We spent much of the day helping some friends move into a new house. The kids helped too, mostly by staying out of the way and doing stuff like this:
the first return on our avian investment.
Behold! The first egg from our little flock of laying hens.
When I factor in the cost for the flock, the feed, the labor, and that deluxe chicken house and run, that egg is worth about three grand.
cluckheim calls for aid.
The new patio, pieced together from leftover granite and marble countertop pieces.
A little while ago I was out on the new patio area, putting together some planters and trinkets the wife had ordered for the new outdoor space. As I was screwing together the driftwood planter, I heard the characteristic “red alert” bawk-bawk-bawking of panicked chickens. I dropped my tools and sprinted through the covered porch and into the front yard, thinking that a weasel or fox had gotten into Cluckheim Keep despite our iron-clad security setup.
As I ran into the front yard with the shotgun, I saw the cause for the chicken distress swoop out of the sky and hit the chicken run a second time: a buzzard, almost as big as one of our Barred Rock hens (and they are large birds.) He flew off and settled on a tree branch at the edge of the yard.
I brought up the Remington and put the front sight bead on him. It would have been an easy shot, maybe twenty-five yards, a no-brainer with a full choke on a sitting bird.
He just looked at me and the chicken coop as if to say Screw you and your boomstick, hairless ape.
I turned the gun over to the hillside for a safe backstop and let off a shell to scare him off. He looked, spread his wings, and flew off in no particular hurry, as if he knew that he’s a protected species. (Not that I would have shot him even if he wasn’t—they eat rodents and other pests and are way too beautiful to kill, and the chickens are safe from him in the run in any case.)
In summary: birds of prey are beautiful, everything out here in the woods eats chickens, and a solid run enclosed in half-inch hardware cloth is a chicken’s best friend in these parts.
battleship.
My friend Mark went to visit USS Iowa (BB-61). Being a 3D animator type, he took a metric crapton of detail pictures. If you’ve never been on an Iowa-class battleship, or you’re just a sucker for those big-ass ships and their big-ass guns, his Picasa page of the trip is worth a look.
crayola davinci.
Oh, this gave me a much-needed laugh today:
Amateur botches Spanish fresco restoration
The once-dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic, [the BBC correspondent] says.
just around the riverbend.
When we moved to New Hampshire, we tossed our joint collection of CDs into a bunch of boxes. After our move, they languished in the garage for a good long while before I got around to sorting through them and ripping worthy stuff into iTunes.
One of the CDs I found in the wife’s half of the collection was the soundtrack to the Disney movie Pocahontas. Being an open-minded fellow and a sucker for movie soundtracks, I checked the whole thing out from start to finish several times. Half the tracks are instrumental, and the other half are the vocal tracks of the musical performances. The CD is really good from an artistic and technical perspective–both the instrumental and the vocal portions–but the stuff that really stood out to me was the parts featuring Judy Kuhn.
I’m fiercely attracted to talent, and even though I don’t have a finger on the pulse of the musical or classical music scene, I know that Judy Kuhn was–and is–a major talent. She performed all the singing parts of Pocahontas in the movie. The eye-opening contrast was the song “Colors of the Wind”, particularly the two versions on the CD. You see, the commercially known version is performed by Vanessa Williams, and that’s the one that took off in the ’90s and won a shit-ton of awards. The movie version is performed by Judy Kuhn, and it didn’t have the commercial exposure of the Vanessa Williams version. As a piece of vocal performance, however, it’s the far superior musical accomplishment. Vanessa Williams has a lovely voice, to be sure, but her version of “Colors of the Wind” is a very un-subtle 1990s ballad that hasn’t aged very well, especially when contrasted with Judy Kuhn’s no-frills performance of the same song. Kuhn’s classically trained soprano just blows Williams’ version away in its power and simplicity. No orchestral bombast, no tricks, just a strong voice and a clear, powerful tune. I just love raw displays of talent like that, and it makes me wish I could carry a tune.
Anyway, that’s what art is about, isn’t it? It makes us stand in awe and want to emulate it, makes us strive to transcend the caffeine-dependent lumps of inertia we are, at least for a little while. I don’t call myself a spiritual person, but if there is such a thing as spirituality, it’s what I feel when I listen to Judy Kuhn’s soprano belt out a beautiful song. Art may not generate stuff to eat or structures to shelter us, but it’s as essential to our species as grain cultivation. It makes the whole survival business worthwhile.
from the castle frostbite cocktail labs.
I think up cocktail recipe. You mix. You drink. Is good.
The Ginny Weasley
In a highball glass:
- 2 oz. gin
- 1 oz. vodka
- Splash of grenadine for color
- Fill up with ginger ale
It’s a nice, refreshing summer drink that packs a bit of a punch. Serve on the rocks or straight up.
a shack of one’s own.
Neil Gaiman has one.
Roald Dahl had one.
So did Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, and a bunch of other famous inkslingers.
I am, of course, talking about a writing shed. The idea for one (or the obsession with it, however you want to look at it) has been firmly planted in my brain for a while now, and my desire for one of my own grows stronger as the distractions in the house get more frequent.
I have the main computer set up at the standing desk in the living room, but I can’t really do any work there that requires focus. Not only am I in the middle of all the house ruckus generated by two kids and four dogs, but I’m also accessible to everyone. So a little writing shed on the property away from the house a bit sounds more wonderful with each passing year. I mean, I put up an 8×10’ chicken house, and we had the handyman attach a 10×12’ run with a proper roof. If the chickens can have such a spacious condo, why shouldn’t I be able to mark off a flat 8×8’ patch of ground somewhere on our ten acres and then put a little private hut up in that spot? No plumbing, no Internet, no electricity—well, maybe an extension cord for a space heater for the winter—but otherwise nothing but a desk, a bookshelf, and a spot for ink bottles and such.
Two weeks ago we went over to some friends for dinner. They have a little 8×8 playhouse on their property which our friend built for his daughter. It has a properly high ceiling suitable for adult use, it has a proper door and windows, and it’s just big enough for a couch and a play rug—the perfect size for a little writing den free of distractions and cat-waxing opportunities.
I asked him how long it took to build that little playhouse.
“Oh, that just took me two days,” he said.
*blink*
I told him about my desire for a writing hut of my own, and lamented my lack of carpentry skills. He said he’d be glad to help me with it. So I offered him all the beer and pizza he cares to consume in exchange for his assistance. Now I just need to stake out a suitable spot on the grounds of Castle Frostbite, and then sell an extra freelance article or short story to get together the play money for the lumber, but then Project Writing Hut is a go.
yo, rocky.
He keeps stopping by once or twice a week even though he can’t get into the coop. Maybe he just likes having his picture taken.
weekend recap.
My old school friend Joerg stopped by for the weekend. He is on a business trip to Ontario, and he had the time to visit with us for two days, so I did my best to play New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce. On Saturday, I took him for a drive down to southern NH (with a stopover at Chez Vachon in Manchester for a poutine lunch), and on Sunday we just relaxed at the house and caught up on stuff over good food and a fair amount of flavored ethanol.
(Joerg was my desk neighbor in high school, which means I’ve known him for almost thirty years. When we were driving around, I asked him if that means we’re getting old, and he emphatically rejected the notion.)
The kids were out of the house all day yesterday. Trusted friends of ours took their grandkids to Water Country for the day, and they asked if our two wanted to tag along, which they did. So we had a quiet house yesterday, which was actually a little unnerving.
Thanks for all the kind words and condolences regarding our Miss Guinevere. She will come home in an urn early this week at some point. It’s still strange not to see her come into the kitchen at feeding time, or walk by her corner where she usually napped under a blanket and not see her snoozing there. But it was her time, she was in horrible pain, and in the end, we did her a kindness.
This morning I’ve already sent my friend on his way back over to Ontario for a fun week of business meetings. Now I get to put away laundry, clean the house again for tomorrow’s play date, and get a thousand words or so in on the work in progress. I KNOW, THE GLAMOUR, RIGHT?
Oh, and we humans put a nuclear-powered car on Mars last night. How cool is that? Science—it works.