aminals. castle frostbite.

fox two.

Another fox grabbed a chicken on the front lawn just a little while ago. I ran out, and he let go of the chicken and ran off. This time, I didn’t have a good shot, and he was running toward the public road anyway.

Two hours of patrolling and coaxing later, I have seven chickens in the chicken house, and one very traumatized chicken in the underbrush behind it. She lost a bunch of feathers and won’t let me come near her. I’ll have to see if she collects herself enough to com back to the coop. One of the araucanas is missing. That puts us at eight, seven if the injured araucana doesn’t gather herself enough to let me coop her up before nightfall.

Yeah, they’re wild animals, doing what predators do, but right now I am not feeling charitable toward foxes. I put a lot of work into those chickens.

I’ll have to go to Home Despot and buy some lumber and chicken wire for a large chicken run. It seems we have a few too many predators running around here to make free-ranging chickens a wise proposition.

this monkey house.

the downsides of green policies.

The German magazine Der Spiegel has a great article on the unintended consequences of Germany’s strict environmental regulations and their effects on everyday life.

This plays into what I mentioned in an earlier blog post: that to a lot of policymakers and voters, negative results of a policy are almost entirely irrelevant as long as the intent is proper. (The corollary is that a positive result of a policy is also irrelevant if the intent wasn’t proper.) In the end, then, it’s not about helping the ecosystem, it’s about the practitioners feeling as though they are.

aminals. castle frostbite.

dachshunds with disabilities.

After a few nighttime incidents with Elderly Dog, the Castle now sports a handful of handicapped access ramps for geriatric dachshunds:

IMG_0678IMG_0677IMG_0681There’s another contraption on the dog door that leads into the garage. It’s a nifty ramp that can be raised and lowered from the inside of the house. That makes four special handicapped access ramps in the house for the benefit of Elderly Dog, who can no longer hop over the ledges by herself.

When you have five dogs, we don’t really have a month that passes without some sort of dog-related expense. There are vaccination boosters, small and moderate injuries, regular check-ups, emergency visits…all I know is that if I had all the money we’ve spent on vet bills in a pile on my kitchen table, we could easily buy a new and not-too-shabby car and then use the rest of the cash to all go to Germany on vacation for a month. But you do what you have to do to keep your Animal-American Non-Human Companions safe and comfy.

capitalism.

the holy grail of joysticks.

This flight sim setup is sick and excessive and way too expensive for a peripheral, and I want one. Oh, yes, I do.

I don’t have the optimism to “add to wish list” or “save it for later”. My entire PC before the add-on video card and the beefier power supply cost only very slightly more than that HOTAS setup. I could—and would—buy a bunch of other shiny things before I could see myself dropping almost half a grand on a joystick. But yeah, that’s pretty swank right there. The only way you can get more control realism is if you break into an Air Force base and steal a stick and throttle setup out of an actual A-10.

in the news. masters and servants.

most transparent administration evar.

So the White House is asserting “executive privilege” on the release of the Fast & Furious documents to the House committee.

What the hell is “executive privilege”? Does it have something to do with the restroom use at the White House, or maybe toll-free calls from the phone in the Oval Office. I don’t rightly know, because my copy of the Constitution says precisely fuck-all about “executive privilege”.

You know, that’s part of the reason why we’re a Constitutional republic—so the #1 public employee can’t assert special rights. You let them claim “executive privilege” when it comes to testimony in Congressional committees, and sooner or later you’ll end up with a Chief Executive who dresses in fantasy uniforms and renames the days of the week after maternal ancestors or favorite race horses.

bullets & links.

bullets & links.

  • Gogol Bordello. Holy shit, why haven’t I heard of these guys before? It’s exactly what it says on the tin—gypsy punk—and for some reason I can’t stop listening to it. Robin hates the one song she has heard so far, but you know what they say about taste. Let’s just say that the Vanilla Ice “To The Extreme” CD that I found in our combined CD collections after we got married wasn’t mine.
  • Readercon. I’ll be there for most of the weekend, from Friday afternoon to Sunday noon-ish. Most of the Viable Paradise crew from last year will be there again, and I’ll get to meet a few new VPers I’ve only met on the Intertwitters so far. This is my one big con event for the year—I go to Boskone as well, but only for the day on Saturday—so I’m looking forward to talking shop and destroying ethanol with some of my favorite unsavory writer types again.
  • A Swedish zookeeper was eaten by wolves. She was delicious.
  • I finally finished watching all the Avengers precursor movies. The last one on the list was 2008’s Hulk. All of them were perfectly serviceable and entertaining, but if I had to put them in a ranking, it would go Iron Man > Thor > Iron Man 2 > Captain America > Hulk. It seems we needed to get to 2012 until a SFX crew managed a CGI Hulk that doesn’t look like he was Rotoscoped out of  a mediocre video game.
  • Chicken count: still 9. They needed a bit of coaxing to accept their new digs. The first night, I had to get their little wooden coop out and move it to its original location, at which point they all breathed a collective “Thank fuck” and filed in to roost for the night. Then I had to carry the coop back into Cluckheim Keep, chickens and all. The second evening, we had to corral them and herd the flock into the Keep. The third evening, I just had to kind of walk them in, no coaxing required. Now they actually use the roosting spots in the Keep to hang out during the day, so they must be taking to it.
  • Friend Mark pointed me to a website that sells repackaged old DOS games, rigged with DOSbox to be playable on modern Windows XP/Vista/7 boxes. (All the games are licensed from their original copyright holders.) Just for nostalgia, I bought a copy of Wing Commander III for $5.99. If you young whippersnappers want to check out what kind of games we old geezers played on our 50-megahertz 486s with 8MB of RAM, there are some fine classic examples of 1990s PC gaming on there for a song and a dance. The graphics are way dated now, of course, but the games are still fun, and surprisingly complex for programs that had to fit into 1/1000th the memory you carry around in your cell phone today.

Thus endeth today’s linkapalooza. Now I have to make some lunch to feed the beasts, and the chickens, too.

books. writing.

the forever war.

It appears that Joe Haldeman’s excellent Military SF novel “The Forever War” is on sale for the Kindle for a measly $4.95. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should, and if you have, you should get a Kindle copy anyway just because.

I’d have to lie if I said that “The Forever War” wasn’t at least somewhat in the back of my brain when I wrote my own MilSF novels. (The first one is still in Slushpile Hell, and the second one, being a sequel to the first, will probably not get any traction until #1 is sold.)

 

aminals. castle frostbite.

chicken fortress.

The chickens have a new home, the mighty Cluckheim Keep.

005

003

There are some leveling and roof issues to be worked out this weekend, but Cluckheim Keep should be reasonably fortified against predators. They can’t tunnel into it, and those walls are pretty hard to chew through.

aminals. castle frostbite. new hampshah.

it’s a northern frost toad. they eat granite.

007Tiny toad.

013

Miss Lyra with Tiny Toad.

That girl is absolutely fearless and non-squeamish when it comes to getting dirty and handling critters. Her brother is a bit more cautious in that respect. He would have looked at the toad, but he wouldn’t have touched it. And he wouldn’t have come running, toad between thumb and forefinger, and said, “Look what I found outside, Daddy!”

My little girl…the headstrong princess who takes a sword to the dragon to defend her play castle, and who comes inside after a day of play with scuffed knees and dirty fingernails.

this monkey house.

i will physically kill you. do you understand me?

“Rachel from Cardholder Services” did not heed my warning. Rachel is now on my Wood Chipper List. That’s a technical term that describes a list I’ve made of people who will be….gently corrected…once I have taken over.

I used to be nice, or at least reasonably polite, with people who cold-call the house to beg for donations or sell me something. These days, as I am older and a bit more cranky, I no longer make an effort at civility. I don’t give a shit who you are or what you are selling–call my number uninvited and try to get money from me for whatever reason, I will respond to you wasting my time by being as harsh with you as the situation warrants. And that goes doubly if you try to talk over me, interrupt me, or refuse to take my first “NO” for an answer.

Among my major pet peeves are guilt trip donation calls for the Orphaned Unborn State Trooper Babies Association (“But they keep you SAFE, sir.”), calls from the aforementioned “Rachel” (a known scam operation), political polls (ESPECIALLY the heavily leading ones where the questions are along the lines of “Were you aware of the fact that Candidate Thatguy cannot conclusively prove that he doesn’t eat foil-wrapped babies for dinner?”), and any sort of robocall that asks me to hold for a person. If I don’t hang up right away, defensive phone tactics include talking to them in irate German, asking them in a breathy voice what they are wearing (male and female alike), asking them to “hold on” and then putting the phone aside for an hour, or telling them (in a bad pseudo-Russian accent) that they’ve reached the embassy of the Kingdom of Upper Cryogenica, and would they mind holding while the ambassador finishes his karaoke session with the Sultan of Absurdistan?

Spammers. I swear, if it wasn’t for the shitty cell reception here at Castle Frostbite, I would have ditched the landline years ago.