to take advantage of their freedom.  They started scratching the ground repeatedly, something they can’t really do in their coop/run because of the safety wire that is on the bottom.  Before long all three of them had dug little holes in the ground and were comfortably sitting in them.  Cindy and I were concerned the chickens might be all over the yard and require close supervision. It seemed our concerns were overinflated.  The chickens pretty much stayed within a 30 feet square area behind the pool cage.  They enjoyed both the shade that area has and the mulch which they loved digging through.

While the chickens were having fun Cindy and I were making additions to the chicken run.  I added one of Tuki’s old bird toys with a bell, a pvc chicken swing and an old perch which I haphazardly screwed into the half bike frame.  Cindy made her own chicken swing using a different design.  Thus far I haven’t seen any of the chickens use either swing as they are intended to be used. I also set up a hanging feeder instead of the ground based feeder we had before.  The chickens seemed to be big fans of eating at a higher elevation and the feeder is protected from the elements this way.

Cindy’s daughter stopped out for a couple hours on Sunday to see the chickens.  She thought it was cool how inquisitive they were.  We bought two new treats for the chickens over the weekend, cracked corn and dried mealworms.  Surprisingly the mealworms didn’t seem to go over that big with the birds but they went nuts for the corn.  We limited how much of the corn we gave them, according to the instructions the corn consumption needs to regulated.

Getting the chickens back into their housing wasn’t as troublesome as we anticipated either.  We had visions of having to chase chickens all over the back yard.  Instead Cindy was able to calmly grab each chicken and pet them as she placed them back into the coop.  You could tell that the girls were not thrilled returning to captivity after getting a taste of freedom. Shortly after the chickens were put back in some VERY severe thunder storms rolled in, unleashing torrential rain and brutal lightning and thunder.  Cindy felt bad the chickens had to be out there in such conditions.

We were trying to watch my latest Netflix rental, Pompeii, in the middle of the storm.  I say trying because the power went out four times during the movie.  Each momentary blackout required me to go through an annoying process to get back to where we left off.  It was REALLY annoying when literally 15 seconds after getting the film rolling again the power again flicked off. I thought the movie was good, sort of a hybrid between Gladiator and Armageddon (in an ancient Roman way).  Getting obliterated by a volcano is not for wimps. I’d give the movie a B+ and would take it over any Transformers movie to date. It was odd seeing Jack Bauer play the head bad guy in the film.

We did go back to Target later in the day to grab the picnic table and umbrella.  Cindy is supposed to assemble it today sometime during her day off.