Archives June 2015

Last night on my way home from work I was on Goodlette Frank Road, a major artery with 3 lanes per side.  All of a sudden I see a bunch of cars in front of me nose diving as they are slamming on their brakes.  In front of these vehicles is a straight body delivery truck with it’s BACK UP LIGHTS ON.  The truck was about 50 feet past the entrance to a development that they evidently missed the turn for.  Instead of going to the next intersection and turning around, this moron thought coming to a dead stop in rush hour traffic and backing up made much more sense.  It was fcking unbelievable.

I was amazed that there wasn’t an accident.  As I swung around the guy he got a generous serving of horn along with a big thumbs up.  I wish I paid more attention to what company he was delivering for so I could have let them know they have an unadulterated moron behind the wheel of one of their vehicles.

Yesterday we sold off one of our excess chicken coops, selling the small one we bought at Rural King about a month ago.  We sold it for 125 bucks meaning it only costs us 70 bucks to use it for a month, a good deal.  I am still holding on to the chicken tractor.  It’s rugged design will allow it to sit unused in the yard behind the coop without significant degradation.  I think it would be good to have secondary housing available in case we have to separate chickens for some reason in the future.

Hey who wants to go on a Greek vacation?  It seems pretty amazing that a non-3rd world country has managed to find it’s way into such a dire financial situation.  It sounds like a coin flip as far as what is going to happen next.  If Greece gives a big middle finger to the banks and drops out of the EU not only will it be chaotic within it’s own borders, it could very well set a precedent for other runts in the EU that are having severe debt issues to follow suit.

On my way home from work I picked up the dogs for another long weekend visit while Ali is out of town.  They had to share space on the back of the Prius with groceries from Costco, including two large bags of softener salt.  During the night Cindy and I both had off and on sadness about Lola passing away.  I have a hard time processing when something is here one moment and gone the next.

On Saturday morning I wanted to get started with the ethernet to coop project.  I wanted to get the attic work out of the way before it became a sauna.  Earlier in the week I had cut and put an end on the network cable I was going to extend outside.  My plan was to come out of the attic with the 200 foot ethernet cable via a hole that is already punched in the cinder block where cable, satellite and phone lines are located.

Well as I surveyed the hole from the outside I realized that I had precious little space to get another cable through there.  To make matters worse the hole is not straight through the wall, instead they are offset by 8-10 inches from the inside to the outside, making it even more messy.  After doing a lot of pulling and tugging I realized that it just was not going to work that way.  So it was time to look for alternative exits.

After some thought and further examination I decided to punch through the soffit next to the conduit used to route the pipe to the AC compressor.  It allowed me to hide the cable for the most part as it goes down the wall.  I jammed the cable through the hole from the outside and had Cindy hold it while I struggled to crawl into the corner of the attic where I could barely snag it with my fingers.

Now the fun was beginning, getting the cable routed all the way out to the chicken coop.  I used two tools to get the cable into the ground, a hand edger to cut a slice into the turf and my window spline tool to push the ethernet cable into the ground.  It’s a slow process as I only move the edger about 6 inches at a time between each cut.

For part of the cable run I went into the border around the pool, pulling back the weedblock and shoving the cable underneath.  It was not fun either but easier than cutting through the lawn.  After close to an hour I finally had traveled the roughly 150 feet to the shed.  I drilled a hole in the front corner of the shed floor and had Cindy fish the cable up to me.  I connected the cable in the attic and to one of web cams while I held my breath.  I exhaled with relief when I saw the connection and activity lights snap on as they should.  The coop was now hard wired.

I added in a spare wifi router I had laying around to create a backyard hotspot.  I hard wired both web cams into the router to maximize bandwidth to them.  When I checked the video feeds with the new set up it was clear and fast, just as I hoped.

My shirt was soaked with sweat which I addressed with a quick jump in the pool.  I didn’t want to stink while Cindy and I ran some errands, including a stop at Rural King for chicken supplies, a nearly weekly occurrence.  This time the dogs had to share the back of the Prius with a 50 pound bag of chicken feed and three 50 pound bags of sand.

When I got home Cindy and I were back outside, her on the tractor, me on the weed whacker.  Of course it was hotter than hell in the middle of the afternoon but we wanted to get it done.  When I finished up weed whacking I had a few other things to attend to.  One of them was coming up with a way to block the skylights in the coop.

The heat in the coop during the day is pretty oppressive.  When I checked it at one point on Saturday the thermometer hanging from the truss read almost 110 degrees. Having two skylights pumping more radiant energy into the coop just was not necessary.  The coop has plenty of other windows to allow light inside.

I grabbed some pieces of white corrugated plastic that is typically used for signs.   The pieces weren’t quite large enough to block the area completely but it was close.  Before long the temps dropped into the upper 90’s inside, still hot but not horrendous.  Cindy is going to buy some bigger panels which will completely block the area.  We are also talking about painting the roof of the shed a lighter color that will reflect some of the sun.  The current dark brown native color is a heat magnet.

Saturday night we were exhausted from busting ass all day.  We stayed in watched Episode 1 of Star Wars, yes the Jar Jar Binks episode.  I put all three of the second generation Star Wars films in my Netflix queue.  I just felt like watching them again, maybe as a build up for the new Star Wars that comes out around Xmas.

Watching the movie reenforced the good and bad from second trilogy.  Jar Jar Binks seemed just as stupid as ever and the films over reliance on CGI and little focus on story was still apparent.  If I was to give it a current day rating it would have to be B+ at best.

On Sunday we bagged a bike ride.  Cindy woke up with her hands feeling pretty bad, something a 20 mile bike ride would only make worse.  Instead we got busy with various things.  One of those things is me working on getting Cindy’s YouTube channel up and running with Google AdSense so she can starting making some ad dollars.  Her application was rejected twice due to lack of content on her website.  After adding some additional content it made it through stage one of the application process, now we have to cross our fingers it makes it all the way through.

I also did another dry run of race timing on Sunday, a less intensive test where I just had one mat set up in the dining room that I walked bibs across.  It served it’s purpose and exposed a couple other operational gotchas I need to look out for.

Of course there was a lot of chicken related activities over the weekend.  The current main drama is sleeping arrangements.  Lucy has still been bitchy and pecking the other chicks if they get too close to her.  Cindy built a secondary perch at a right angle to the main perch, hoping Lucy could claim it for herself.

Well since the secondary perch still connected to the main perch structure Lucy still was able to slide down and peck away at the babies.  Last night Cindy tried to address the problem further by stringing some netting that created a slight barrier between her and the rest of the flock.  It seemed to work ok but we can’t really be at ease until all 12 birds put themselves to bed and wind up in their respective spots without us putting them there.

Last night Cindy finished up applying the chip timing device to 1200 bibs we have ready for Saturday’s 4th of July race.  Only 1800 more to go. 🙂  It’s not a fast process but I am confident as time goes on we will fine tune things to consume less resources.

My 200 feet of bury rated ethernet cable showed up yesterday.  I wanted to see if I would be able to pull up the cable from the unused jack in our bedroom.  I was up in the hot and itchy attic while Cindy was in the bedroom.  I had her tapping on the ceiling so I could home in on which cable I was looking for.

Once I found the wire, which was smack underneath some AC ducts, I gave it a tug to see if it would be possible to pull the wire up the wall.  There was no give at all in the wire.  I recalled when we wired the house we secured the CAT 5 to the metal studs so I wasn’t surprised I couldn’t pull it up.

Plan B was to cut the wire in the attic and put a new cat 5 connector on it, something I haven’t had to do for many many years.  I dusted off my old metal tool case that had all of my cabling tools and printed out a diagram as a reference for 568B wiring since the pin out order is something I forgot long ago.  After some tedious work I was able to get the wires into the connector and crimped in place.  I brought one of my timing boxes out to the garage, connected it to the wire and was able to ping it through the network meaning my surgery had been successful.  The next steps will be this weekend where I hopefully can snake the wire out the side of the house and all the way to the coop in the backyard.

So when I got home from work yesterday Cindy told me that Lola was not doing well.  She said she stayed in the coop all day and did not want to eat.  When Cindy told me she didn’t even eat a blueberry when it was offered to her I knew it was serious.  When I went out to see her it was obvious things were not good.  She had her eyes closed mostly and she periodically was moving her neck around and making noises that almost were like coughing.  The dramatic downturn was surprising, especially since on Wednesday Cindy said Lola was doing well (for her), eating and drinking quite a bit.  Hell Lola had a starring role in a video Cindy shot about cleaning chickens with dirty butts that same day.

Obviously Cindy was very upset and so was I although I told Cindy that I think we both knew this outcome was coming.  Lola first started acting sick at the end of April when she no longer was able to hop up to the nesting boxes or onto a perch.  When the symptoms persisted we took her to the vet when we were afraid she may have had Mareks disease.  We never found out definitively if she had it but we did find out she had parasites in her poop which we treated. After she was dewormed she had some mild improvement but never came close to returning to normal.  Despite her weighing less than a pound and a half she walked like she weighed much more.  Each step looked deliberate, labored, and slow.

So anyway I carried the nesting box Lola was sitting in outside, telling Cindy I think she would like that.  I gently petted her head as I carried her out.  I told Cindy we should keep her inside with us last night since it seemed like the end was near.  Cindy agreed we could bring her in after we ate dinner.  More storms were starting to roll in so we put Lola back in the coop before we went in to eat.

The storm was quite strong, dumping large amounts of rain in a short amount of time.  After it subsided I went outside to get the chickens settled into the coop for bed and to bring Lola inside.  When I opened the door to the coop I saw Lola had her head tucked down out of view.  I knelt down and touched her back while gently while saying her name.  She felt still and did not respond at all to my touch.  I moved her a little bit and still had no response.  When I picked her up the cold realization came over me that Lola had died in the brief time period we were inside.  Feelings of guilt and sorrow rushed in.

I held her in my arms, petting her while I walked out of the coop as Cindy was coming out to join me.  I gave her the sad news which of course devastated Cindy, who has spent countless hours and endless energy trying to nurse Lola back to health.  I cried not only over the loss of Lola but because of the pain I knew this was causing Cindy.  Lola was literally like her little feathered baby.

We decided to bury her right away.  We did so in the orchard at the base of the black raspberry bush, whose fruit Lola loved so much.  It was a somber evening as you can imagine and recalling these moments has made me grab the tissues once again.

So last night Cindy and I tried again at setting up 8 meters of timing mats as quickly as possible, hoping to improve on the 15 minutes it took us the first time around.  Well we did improve but not as much as I hoped, clicking in right around the 13 minute mark.  The cable routing is what becomes a quagmire.  As you get further into the process you are wrangling with a bigger and bigger rats nest of cables that you are trying to straighten out and lay in their assigned rubber channel in the mats.  Today Cindy is going to try another method for set up to see if it works out any better/faster.  Like anything, with practice it should improve.

Last night we once again had issues with Jaina wandering under the coop deck, squawking while all of the other chickens were inside ready for bed.  When she finally came out I noticed she had a blood spot on her back.  It came from one of two things, a particularly hard peck from Lucy or more likely from Jaina cutting herself on something under the deck.

Jaina is not only huge, she is also clumsy and not able to easily get down low like the other chickens to scoot around under the deck.  This problem is only going to get worse the bigger she gets.  I went inside and got some cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide so Cindy could treat the wound.  I also grabbed stipic powder which is used to stop bleeding in animals.  Jaina didn’t seem to mind Cindy attending to her injury.  Typically her breed has already been slaughtered for meat at this point in their lives.  She is going to have a rough time getting by for however long her life turns out to be.

The final part of the blog is a WoW issue.  If you have no interest in the virtual world of nerds you can safely close this entry now.  This latest expansion to WoW has had a bit of controversy surrounding it for quite awhile regarding the lack of ability for characters to fly.  Flying is an ability that has typically been granted to all players once they hit the maximum level for that expansion.  Gaining that ability only required you to hand over a large chunk of gold.  Being able to fly has a lot of advantages, especially when you are trying to get things done quickly.

Well with Warlords of Draenor Blizzard has not allowed players to fly, at all.  They have been vague about possibly allowing it later on.  Their main argument was they felt that flying cheated players from experiencing content in the way it was intended to be experienced.  Instead of having to fight your way through various obstacles on the ground you can simply swoop in on your flying mount, accomplish your objective and zoom back out.  The players argument has been that after they hit the maximum level the have already experienced a good portion of the content on the ground.  Withholding the ability to fly once you are max level just felt like an unnecessary shackle to many.  Plus generally speaking, taking something away that used to be standard fare is never going to be welcomed.

Well a couple weeks ago somebody at Blizzard made the announcement that there would indeed be NO flying in the current expansion, period.  Well that was like throwing a blazing torch into a wheelbarrow of dynamite.  Massive nerd rage ensued.  People were PISSED.  They were pissed not only for the reasons in the previous paragraph they were pissed because Blizzard has continued to sell fancy flying mounts in their online store for real world cash, despite the inability to use them with thier most current content.  There was already the assumption it was just a matter of time until flying was turned on. When you consider the most recent quarterly report from Blizzard showed a massive 3 million drop in their amount of subscribers you would think the last thing they would want to do is give their player base a reason to /ragequit. It was just dumb.

Well it appears that somebody at Blizzard had the common sense to realize this was a poor move.  Somewhere around a week later Blizzard did a complete 180 degree shift, saying flying in WOD will indeed become available soon, although gaining the ability is going to be quite different than in the past where you just paid gold for it.  Instead you need to complete various tasks in the game to earn the right to fly.  These tasks will require you to pretty much experience the vast majority of the content and travel to all corners of the virtual world.  To be honest it seems overly tedious, to accomplish everything required will take well into the double digit hours to complete. On the plus side, you only have to complete this slog one time.  After that any and all characters you have will be able to fly instead of each one having to hand over a kings ransom in gold to do so.

I have started on the arduous task of unlocking flying in my spare time, which there isn’t much of nowadays.  I would expect this will be the blueprint for how flying will be handled in the future.  If we would have known it from the get go I could have done things in a way that would have made completion of the tasks much more of an inline process instead of a large, annoying tacked on blob of work.

So I pulled the access panel in the garage where I had run a long section of cat 5 cable to the office when the house was built.  In the back of my mind I sort of recalled that I redeployed that cable awhile ago.  When I saw the cut wire in there it refreshed my memory.  Quite a few years ago I needed to get a second hard line ethernet connection into the bedroom for whatever AV arrangement I had at the time.  In order to do it I cannibalized that line and rerouted it to the bedroom.

Well I no longer require two hard lines in the bedroom thanks to the advent of much faster wi-fi technology over the years.  My idea is to utilize the wire that runs next to our bed and connect it to a 200 foot bury rated ethernet cable.  It will go through the attic, into the garage, out the access hole used for phone, satellite and cable wires.  From there it will get routed around the perimeter of the house, through the yard, and into the coop through the hole I cut for power. If I am successful getting a live hard line into the coop it allows for many options with chicken surveillance in the future.

Of course this plan is all speculative.  It is going to require traversing the very hot and unfriendly attic space.  Cindy has already volunteered  her services for this part of the project but since I know the layout I expect I will be the one crawling around up there.  Getting the cable into the ground won’t be much fun either although I plan to just lay the cable under the weed block around the pool for a good portion of the run.  The rest will be pushed into a small slice I put in the ground with my hand edging tool.

Last night the chickens did a better job of putting themselves to bed, well all of them but one, Jaina, the HUGE cornish hen.  The other 10 babies were all content inside the coop perching while Jaina, who is literally double the size of the other chicks, was wondering around under the coop deck making a noise that sounded much more like a goose than a chicken.  Jaina gets very upset when she is alone.

After some patient waiting she eventually came out from under the deck which allowed Cindy to grab her and put her in the chicken door.  Once she was inside she was still carrying on.  The first night they were in the coop Kristen stayed down on the ground with Jaina.  Last night Kristen was up top perching with the others and Jaina was upset about that too.  She was walking circles looking up at the other chickens, acting like she either wanted to be up there or she wanted them to come down to her.

I suggested we try putting Jaina on the middle perch which is bigger.  Because of her size and weight Jaina doesn’t really like to perch.  We tried it anyway.  Jaina stayed there for a minute or two until she fell down.  Cindy put one of the nesting boxes down on the ground for Jaina to use as  a bed.  She eventually took the hint and settled down in there.  The 13 chicks seemed to do fine through the night.  Things were less crazy because Lucy decided she wasn’t going to use the perch last night.

So has been the case lately, last night was again very chicken-centric.  The majority of the chickens went into the coop themselves, about half them got right up on the perch like they should.  Well then Lucy went into the coop and the fireworks began.  On Sunday night Lucy was content to sit in one of the nesting boxes all night while the babies mostly occupied the perching area.  Well last night she decided she was going to be claiming a perch.

As soon as Lucy hopped on the perches the other chicks got very nervous as they now associate Lucy with pecks on the head and back.  Lucy immediately started poking at any chicks within reach.  Some of the babies jumped off the perch while others just moved away out of pecking range.  As some of the chickens were trying to get off the perch they were utilizing the side frame of the perch.  They were sliding/falling off, adding to the chaos.

Well one of the babies, Kristen, was scared off the perch by Lucy’s tactics.  She is a good flyer, as she jumped she flew up into the air.  As she did she collided with one of many fly strips Cindy had hanging in the coop.  Somehow Lucy also managed to get another strip stuck on her.  There was a flurry of chicken panic as those strips are almost like super glue.  Cindy corralled Kristen and I got a hold of Lucy, something neither of us had ever done before.  Slowly we peeled the strips off the birds.  Cindy used the hand sanitizer we had in the coop to help dissolve the adhesive.  Obviously sticky fly strips are not going to be a good thing in the coop although neither Cindy or I gave any thought to the possibility of the scenario that went down last night.

Lucy continued scaring a lot of the chicks.  At one point Cindy was sitting down and had three or four chickens on her lap or arm, viewing her as safety.  It was very cute.  Despite the sun rapidly setting I wanted to try to quickly address the problem with the chicks sliding off the frame of the perch.  I quickly cut some small pieces of wood and attached them to both sides of the frame in between the perch locations, allowing the birds to climb up or get down from the perches in a more controlled manner.

As it got darker and darker in the coop things settled down.  There were a total of 9 birds on the perches with Lola, Jaina, and Kristen on the ground.  When we watched via the infrared web cam it looked like the chicks all fell asleep.  Lucy appeared to be awake and alert, hopefully she got at least some sleep during the night.

As I mentioned we have been trying to monitor the coop via the two wireless web cams we have in the coop.  The wifi signal strength out in the shed is marginal at best.  Sometimes we can get a steady feed but other times it won’t connect at all.  I began thinking about how much better it would be if I had a 1 gigabit hard line in the coop.  Not only would the web cams work flawlessly, I could even install a 4 camera dvr system out there, allowing us to monitor the inside and outside of the coop.  Is this even remotely necessary? No, but it would be undeniably cool.

I already investigated bury rated ethernet cable., which I could get in long lengths, up to 200 feet. The only remaining challenge would be how I would get the hard line routed from inside the house to outside in some manner that doesn’t involve drilling a hole through a wall.  When the house was built I actually ran some cat5E cable from the office to the utility panel in the garage which in turn could possibly be fished out the conduit where phone/cable comes in.  I would need to do some digging around to see what exactly I can do.   If I can get the cable out of the structure then it is just a matter of some grunt work which costs nothing but time.

This weekend seemed to be over way, way too quick.  On Saturday after weeding and a few other tasks I worked on setting up my test race in the front yard.  This was the first time I set everything up in anything close to real world conditions and it was a learning experience for sure.  I had my stop watch out to see how long it would take Cindy and I to set up a full 8 meters of mats, the maximum I would need to do for the start line of most races.

The design of the timing mats is quite different than the roll out mats Ipico uses.  From a runners perspective the design is definitely better,  The low profile, durable rubber mats will not present the same tripping hazard that the unavoidable wrinkles in the Ipico mats caused.  In heavy foot traffic situations the Ipico mats would also have a tendency to slide, again causing tripping concerns.  The interlocking design of the MyLaps mats combined with their grippy rubber bottoms should eliminate that problem.

From a time and set up perspective, the Ipico mats are much easier to deploy.  Simply unroll and connect one set of connectors to the timing box per mat.  The MyLaps mats are in shorter, 1 meter sections where the shortest Ipico mats are 2.5 meters in length so you need more MyLaps mats to cover the same distance.  However the real time consumer comes in setting up the cables.  Each mat has it’s own detachable cable that you have to connect at both ends.  On the mat side after attaching the connector you have to route the cable in one of the 8 rubber channels under a flap in the mat, back to the timing box.  If you are doing a full length of 8 meters this is not a quick process.  It took two people almost 15 full minutes to get the mats in place, cables routed, and hooked to the timing box.  For comparison sake I could do something similar with the Ipico system in probably 5 minutes.

Now to be fair this was the first time Cindy and I ever attempted this thus we surely were inefficient.  It took some trial and error to figure out which cables needed to go into which channel to prevent problems.  I am sure we will get faster at this process as time goes on but there is no doubt I need to allocate extra set up time for hardware set up at each race.

Once I got the start timing mats up Cindy strapped on 10 race bibs to simulate 10 runners.  I gave her a ready set go and had her run across the mats.  I then headed to my “finish line” which was a single mat in front of the garage.  I worked on getting the finish line up and running which is made simpler due to the fact the MyLaps boxes automatically synch themselves to GPS time, not requiring me to synch them with my laptop which in turn was synched with my atomic watch.

Once I had the finish mat up and running I started walking the bibs across the finish line to simulate the finish.  I had assigned the 10 bib numbers to various well known people of mine so it was funny to see the results posted which included the likes of Nicki, myself, Randall and even IronLoo (the virtual race winner). Importing the data into my timing software was not difficult at all.  I like the fact that my timing data is absolutely safe on the MyLaps box.  I can pull times off of it in real time or a week after the race if I wanted to.

Later on Cindy and I discovered another noteworthy issue with the rubber mats.  By the time we took them apart the sun had moved enough that the mats were now receiving direct sunlight.  They were BOILING hot, requiring me to grab my leather gloves to handle them.  Of course this was around mid-day, in race situations which are early in the morning the mats should not be able to collect enough heat to simulate this issue, hopefully.

On Saturday while Cindy was outside doing a brief bar park workout I got on the pull up bar, curious if I still could do a muscle up, despite not doing any of them for at least 3-4 months and doing next to no training of the movement over the last couple years.  Well I got my answer of yes, but if you watch the slo-mo video of it you will see two extremely sloppy reps.

Saturday night we decided to mix things up a bit.  Yes we still saw a movie but we did it at Silverspot Cinema in Mercato.  We really went crazy and had a meal at Mercato beforehand at Masa.  We were able to do the date night on the cheap since we had gift cards from Christmas for both places.

The dinner at Masa was very enjoyable.  The food was nothing short of fantastic.  The two Budweisers I drank were more than enough to raise my somewhat droopy mood I was in, thanks to being somewhat dehydrated from a lot of work outside during the day.  I was feeling stressed from two things.  The first was the uncertainty  of timing the upcoming July 4th race with the new hardware.  Not having a smaller, real world race under my belt with the new equipment prior to jumping headfirst into a nearly 1000 person 5k is a bit worrisome.

My second stress item was the chickens, big surprise.  I was worried about them integrating with Lucy and Lola and the long term care requirements our decision to have 13 chickens will present.  It seems like the last  3-4 months have been chicken crazy, first with the construction of the housing quarters and next the challenges of raising 11 chicks.  Now of course the VAST responsibility and workload for the chicks has been squarely on Cindy’s shoulders.  We both feel the work that has been needed has far exceeded what we expected.

I find myself wondering if we will ever get to the point where the chicken care will simplify along with a gradual reduction in the amount of time required in their care.  I know Cindy has had large blocks of each and every day gobbled up with chicken related items.  I was worried that this pattern would continue, making us feel somewhat shackled and unable to what we want because having a big ball of feathers over our heads.  Hopefully the integration, which started last night and I will cover more later is an important first step to more barnyard animal independence.

So the movie we saw was Tomorrowland, a film I had previously decided I would wait to see until it came out on Netflix.  Since there were no other must see films out right now we decided to accelerate our viewing of the film.  Well we could have waited.  The pace of the film was rather slow.  My eyes closed briefly a few times and Cindy reported she dosed off as well more than once.  The coolest thing about the film was the big budget special effects.  The movie was one big green peace message, something I support in the real world but did not make for a compelling storyline.   If you are a regular Fox News watcher you would probably hate the film.  To make matters worse it felt like somebody turned down the thermostat as the movie went on.  By the end of it Cindy and were both chilled to the bone.  Overall I’d rate the movie a B.  Certainly there is no need to rush out to catch it in theaters.

Sunday was Father’s Day.  When I walked out to the office I saw a plastic egg carton on my chair.  It was all decorated with pieces of paper in each egg slot.  Cindy can be very creative and thoughtful.  Each piece of paper had a personal note from each chicken, appropriately written based on their personalities.  The first one I happened to pull was for Kathy, whose paper had a little rainbow drawn on it.  My eyes got blurry with tears for a few moments.  The thoughtfulness of Cindy’s effort combined with thoughts of my mom was just very touching.  I can say assuredly that this was the nicest, sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me on Father’s Day.  The notes from the various chickens were quite funny.  I especially liked Lucy’s “I love you but don’t touch me”

We got out early on the bikes for a DD ride, although I still dare not run with my cranky right wheel I needed to at least do something.  Although I once again did not use a GPS for the ride we definitely picked up the pace.  Cindy is considering doing a duathlon next month, in order to do so we need to crank the intensity level back up a few clicks.  Once we got back Cindy almost immediately headed into the back yard to run 3 miles.  I was sure to wave to her as I cooled off in the pool while splashing Sadie.

A large portion of Sunday was planning for an integration of the 11 chicks with Lucy and Lola.  Cindy and I had somewhat of a role reversal on the subject.  I was more worried about them being under one roof because Lucy was sort of terrorizing the 11 babies when they were enclosed in the run together, pecking the head/back of any that were near her.  Although Cindy and I both know this is a normal part of integrating chicks, establishing pecking order, it still was upsetting.  We certainly didn’t want any of the babies seriously injured.

After we dropped the dogs back off at Ali’s late afternoon we turned our attention back to the chicken integration.  During the day the babies were out in the main run for a good portion of the day while Lucy and Lola free ranged.  The chicks discovered the area underneath the deck platform.  They seemed to enjoy the break it gave them from the brutal sun as well as the secure feeling they got with a low roof with a hardware cloth barrier.

As the sun started to set the chicks were getting very noisy and nervous, pacing back and forth in the run, expecting to be able to make their way back to the chicken tractor they have huddled in for the past several weeks at night.  At first we thought the chicks might actually choose to just stay out in the run so we started putting in some accommodations for them to do that.  However eventually a couple of the chicks went inside which is all that was needed to get most of the others to follow as chickens have a lot of lemming mentality.  We had to stuff a couple stragglers in the coop but for the most part they all willingly went in there.

Getting them into the coop was only half the battle.  Once inside a number of the chicks just started piling in the corners, not using the expansive and sturdy perch system we built last week.  Cindy tried no less than a half dozen layouts to make things workable for the babies.  After at least a half hour of futzing around she was able to get 5 or 6 of the chicks up on the perch with the rest hanging down below.  Once we turned the lights off everyone seemed to settle down.  When we woke up this morning and checked the web cam it appears everyone stayed put all night which was good. Cindy and I are hoping things improve from here and we can establish a less intrusive chicken maintenance pattern.

Last night we watched The Power of Everything, the movie about Stephen Hawking.  I heard it was good and the lead actor was nominated for and I think won the Oscar for best actor award.  Early on Cindy and I were struggling to make out the dialogue, I kept progressively turning the volume up on the surround system.  Even before he was deeply symptomatic it was tough to understand.  Later on in the movie they really could have used subtitles to help the audience make out what was being said.  It was kind of annoying to be honest best guessing all the time about what was being said.

The movie did a good job depicting the incredible resiliency Stephen has demonstrated throughout his life as well as the massive toll it took on his family, especially his first wife.  It is amazing he was told as a young man he had two years to live and when the movie was released he was now 72 years old.  The actor who played Hawking, whom ironically came off as absolutely horrible in Jupiter Ascending, did an amazing job depicting the the physical aspects of Hawkings ailment.

Despite appropriately using the words “incredible” and “amazing” to describe  the accomplishments of Stephen Hawking, overall the movie didn’t grab me all that much.  Like I said, not being able to clearly understand large portions of the dialogue didn’t help matters.  It’s a solid B rental for me.

Yesterday I left work a little early so I would have time to work on yet another chicken project at home, a new coop perch.  The perch we have in the coop was built by Cindy.  Although Lucy has been quite content perching on it at night it is constructed out of mostly 2 inch lumber which just isn’t very sturdy.  It was also made before we knew we would be housing a total of 13 chickens at night. Cindy had been looking at various other designs on the internet and settled on one.  She bought the lumber for it earlier in the week so I had everything I needed after she handed me the sketch she drew up with dimensions.

Pretty much the entire time the skies looked quite menacing.  We had some light rain dropping on us and had a serenade of thunder through most of the build.  I was in tunnel vision mode, I was going to get the perch done, pretty much no matter what.

The design Cindy found is good and with 2×4’s as the frame it is very solid.  In total there are 5 perches, each 46″ long, giving the chickens a wide variety of perching locations depending on where they are on the pecking order.  The angle design prevents chickens higher on the ladder from pooping on those beneath them, an important feature. I lost count of how many times Cindy said “I am so excited!” during the build process.

We had the baby chickens out free ranging with Lucy and Lola while the build was going on.  They seem to be integrating better and better.  For a period of time Lucy and Lola were inside the chick’s coop eating their food.  It was a funny visual.  Cindy was anxious to get the new perch done because she is feeling more and more comfortable with the idea of all 13 birds being together based on how things have been going the last week.

So yesterday I did the first steps in planning a potential 2015 road trip.  The plan is in a word, big.  The route I tentatively mapped out has five potential key destinations, Mt Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, Craters of the Moon, Bonneville Salt Flats, and the Hoover Dam.  To hit all of these destinations adds up 6000 miles plus of roadway which is a big number.

I have actually been to all of these places before minus the Salt Flats in prior road trips with Ali.  Despite that I am quite interested in revisiting them again because my first time through we had canines in tow which created pretty significant restrictions on what we could and couldn’t do. Plus the idea of showing Cindy some of these national treasures is exciting for me, she appreciates it so much.

There is a long list of hurdles to clear and ducks to line up before I can make this happen.  Not only do I need to steer clear of other reserved vacation blocks at work, I also have to dance around the races I am responsible for timing.  There is also the requirement of finding somebody very reliable and responsible to tend to chickens and Tuki while we would be gone.  Finally there is the monetary pressure what is sure to be around a two week trip would apply.  The fuel efficiency of the Prius is a big help in this regard but there will be tons of dollars involved in a trip of this size. I will start trying to knock down the hurdles one at a time today.

This weekend I have work to do outside of my normal circle of to do’s.  I have a server upgrade at work that needs to be handled and extensive testing of the new timing hardware that needs to be completed.  I plan to literally set up a race in my back yard with Cindy being my guinea pig.  Although I have timed something like 150 races, this will be my first time doing it with something other than Ipico hardware in the last 7-8 years.  I need to get familiar enough with the MyLaps hardware so I know how to handle at least the basic, common problems that can pop up during a race.

There is also a good chance that by the end of the weekend all 13 chickens will be housed under one roof.

Yes I read about the shootings at the church in South Carolina.  Yes it is horrible and another painful example of how sick the human mind can become.  Is there anything I can say to add insight or clarification as to why this happens? Nope.

Last night Cindy and I worked on preparing race bibs with the new MyLaps timing chips.  Peeling and sticking the chips to the bibs is much easier than the Ipico bib chips which are huge in comparison.  However we quickly identified another issue.  Because of the thickness of foam that protects each timing device it makes stacking/storing the bibs difficult and much more demanding space-wise.

A large shoe box that used to be able to accommodate 250 bibs with Ipico chips now can barely hold 100 of the bibs with MyLaps chips.  Since I have 3000 chips/bibs this could quickly present a large storage issue.  I also need to be able to transport the finished bibs in some manner that keeps them from falling out while minimizing the space taken up.

Cindy came up with a good idea as far as storing the bibs at the house.  In the guest room we have a bunch of empty drawers.  Cindy pulled one of them out and discovered that 300 completed bibs fit in there quite well.  We have something like six empty drawers, meaning we wouldn’t have enough room for all 3000 bibs but we could house over half of them in this manner.  Since I only need around 1000 bibs ready for the next race that is all we are focusing on getting done short term.   For our two large races we do each year (2500 each) I think we would need to have some running club people lend a hand to cut down on the amount of time the bib prep process would take.

While we were prepping bibs we were watching my latest Netflix rental, Boiler Room, an old movie that I never saw in it’s entirety.  I added it to my queue after seeing a brief clip where Ben Affleck reams a room full of stock broker trainees.  The movie was quite good and gave an in depth view into just how slimy the financial/stock industry can be.  A-

I just received a Nuvi 2597LMT GPS yesterday.  It may be seen as an odd purchase by most since I already have a relatively new Tom Tom GPS that we used on our last road trip.  The Tom Tom works well but had a couple holes that annoyed me.  It includes lifetime maps but if you want traffic alerts you had to pay extra for the service.  It also had no bluetooth phone calling which made no sense to me considering the device has Bluetooth support to connect to the Tom Tom app on my phone.  It’s silly that the device has a mic, a speaker, bluetooth capability but no ability to take/make hands free calls. Well the Garmin addresses both of those holes with free lifetime maps, traffic and BT hands free calling.

This morning on my way to work I had both GPS devices up and running in the Prius.  I still have a lot of digging around in the Garmin to figure out how to fully get around the unit.  The device seems nice and I like the default information shown on the Nuvi when you are just driving around in map mode more than the Tom Tom.  I did notice a couple things where the Tom Tom has the edge.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to do a conventional overhead view on the Nuvi where the screen looks more like a big Google map.  Sometimes I like this view to get an overall picture of the surrounding streets.  The Tom Tom allows me to flip between overhead and the first person view that the Nuvi appears to use exclusively.

The Tom Tom mounting hardware is also slicker than what the Garmin uses.  With the Tom Tom the charging cable attaches to the mount instead of directly into the GPS, allowing you to easily pop the unit out of the mount and store it when you aren’t driving.  The mount is magnetized, making removal and insertion of the Tom Tom very easy. The Nuvi uses a much more low tech mount with a clumsy latch that you have to release. The usb power cable plugs directly into the gps so when you disconnect the gps you have to address the cable as well which is a pain.

I think overall the Nuvi will still be my preferred navigator of choice because of the phone support.  I hate trying to dig out/answer my phone when driving.  Being able to do this effortlessly in the Prius (already can do it in the Tacoma), will be a nice tech convenience.

Cindy was a mowing machine yesterday, mowing the entire property inside the fence.  When the back of the property is mowed it makes everything look great.  Did I mention how nice it is to have tasks like this done while I am at work?

Last night after work I drove the Tacoma up onto the ramps to get the oil change done.  When I looked at my maintenance log I was surprised that the last time I did one was in December.  I am used to more frequent oil changes with the truck however since I am taking the Prius to work more often than not nowadays, there are less miles getting put on the truck.  The Tacoma now has over 180,000 miles on it and is still running well.  I have put more miles on the truck than any other vehicle in my lifetime.

The reason I wanted to get the oil change out of the way was so I had one less thing to attend to over the weekend.  I need to do some extensive testing of the new timing system this weekend, part of that includes getting 3000 timing devices affixed to 3000 race bibs.  I am trying to keep my weekend workload light to facilitate getting the race timing stuff done.

I also need to work on building a revised perching rig for the coop that will be better suited to accommodating the 11 baby chicks when they move in.  Cindy is more open to integrating the baby chicks with the adults sooner rather than later after seeing how they have been doing when we let them briefly free range after work the last couple days.  Lucy is still giving the chicks pecks on the back/head if she feels they are infringing on her food access but as long as there is enough food and enough space for the chicks to escape it should be ok.

Cindy and I need to start doing some loose planning about a potential 2015 road trip.  The chickens add a layer of consideration in the process.  I am worried about them being restricted to the coop/run exclusively for an extended period.  The answer would be to have someone willing to hang out while they roam around a bit each day which is not going to be easy.  We need to see how many days we could do, how far we could get reasonably in that amount of time, and how much money we can afford to spend.