Beating back the impulse, 4 pounder, silly season, chicken housing development, B
So on Friday after work I was pretty sure I was going to wind up driving home with a new TV. I brought the truck to work so I would have the hauling capacity needed for a 75 inch tv. In total I went to three different retailers, Best Buy, Costco, and Sam’s. I went to Best Buy first as they obviously had the biggest selection. The 75 inch tv’s are on display in the “Magnolia” area of Best Buy, the high end room where there are sofa’s and lot’s of big screens.
I wound up talking to a couple of the sales guys there. They all pushed 4K tv’s hard, saying there was really no choice to be made, 4K is the future. I discussed with them some of the info I had read regarding 4K like how after you are more than a half dozen feet away from the screen, your eye can no longer discern the difference in resolution. I told them with my layout at home my couch is approximately 12 feet from the tv. They did not agree with my statement and wanted me to see for myself.
In front of one of the couches was 70 inch Sony 4K tv that was currently playing Avengers in 1080p via an attached Blu-Ray player, it looked good. I estimated my distance from the set as about 10 feet. The sales guy then popped in a USB drive that had native 4K video on it and asked me if I saw a difference, even at 10 feet back. The 1080P Avengers video looked great, the native 4K content looked amazing. The detail and visuals almost seemed better than real life if I was standing there. Ok they made their point.
My other counter 4K argument was the lack of 4K content currently. 3D tv originally was touted to be available everywhere eventually and instead the exact opposite happened, it dried up and went away. I think the odds of that happening with 4K is less but still possible. The sales guys pointed out that Netflix already has streaming 4K content with others reportedly ready to hop on board in the near future.
I then mentioned to them that my current intention was to buy a 75 inch 1080P set, specifically a certain Samsung model. They immediately tossed mud at that idea, first because it was ONLY 1080P and that it was Samsung’s low end model which only has a real refresh rate of 60HZ, despite it being advertised on the box as 120hz through some fuzzy math. Hearing that the tv I was close to pulling the trigger on was a low end set sort of let the air out of my balloon. Thinking about dropping a good chunk of money for a non 4K set that has now been flagged as “low end” did not excite me. I thanked them for the info and headed out with much less tv buying spring in my step.
I swung into Costco which was a few doors down to see my options there, which was the same Samsung 75 incher Best Buy staff just looked down their noses at. I then headed to Sam’s where I was buying some groceries and looked again there. By the time I was walking in from the parking lot I had already had an internal dialogue with the impulsive, illogical portion of my brain that was obsessing about a new tv. I realized that for what I would spend on a new tv I could basically pay for an entire western road trip, which I value more.
The bottom line is my current 73 inch set has a few annoying holes in it’s capabilities due to it’s age, (lack of enough HDMI ports, no digital audio port, no internet connectivity) but it still works and looks fine. Until that is no longer the case I need to just sit on the sidelines and reap the rewards as the prices of 4K tv’s drop as is always the case the longer a technology is on the market. When I get a tv I will likely hold onto it for a good 7-8 years so I want to make sure I invest wisely.
On Saturday while Cindy was doing some of the seemingly endless baby chicken maintenance, she picked up Jaina, the cornish hen and took her inside. Jaina is huge, something common for the breed as they are primarily raised for meat. Cindy wanted to see just how huge she was. So she weighed herself while holding the bird and solo. The number was a pretty amazing 4 pounds. For her to weigh that much this quickly was incredible. For reference you may recall that when the vet weighed Lola she came in at scarce one pounds and three ounces. We can only imagine how large Jaina will be as a true adult chicken. Unfortunately cornish hens do not typically have a long life span, if allowed to they will literally eat themselves to death. Cindy is hoping that her being allowed to free range will help stave off morbid obesity.
Before we were ready to head out to run some errands I was in the driveway. I spun around and all of sudden had a male pit bull looking at me. He seemed friendly so I called him over. After letting him give me the sniff test I started petting him. Cindy was startled by the dog and her first thought was keeping him away from the garage since the door was open with the 11 chicks inside the coop. Pit Bulls and chickens are not going to mix well.
Cindy got the door closed and came over to the dog as well. He had a collar but no tags. He had a few small open wounds, one on his ear and a couple other places. Of course my first assumption was the dog was from one of the idiots that unfortunately live in our area that think nothing of leaving their dogs outside full time. These same people also often don’t put much priority on making sure their animals are safely contained.
We filled a container with water which the dog drank from several times. I wanted to give him some treats/food but Cindy didn’t think it was a good idea unless we wanted him to stick around. If I didn’t have a long list of things I wanted to get done on Saturday, the best option would be to load up the dog in the truck and take him to domestic animal services where his owner could hopefully find him although for the dog’s sake, he may better off being re-homed. Instead we let the pit bull head off with us hoping he knew where home was and was heading that way. I felt guilty and somewhat irresponsible as we drove off.
So as I mentioned, Cindy has been finding that very large portions of her days are being consumed by chicken maintenance, specifically trying to keep ahead of the baby chicks and the mess they create. In retrospect, getting 11 chicks was probably a bit more of a bite than we should be chewing. Part of the problem is space. In order to clean the chicken tractor properly the chicks can not be in it. For the last couple weeks we have been using the run portion of the chicken tractor for that purpose, flipped upside down in the yard so we can grab the chickens easier.
Well the unannounced arrival of the pit bull put a scare into Cindy. She imagined if the baby chickens were outside in the run when the dog showed up. It could have been potentially disastrous. Well when we got to Rural King a viable solution was in front of me. They had a small, put together yourself chicken coop and run on sale. It was constructed in much the same manner as the original coop I bought off Ebay which I quickly unloaded due to it’s lack of long term viability. This coop cost less than half of what I paid for the first one and after unboxing and assembling it at home, seemed to actually be built a little better.
At first our thought was to just let the chickens hang in the new secondary coop in the front yard during the day, giving Cindy free access to clean the main coop. After putting the chicks in there they looked cramped. Even though the coop is elevated with space underneath, 11 chicks add up quickly. I then came up with a secondary idea, mating the run from the chicken tractor with the new coop via one of the doors. When I first mentioned the idea to Cindy she was skeptical but once we worked out a few logistics it actually was pretty cool. Adding the run into the equation gave the chicks a lot of real estate to run around in and they took advantage of it. It seems like this will be a good stop gap measure until we are able to do a full merging of the babies with the two adult hens in the backyard.
Saturday night we attended the final home game for the Tarpons which was morphed into a championship game as I described last week due to one of the teams being suspended. The Tarpons were scheduled to play the Rio Grande Valley Sol, a team from Texas that had the second best record in the league. For this reason I was very confused when we stepped into the arena and saw RAIDERS listed on the scoreboard as the away team. When I saw the players from the other team on the field it confirmed that actually the Florida Marine Raiders were here. What the fck??
So I looked online for some explanation of why the conjured up championship game was changed once again, with no prior notice. No explanation was available online. The following morning I saw a post that stated that on Friday the Sol pulled out of the game, citing transportation issues as the problem, probably meaning they had no money to pay for the trip to south Florida. Since the Raiders are just across Alligator Alley I guess they were the best fit, regardless of their actual placement in the standings. It was just another comical twist in this season. The past few years have just been one lol moment after another as the league tries to prop itself up as legitimate where the reality is the entire thing is a house of cards.
The game itself was pretty good in the first half with only one point separating the teams on the scoreboard. The second half however was all Tarpons with them pulling away for a 30+ point victory. I drank a lot of beer, four large Budweiser drafts. As they took affect I found myself less interested in the game and more interested in the man I referred to as “the seat nazi”. This was the same guy that a couple games ago asked to see our tickets, despite us not being in his assigned section, to make sure we weren’t seat jumpers.
He is older, has a big belly and a scraggly looking goatee. He peers out thorough his glasses at the sparsely filled seats, looking incessantly for people not following the rules and or sitting in a seat not assigned to them. Don’t get me wrong, generally speaking I am a fan of rules and in an event where seating is at a premium, people jumping down to better seats is annoying. But this is a Tarpons football game, 65-75% of the seats were unoccupied. To me common sense needs to be applied in a balanced manner with the rules. The seat nazi did not share this belief, repeatedly Cindy and I watched him walk up into the seating area to reprimand seat offenders for no good reason outside of stroking his personal need to wield power upon others. It just was stupid.
Cindy and I stayed to the very end to watch the Tarpons nail down their “championship” but it sort of rung hollow. Despite the Tarpons best efforts it didn’t prevent me feeling like it was a fake accomplishment from a league that makes up the rules as they go to compensate for the very shaky financial footer it is built upon. My post to the Taarpons FB page asking if they planned to be back for 2016 has gone unanswered. I suspect the silence means Cindy and I have watched the last game in franchise history. At least it ended on a positive note, sort of.
Sunday morning Cindy and I slept in a bit. The four beers and getting to bed after midnight lent itself to the late departure from bed. Sunday was the Naples Fitness Challenge, an event I participated in a few times, including last year as a team effort with Randall and Cindy. Not even being on site made me feel a bit like a loser and for a period of time made me feel like I should get my ass on the bike or something, despite my still present knee/IT band pain, just to prove a point to noone but myself. I did not act on that feeling and instead distracted myself with more chores/projects around the house.
I did some work getting the four MyLaps timing boxes configured for real world use. Before they are put into real world testing I need to set up a practice 5K in the back yard where I totally simulate the steps I will go through on race day. It’s very important I have that blueprint laid out ahead of time, backed up with real testing of that blueprint to identify flaws before they matter.
I had an unexpected task laid on me when my neighbor asked if I could take a look at her laptop which was not connecting to the internet. I expected the fix to be easy, instead I was working on it on and off for several hours as I watched Spiderman on tv. It’s still not fixed. This is the very reason that I avoid working on people’s computers as a favor. Those favors more often than not translate into hours of frustration for me.
Sunday evening we watched 3 Days to a Kill, what I thought was a Liam Neeson, Taken style of flick, except with the lead role played by Kevin Costner. It was an odd film. It did have aspects of a regular action movie but then it also had a slapsticky side with a side order of chick flick. As a whole the movie was ok but the weird mix kept it from getting higher than a B rating in my book.