More chicks, Work, Work, Watch, Watch out

So on Friday Cindy nearly doubled our amount of chicks in the house, picking up another 5 of them at Rural King.  When Cindy and I discussed this before the purchase we said it would be good to get the amount of chickens we want to more or less keep full time so we don’t have to go through the chick stage more than once.  I had talked about just picking up 2 or 3 more chicks, I was surprised to see 5 little fuzz balls show up in the picture.

We wanted to make sure to get some different, non-black varieties so we weren’t accused of being racists.  Cindy got 3 or 4 different breeds this time and they are all pretty diverse.  At first she put them in their own little box in the same tub as their 1 week older siblings.  It was amazing the size difference 7 days makes in a chicks life.  The first set of chicks were nearly double the size of the new hens.

You aren’t supposed to put chicks from different breeders together for germ reasons and safety reasons since the older, bigger birds could beat on the smaller ones.  We wound up commandeering the second bathtub in the guest room as the second brooder.  Cindy ran out late Friday to grab a second heat lamp and a few other things for the new babies.  It goes without saying that they are very cute although it is weird having both bathrooms in the house being turned into chicken brooders.

First thing Saturday I was outside doing a few chores, taking advantage of the cool temps and low humidity.  Once I finished up I headed into the office to work on the firewall switch over.  For the most part it went smoothly but I had a couple bugs that took me awhile to resolve.   On the way home I stopped at Ali’s place to do some work on her computer as well.  By the time I got home it was close to 3.

It wasn’t long until Cindy and I jumped in the SSR to head back down to Naples for me to pick up the entries and race bibs for Sunday’s 5K.   That evening we finalized the race prep and tried to get to bed at a decent hour since the alarm clock was set for 4:15am.

When we got on the race site a couple minutes after 5:30 there were already a number of people there which I am not accustomed to, normally Cindy and I are the lead off hitters.  It was nice to have the race set up routine already well underway that early.  I ran into a bug early that prevented us from using more than one laptop to put in day of race entries.  Luckily the walk up traffic wasn’t that heavy so Ali was able to take care of it solo.

Things went smoothly once the race started other than one bib that appeared to be dead and a woman that only ran one of the two laps that made up the course.  I would think running 1.5 miles would feel a lot different than 3 miles to even the most novice of 5k runners but it’s happened before, I am sure it will happen again.  Cindy and I rolled off site a little after 9:15 and grabbed coffee on the way home before attending to post race work.

Despite our weekend being busy we wanted to squeeze in seeing the new Avengers movie that came out.  Cindy and I are big super hero movie fans.  We decided to go to the 3:45 matinee.  Despite Coconut Point showing the movie roughly every half hour all weekend, the theater was still about 2/3 full.

I am a huge fan of Marvel movies and really liked the first Avengers so I had high expectations for the second installment.  Those expectations were met.  The movie is an orgasm of action and mind blowing visuals with just the right amount of satire and silliness mixed in.  I did not have a very detailed background of Ultron or other super beings introduced in the movie like The Vision.  I knew their names and little else.  It was cool seeing the origin of them.

Of course the movie was filled with unbelievable destruction and unlikely outcomes but with this type of movie you already commit to leaving anything resembling reality securely checked at the door.  Cindy and I both enjoyed it to a full A rating.  We stuck around for the late bonus footage which showed up just before the main credits.  I assumed there would be additional footage at the very end of the credits, since there normally is, but we bailed when Cindy looked it up online, finding there are no end of the credits Easter eggs.

On the way home from the theater we both got a very scary reminder of the dangers of distracted driving.  We were on Immokalee Road in the middle lane.  About 100 yards in front of us was what looked like a lowered Honda Accord in the middle lane and an Isuzu SUV in the right lane.  All of a sudden I see the Honda swerve right, plowing into the right rear of the SUV.  The Honda driver then swerved back left and then hard right again, hard enough that the passenger side of the vehicle lifted several feet off the ground, perilously close to rolling over.

The SUV immediately got off to the side of the road.  The Honda slammed back down on to the ground and managed to wind up on the side of the road in front of the SUV.  As we passed slowly with other vehicles we saw a shirtless, shoeless young kid open the door of his now destroyed vehicle.  I can almost guarantee the dumb shit was interacting on his phone is some manner that led to the impact.  Since both drivers appeared to be in one piece I decided to keep on rolling, assuming there would be plenty of other good Samaritans willing to stop if need be.

Smart phone usage while driving is so commonplace I think most become numb to it’s inherent danger.  I wonder if Junior will finally wise up after destroying his vehicle and majorly damaging another.  I doubt it.  I never realized just how dumb I was right around legal drinking age until I see kids the same age now from my nearly five decades on the planet perspective.

On Sunday we realized we had some dimension problems with the first set of chicks.  Cathy managed to flap/hop up on to the top of the bin, meaning she could easily hop into the tub or out on the floor from there.  This would be bad from an excrement containment perspective as well as the chick being cut off from food, warmth and water.  Cindy is working on some modifications today to hopefully address it.

On Sunday I also received my latest robotic cleaning assistant, an iRobot Brava 380T.  This is a floor maintenance robot that is not as robust as the Scooba I already own.  A Scooba dry vacuums, sprays cleaning solution, brushes and then sucks up the liquid.  The Brava uses simple cloth cleaning pads which have the ability to perform Swiffer like cleaning.  It isn’t a way to clean floors thoroughly but is great for maintenance.

The robot uses more intelligence than Scoobas or Roombas which blindly bounce around the cleaning area in a random pattern.  The Brava uses a little cube they call Northstar to provide something similar to Neato-like smart routing around a room.  The cube bounces signal off the ceiling to help the robot make it’s way around a room.

You can use a dry cloth for sweeping or a wet cloth to do light mopping of the floor.  With our main living space being all tile I figured something like this would come in handy following up Neato sucking sessions.  Now if they only had a robotic lawn mower that was up to the task of handling my large, varied, yard terrain…..