More Quackers

Well, we spent a very energetic and not entirely fun weekend trying to work and in my part, learning just how painful something can be. I was in the car coming back from Nashville for all of an hour when a somewhat familiar pain started up in my lower left back. Captain Kidneystone was back, and this time he was pissed. By the time I got to Springfield I was almost doubled over with pain. I'd almost not gone home that weekend to save money, probably just as well that I did. After trying everything to aleviate the pain for several hours, I eventually succumbed the superior intelligence of my wife and just after midnight she hauled my sorry ass down to the local mini-hospital in Lebanon (see Jericho for reference, not much bigger). Well, the cat scanned me and dopped me up with morphine! Fun stuff that, I was so wasted apparently I said some things that Joy will be laughing about for years to come. Its partly my lack of resistance to that drug, and partly relief from the pain. The CAT confirmed, big ass stone in kidney and little one lodged in tube. Ouch! So I got a bottle of happy drugs and went home.

Saturday was kind of a loss, with me trying to recover and all. But Sunday we finally got out and went on our first scavenger run. We went around Springfield and tried to lay hands on every used skid that both wasn't nailed down, and was in a logical 'garbage' location. In the process we scored a couple dozen 5 gallon food grade buckets that will come in handy! Anyway, with those skids, some nails, and part of a huge tarp we had left from one of our many moves, we made an outdoor brooder. Our little quakers were starting to become little stinkers, and it was time for the move. Plus they're trying to forage real hard and we wanted to expose them to the out of doors soon. Here's a picture of our half day of back breaking effort.

Say hi to Joy in the picture; hot, sweaty, and annoyed as always in having her picture taken. You can see the gate to the duck paddock int he foreground. Between the paddock and the brooder, we spend maybe $75, and except for the $3.00 for nails, the brooder was free of from stuff we already had. The fence is about $16.00 a roll (36"x50') from Lowes, almost $12.00 cheaper than Tractor Supply (can't figure that one out). We used a few T polls, the green thing with the white top, at $4.00 each, and a few lighter yellow electric fence polls at about $1.00 each. The gate there is, you guess it, another pallet just covered in chickenwire. This is likely all temporary brooder space, so why spend any real money. The ducks live here for a few weeks while the chickens show up and take over the old (and much in need of cleaning) brooder. In a few weeks, we'll make another paddock and move the ducks into it, an the chicks will then move in here. We hope to get a few layers from ducks and chickens, so this might well be our permanent brooder half-way house. Who knows.

Here's another pic of the brooder, this one with wife and boy.

And here is the little quackers, now much bigger, checking out their new digs.

I always knew ducks were omnivorous, a lot like chickens, but I didn't know they were agressive insectavours. They actively chase and eat insects. We bought a couple little cups of meal worms, and they loved them. The area that this paddock was cut from used to be heavily overgrown with brush, and is likely swarming with bugs. They'll love it.

The funniest part (aside from me on morphine), was when Joy brought the quackers up from the garage. I didn't have my camera out but it was hilarious. She had them all (18 of them) in a ten gallon plastic tote. A bucket-o-duck. Needless to say they were compeltely freaking out and crapping all over the place. Damn, what a mess. Of course, being ducks, once the water was in there they proceeded to get it everywhere whilst they proceeded to give themselves baths. I think a small pond is going to be a must for these guys...

Cool Site

Check this out, my honey found it...

http://wordle.net

You can make these awesome word clouds of stuff. Joy made this one...



I made this one...

Joe's Apartment - Part II

Yeah, great movie. Thousands of roaches in a dance numbers, helping out their good friend Joe. My roaches don't dance, and they don't help. What they do s take over the friggin place and crawl up my arm in the middle of the night. AAARRGGHH! I've lived with them in the past to one degree or another, but never like this. These bitches are a biblical plague. That cheapass apartment right next to my office in Nashville was a real good deal. Now I know why.
The owners nuked it, and they thought that was kinda fun. I put out bait traps and got a good body count, but either reinforcements arrived from the low income crowd next door, or they decided that baits were more like a tasty sauce. Added some spray, same results. I chased one bastard around the bathroom for five minutes a couple days ago. Spray, run, spray, run, screw it SMASH, ewww.
Well, stopped on the way back from my Nashville Writers Meetup and considered nuclear options. A triple bomb pack I would set off tomorrow morning when leaving for work, have the whole weekend to work. Then I spotted something. Boric Acid sold as a pesticide. Boric Acid? The same stuff made from borax? You gotta bekidding me. Sure, why not. Bought a bottle for a couple dollars and brought it home. It looks like talcum powder, has kind of a bitter smell. I started sprinkling it along the walls, behind the fridge, all over the friggin place. WTF? Better than chemicals.
Well, went into the kitchen to nuke some dinner, and hello, freaking out roaches. A couple on the floor were doing a fair impression of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. The stuff was killing them, and quickly. Not like some chemicals, but still working. So I hopped on the net and found out they've been using this to kill ants, roache and silver fish for like 200 years. Name a pesticide that goes on killing roaches for two centuries. Right, there isn't one. This stuff gets them three ways. They like to eat it, and it jacks up their digestive system. They resperate it, and it cloags their air holes. And when they walk through it, the stuff jacks up the waxy links between their chitton joints, basically making them leak to death. Damn! A bunch of web sites rave about it. I'm shelving the chemical warfare for a few days, lets see how this works.

Little Quackers!

I know the blog is about writing, but it's also about me! One of our (wife and I) dreams has always been to have that mini-farm, or at least a few acres and some animals? Got it! Today our first livestock arrived! I ordered 15 Kaki Campbell ducks from a hatchery on the net, and here they are!

We ordered 15 and they sent 18! My wife Joy decided on them by herself, and I found them on the net while in Nashville. When we talked about it a few weeks ago, we both suggested the same breed. It was pretty funny really. They are a rare breed known for their meat and egg laying. KCs have been known to out produce Leghorn chickens, the main commercial bird, at more than 200 eggs per layer a year. Now that is a bit less than the Leghorns, but you have to remember that duck eggs are 20% larger, so there you go. They're living in our home made brooder now, drinking and eating. They haven't been introdcued to our new puppy, Harley, yet. Here's the intrepid hound too.
The KCs are straight run, so we should get about 10 males and 8 females. Depending on how it ends up, some will end up making eggs and more ducks. The rest will try the freezer on for size. Well, in a couple weeks we get another 25 family members in the form of Amaraucana chickens, also straight run. Hmmm, chicken and duck! We've decided to wait on sheep and goats until next year. It's probably gonna run a couple $1000 to fence the property. For now, the weeds win. Can you say ticks and thistles? Pass on that job. The chickens come just before the 4th of July! Patrick and my wife are going to be in a parade, so I'm taking a half day. More then.

Star Wars for MEN

Was trolling the net at lunch and came across this. I know a lot of you have indegestion after the Star Wars trilogy and all, but considering the Clone Wars series coming out and that Lucas had minimal hands-on with it (especially dialogue, thank the Gods), this was particular interesting, and easy on the eyes...

http://starwars.yahoo.com/photos/hot-trooper

Just imagine if Luke met her in a dark side passage in the deathstar? Hmm, lets see, bitchy-slightly pudgy-no bra wearing sorta sister, versus Stormtrooper hotness? Yeah, sorry aliance, I'm gonna be a little busy. Besides, I hear Obi-wan is actually a lying douchebag.

Later.

The Big Apple

Well, went to NYC for a week for a conference, and they let us go early enough to do some site seeing. Took my boys stuffed rabbit up to the Empire State Building. Here is a pic or two. I'll tell you what, it is an amazing town, but I honestly don't think they could pay me enough to live there. What a freaking madhouse. Took us three hours to drive 12 miles. I never thought I'd see traffic worse than Seattle. Turns out, I was wrong!

Sic semper tyrannus!

Rabbit chillin on the 100th floor.

Damn, that's a long way down! Don't drop me, please!

A Viking, oh yeah! Sound the Feasting Horn!

In the continued tradition of copying/following up on quizs Oz has taken, here is one I liked. What kind of Viking are you? Anyone who knows me won't be surprised, it's basically an Aries Viking...

Your Score: Lawspeaker

You scored 41% leadership, 29% spirituality, 25% violence and 25% intelligence!
LEADER - SPIRITUAL - VIOLENT - EDUCATED Judge, jury and executioner; you are the lawspeaker. You know the ancient lore of your people back and forward, and you can remember every charted detail of your peoples' history back to the days when Odin created your world from the dead body of a giant. You preside over the Althing, which is the meeting of tribes and kings, and make sure nobody gets out of line. You are merely a freeman outside the Althing, but within the sacred boundaries of the frithgard, you are higher than the mightiest king of the north. And if anybody messes with you, you've got the gods themselves on your side. Wisest of the wise, you are untouchable.

Here's the link if your interested...

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/9724741004972087450/Viking-Age-Persona

OH CRAP!

Check this out...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080608/ap_on_re_us/nevada_earthquakes

You can't grow up in the Pacific Northwest without earthquakes and volcanic eruptions being in the back of your mind. Assholes from Seattle love to lay claim to Mt. Raineer, but the truth is you can almost never see it from Seattle. Gowing up in a piss-ant town called Milton just a few miles from Tacoma, I could literaly see the massive cindercone volcano out our kitchen window. In junior high I first studied what a real explosive eruption can do, and as a freshman in high school we watched in horror and Mr. St. Hellens blew itself to hell and killed a few dozen people. Shoveling snow is a rare enough thing, but nothing compared to shoveling ash from your driveway!

Anyway, as the years went by and I became a science fiction writer, I studied in deeper and deeper detail what exactly was possible from an eruption. I moved away from the spector of Mt. Raineer long before most people living in its shadow came to realize they were living under a death sentence. Should Raineer go with even a fraction of the power of St. Hellens, more than fifty thousand would likely die.

I can't remember when exactly I learned about what Yellowstone really was. I think it was after I moved back to the Seattle area and my wife and I were considering relocating to Montana and visited the park. I knew what a caldera was, but never realized how massive of a one Yellowstone was made from. At least once in its past it had erupted with enough force to cause an extinction level event, and every time it did erupt it was devastating. Worse, it was not at the end of an activity period, but alive and well.

So anyway, when I saw this story I felt an icy chill run down my spine. If (or rather, when) that caldera goes boom, you can kiss life as you know it goodbye. Discovery (or History?) did a docudrama on the events around just that event, and they were chillingly kind of the possible outcome. We stand back and watch with fascinated horror and the destruction wrought (mostly on other lands) by massive typhoons, but the Yellowstone Caldera has the potential to make this nation a third world country, and bitch slap the rest of the world in the process. Global warming? Please don't waste my time with that BS.

I find the coverage interesting, and very subdued. This is the southern edge of the caldera, why are there no mention of true epicenters? Why not much from the USGS? I bet there are a few hundred people losing sleep over this? I have an old friend in the Pentagon, I only hear from him in very scary times. Both Iraq wars, just after 9/11, during a very tense 48hrs back in 1990... I am watching my yahoo email carefully and hoping I don't hear from him, and never more grateful I live in a geologically stable region with ancient techtonic mountains, and well above sea level.

Marik

THE GREAT RETURN!

I finally figured out how to get into my blog again!! This time (at least) it wasn't my fault. During the great migration between blogger to google ownership, me emails changed and I lost my password. Well, sitting here in my job in Nashville I had a moment of lucidity (rare at best) and suddenly remembered it. So, I'm back!

It might take an hour to explain what has happened, so I'll take a little less. About a year ago my wife (Joy, or Knitnick to those who know her) had a incident at work. Suffice it to say a little shit was running around the library being disruptive and she stopped her and asked her to not run. Well, welfare momma and recent parolee dady started talked lawyers, there were threats, and angst, and much hand wringning and teeth gnashing. In the end we looked at each other and said "what the fuck are we doing in a big city?!"

A decade ago when we got married/handfasted, we dreamed about a nice house on some acres int he country. A few animals, a kid or two, a dog, and PEACE! Not to mention the freedom that goes with it. Somewhere along the line we sold out for the burbs, then moved into the fracking city itself! After her incident, we prayed a lot and threw everything we had (mojo and money wise) into making it a reality. It was almost exactly a year, and she got the job offer to be Director of the Washington County library in Kentucky.

You might think this is a big job, it isn't. It's big for her, and us, but the entire county has a population of eleven thousand. DFW was around eleven MILLION. Her library branch in Ft. Worth had more visitors in a month than we have population in the whole county. So she took a little pay cut and off we went.

The next step was harder. My job/career is heavily dependant on population density or port of entry. There aren't a lot of customs brokers in Springfield Kentucky. Well, none really. I spent all the time before her starting looking furiously for work, and bombed. Our choices were three options.
1) She gives up the job and we stay.
2) She goes and I stay in DFW until I get a job.
3) We go anyway.

Option one was tossed in the shitcan so fast it never even realized it was alive. Option two was alive and kicking up to two weeks before the move. Then I had one of them moments that pagans will tell you about. Where you give up outcome and just go with it. I put in my notice and for the first time in ten years I was unemployed.

Moving to Springfield went well, most of our stuff went into storage, and Joy started her job (and Patrick school). I played home-pappa and looked for a job. Since before leaving DFW I had a trail on three positions through a recruiter, but none of them less than 100 miles from Springfield. Just after arriving I had a bite in Louisville (50 miles away), and eventually an offer, but finally passed on it. $39k was a $6k a year cut in salary. Soon afterward my current employer offered me $50k a year, in Nashville. 170 miles from Springfield. Good money, bad location. I took it.

The job is a good one. Quite a bit of travel, none of the angst and screaming rush of brokerage, a company credit card, 7 hour work days, 17 paid holidays, 20 vacation days in first year. Yum. The distance isn't so great. I started with a room-mate situation, but the last time I did that it left a bad taste in my mouth (not too much personal there Oz), so I've since bailed on that for a studio apartment at $400 a month. Pretty cheap, except there are a few thousand small roommates that just won't go away (see Joe's Apartment for reference).

Life is tollerable for now. I had a breif bit of horrible depression just after getting here, and came within a few days of quitting. But now we've just closed on our new house and things are improving. My lease here is only a year, and the experience is invaluable. I drive home Friday night (about three hour drive), and back monday morning. It's kinda becoming a wierd time warp commute. I think the older you get, the more you find you can tolerate.

Right now I only write a little and count days until my lease is up. The new mortgage (2nd property) is kinda big, but the house is awesome. Remember that house in the country and land? Check. Animals? Just ordered our first chicks and goslings. Check. Kids? Got one, and he's the best ever. Check. Dogs? We're working on that. Poultry first, at this point.

Life goes on...

I'll try to upload some images soon...or link to Knitnick's flikr!

Marik

Okay, here are those pics!