this monkey house.

tying a knot in it for mother gaia.

One of the silliest things I’ve seen in a long time—the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. These are folks who think the human race should stop procreating until we die out and the biosphere can recover.

There was a community here in Enfield that practiced a small-scale version of the VHEMT. They were called the Shakers. They didn’t procreate (or have sex at all), so they died out, which is not exactly a shocking development for a religious community that can only gain members through adoption or conversion. The village is still there, and it has some beautifully constructed buildings on it. The Great Stone Dwelling is particularly impressive. It’s made of granite and was designed to house 150 people. The Catholics bought Shaker Village and then resold it, and now it’s mostly private residences sitting on prime real estate overlooking Mascoma Lake.

Human reproduction, tied to our most basic biological urge, is pretty much impossible to suppress, and any organization dedicated to the eradication of it has no chance of convincing more than just a statistically insignificant number of followers. 

things that go boom.

calling the scattergun experts.

I said in the comments to the post about the fox that I use only birdshot in my shotgun because of its age and the fact that it has a full choke, but to tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure. (If in doubt, play it safe, especially when you’re dealing with things that generate ten thousand PSI of pressure right next to your face.)

But there have to be people out there in Internet land who know for sure—is it safe to fire buckshot or slugs out of that particular scattergun? We’re talking about a Remington Model 11 (the Remington version of the Browning Auto-5), 1935 vintage, with a full choke, friction rings stacked for heavy loads. What say the jurors?

intertubes flotsam. parenting.

do you have volume discounts?

Best fake ad ever. If you’re a parent, you’ll find it hysterically funny. If you’re not, you may find it a wee bit offensive. Either way, put that drink away before you click “play”.

aminals.

I just had to go and thumb my nose at fate.

Not two hours after I posted that thing about the joys of owning chickens and how we haven’t lost a single one yet, a fox stopped by our front yard to help himself to a free lunch.

I was upstairs and heard the birds make a ruckus, so I went downstairs to investigate. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw a fox standing on our front lawn by the tree line, right where the chickens usually hang out under the pine trees in the morning.

I ran outside and grabbed the shotgun on the way out. (I staged it next to the door with an empty chamber and the safety on just so I’d have it handy in case of predator instead of having to run upstairs and fetch it out of the cabinet. It turned out to be a good call.)

IWhen I opened the door, the fox looked over and started running. Unfortunately for him, he chose to run almost straight away from me across the leach field on the other side of our driveway. Bringing the shotgun up and pulling the trigger was almost a reflex. I hit him in the rear from about thirty yards at a full run, and that was pretty much that.

The chickens were scattered to hell and gone. I walked around calling for them, but I was pretty sure that the fox either a.) killed the whole flock before I got downstairs, or b.) scared all the chickens into setting sail for Patagonia. But as I was approaching the burn pile at the bottom of our leach field, one chicken popped its head out of the pile. I called it, and it hopped off the pile to come over to me…and four more followed it, single-file, in no particular hurry. The rest of them had scattered in the woods behind the house, but they all came back to the coop within thirty minutes.

Except for Clucky #5, that is. One of the barred rocks didn’t come back. I was hoping she had just run too far and gotten lost temporarily, but when she wasn’t back by the coop at nightfall, I had to write her off as MIA/likely KIA. Either the fox killed her in the first attack, or she went into the woods too far and got lost or fell to another predator.

So now we’re down to nine chickens.

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I took a picture of the dead fox. It’s a shame, really—it was a very pretty gray fox, and I hated having to kill it, but a single fox could, and would, have wiped out that whole coop in less time than it took for me to write the first three paragraphs of this blog post. Foxes are smart animals, and even if I had chased him off, he would have remembered the big FREE CHICKEN sign invisibly hovering above our yard, and he would have returned and taken the rest of them. I could have tried to trap it, but I didn’t have a trap handy, and the Remington was what I had in hand when I stepped out to confront him.

Again, it was a shame—too bad the chicken was lost, and too bad I had to shoot that fox. I don’t enjoy killing animals, but there was really no other way to save the rest of the birds.

So, farewell, Clucky Five. We hardly knew ye. Your sisters ate your share at dinner in your honor.

in the news. military life.

fakin’ it.

And another example of people making up stuff to make themselves look like war heroes.

What kind of kills me about this one is that the guy served honorably in the MN National Guard, and was actually deployed to Afghanistan and Kosovo. Why would he feel the need to embellish his service record? At least he didn’t make up his service time from scratch and run around in a uniform he’s not entitled to wear, like some of the more egregious posers.

There’s no shame in having been a truck driver, cook, or supply sergeant. There’s those who pull triggers and kick in doors, and those who make sure the trigger pullers have all the ammo, food, and water they need. Both kinds are essential to the whole effort. But I guess until they start making videogames like “Call of Duty 5: Vehicle Repair” or movies like “Act of Valor: DD1348 Crisis”, some people will feel the need to add a little bit of extra color to their fruit salad.

aminals. castle frostbite.

them chickens is organized.

I’m a little surprised at how much I enjoy having chickens around. Our ten chicks have turned into ten pullets that are almost fully grown adult hens now. We still have all ten of them—no accidents, predators, or other attrition, although one of them had a run-in with a dachshund that luckily only ended in some missing feathers.

They’re entertaining to watch. We have a routine in place where they get let out of their coop first thing in the morning, and they’ll wander around the property in a flock all day and eat bugs. When it starts to get dark, they’ll all come back to the coop and head upstairs to roost for the night, and all I have to do is to lock them up. I never realized how smart chickens actually are, or that they’re social birds with a flock hierarchy. I’m also amused by the way they all come running when I set foot outside—I know they have learned to associate me with food, but it still makes me feel a bit like the Chicken Whisperer.

We bought a large garden shed, eight by ten feet, to use as a chicken house. Right now they’re still in their coop, but this weekend I’ll place the coop inside the new chicken house to get them used to the new digs. They’ll weather the winter better in the shed, and they’ll be safer from predators at night.

Of course, they’ll have to lay about three thousand eggs for us to save enough in grocery store egg purchases to make up for all the chicken swag we’ve bought to get the little cluckers situated.

Owning ten laying hens is definitely something that we couldn’t have done at the old place in suburban Knoxville. Ten acres out in the country leave one some room for agricultural experiments.

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The ameraucanas have distinct plumage patterns, so they’re easy to tell apart. We’ve named all of them. The barred rocks all look the same, so they’re just about impossible to tell apart. Those are Clucky One through Clucky Five.

fountain pens.

pen-modding.

A fountain pen works via capillary action. It has a roughly leaf-shaped nib that sits on a feed which is connected via channels to the ink supply. Ink will flow out of the supply, through the channels, and then to the tip of the nib, all without the user having to put any pressure on the pen to write.

On most fountain pens, the tip of the nib is a little ball that’s welded onto the nib itself and then split along with the nib. The finer the little ball, the finer the line the pen will leave on the paper. Super-fine nibs will make your ink supply last a lot longer and allow for writing in small spaces such as graph paper and book margins, but the finer the nib, the less smooth it feels because of the smaller amount of ink for the nib to glide on.

There’s a type of nib called an italic or “stub” nib that isn’t a ball, but rather just a chisel shape with rounded edges. It’s mostly used for calligraphy and expressive writing because the chisel tip produces different line widths on horizontal and vertical strokes.

Here’s an example of the difference between a ball-shaped “regular” fountain pen nib and one with an italic nib:

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As you can see, the lower pen with the chisel-shaped nib makes thinner lines on the horizontal strokes, while the ball-shaped nib tip of the upper pen produces a line that does not vary in width.

Italic nibs are a little harder to master because they favor a certain stroke direction and sort of force your writing that way, but the output sure looks nice.

The bottom pen is a Pilot Knight fountain pen. I bought it with a medium nib of the regular variety, and it was just a ho-hum nib that didn’t write remarkably in any way. I also had two cheaper Pilots around with different nibs, one of which was a Pilot Plumix with an italic nib. The nibs and feeds on the Pilot pens looked identical, and I had read that the feeds are just friction-fit inside the sections, so I emptied both pens and tried my hand at some modding. I pulled the feeds and nibs out of both pens and swapped them to find that they were, in fact, completely interchangeable. Now I have a nice metal-bodied Pilot Knight with an italic nib, and two spare nibs to use if I want to switch to a medium or extra-fine line.

Once you get used to the peculiarities of the italic nib, it’s a lot of fun to write with. It gives the line a sort of character you can’t get from any other pen. The Knight is no longer in production, although you can usually find some new-in-box examples on fleaBay. The Plumix with the italic nib is widely available, for example here, and it’s very inexpensive as quality fountain pens go.

castle frostbite.

the new summertime desk.

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At my request, our very handy handyman used some of the old floorboards from the renovation project to make this neat little bar-type shelf on the covered porch area. It’s just the right height for use as a standing desk, and the windows overlook the backyard where the kids and dogs are frolicking. That means I now have an alternate work desk out on the porch from where I can supervise playtime.

(As an added bonus, that shelf will serve very handily as a dachshund-proof staging table for the propane grill that is out of frame on the right side.)

As you can see, that wall now sits on a concrete ledge that’s about a foot thick. This was the trouble corner of the project—the logs of the outside wall had rotted away to the point that the floor had a lean of several degrees. Now there’s concrete holding up the logs on the outside, and that ledge is not very likely to rot away like the wood did. I’d sure love a word with the people who put this place together, though. The phrase “drunken monkeys with delusions of competence” has been used more than once around here when discussing the construction skills of the builders.