A Worthy Substitute, Live From Germany, First Time in a Long Time, To be 9 again
Since my left knee got injured running two months ago I have mentally crossed that off the list of viable cardio activities for myself for the foreseeable future. I have been using Cindy’s Echelon cycling bike a few times to get my cardio in and I like it more than I expected. When paired with the app which allows you to do both recorded and live rides lead by a trainer I find myself pushing myself to levels near my exertion level while running. I also like the element of the live scoreboard which ranks your overall watt output to other people that have done the same ride. Despite my overall lack of cycling experience I almost always manage to get myself into the top 20% of riders.
On Saturday I knocked out a good chunk of the to do list before setting up to do another live stream at a very odd time, 3PM. The time selection was intentional as I was streaming with Ulf who lives in Germany which is six hours ahead of us on the clock. He has a broad technical knowledge of EUCs and I was talking about streaming with him way back in 2018 but we never got our schedules coordinated. The two hour plus stream went well, people really seemed to enjoy having a more technical viewpoint on the stream.
After the live stream I was right back outside, this time modifying the chicken perch in reaction to us losing ANOTHER hen from a fall off the perch. At this point we lost three or four hens this way, they lose their balance for some reason and break their neck during the fall. When I was thinking about these scenarios, every time it occurred the hens were on the left edge of the perch, where the small round dowel is, that we now know is not well suited for chicken perching.
The first thing I did was rip the round dowels from either side of the perch. On the one side I put a 2×4 with the wide side up to give them a nice flat surface to perch on. On the other side I left the 2×4 which is on it’s side so it would be smaller if the hens preferred it but still flat so they could maintain balance easier. The other change was I added two more 2x 4 to fill in space between the perches . When we watched the video from Dot’s fall she lost balance on the round dowel and then fell back towards the middle of the perch. When she fell it looked like her head hit one of the perches on the way down which likely broke her neck. With the additional cross supports a chicken should not be able to fall through that spot which hopefully will prevent a similar scenario from happening again.
Saturday night Cindy and I watched Official Secrets, our latest Netflix rental. It was a true story regarding the deception and arm twisting the US participated in to try to get the UN Security Council to approve a war resolution against Iraq. It reinforced my already firm opinion of just how dark and slimy our government can be behind the curtain. We both found the movie very interesting, B+.
Around noon on Saturday Cindy and I did something we had not done for a long, long time, conventional brick and mortar shopping. I wanted to hit the Jockey outlet at Miromar to refresh my undergarments which were getting pretty beat up. Cindy needed some stuff too. We even ate lunch there, albeit at the Subway at the food court. Of course we wore our masks the entire time outside of eating but it wasn’t a big deal. Cindy and I both commented how it felt nice to do something we had not done since Covid 19 became a household word.
I had been contacted maybe a month ago by one of my YouTube channel subscribers. He was from the Philly area and was coming to Marco on vacation with his family. He had asked me if I would be willing to go ride with him and his 9 year old son when they got here. He emailed me Saturday night that they had arrived and we worked out that I would meet them down in Marco about 4PM.
I arrived a little before they did so I rolled around on my One Wheel until they showed up. I parked in the Publix shopping center, my normal launch point for Marco rides. I was quite surprised when I saw the Publix was no longer there, just a big fenced off construction area. They evidently knocked down the building to build a new, modern Publix since I was last there, crazy. I also noticed the old Burger King that was an out parcel in the same shopping center was now nothing but an empty patch of grass.
Igor’s son’s name was Landon who is only nine years old. He and his dad only started learning EUCs back in May. When I pulled out my MSX and 16X Landon was able to ride each of them stupidly easy, the gift of youth. We rode around the mostly empty parking lot for awhile before heading onto a few of the small hilly regions nearby. Igor really liked the MSX and I expect him to be buying one soon. His family moved to the US in 1989 from the former USSR which I thought was interesting.
Landon was was a really cool little kid. He even has a YouTube channel which I posted in the description of the video I made to hopefully get a few subscribers thrown his way. I think they really had a good time which made me feel good in return.
When I got back Cindy was babysitting DJ for a bit which was a nice treat for me. I always enjoy having the little guy around.