April was a busy month

All I can say about last month is that I’m glad I got through it… some of my highlights included:

1. My laptop computer has been on it’s last legs for a while… it’s an HP pavilion workhorse (nx9000 series) -17 inch monitor, big hard drive, fast cpu, lots of memory, and about 4 years old with a fan that was in hyper drive and enough heat generated to warm a small room to a comfortable temp.  A year ago lines started to show up in the display.  Every month a few more vertical lines would appear.  The nvidia video driver kept freezing the operating system about 6 months ago, so I had to use the generic windows video card driver - which meant no cool video games for me.  Finally, it looks like the video card has given up the ghost.  No video on the LCD, no video on the external monitor.  So this week I finally did the research and bought a new laptop computer and have spend the week restoring backups and reloading all my applications on the Windows Vista64 operating system.

2. Chickens are evil to gardens.  I wasn’t thinking about it and planted my new seedlings that I have been growing indoors.  I went to work for a day, came back with the chickens having made a tasty meal of my little plants.  I now have chicken wire hoops around the remaining plants and am trying to figure out if there is a cheap way to energize it with solar electricity to keep them away from my poor plants.  I will also be building a chicken run.  No more free range for these little chickens until my garden gets a bit more mature.

3. Installing fiberglass insulation under the kitchen.  I live in a tri-level house.  This means there is a crawlspace under the kitchen and great room.  I have always wanted to put insulation in there to keep the tile on the kitchen floor from being ice-cold in the morning.  This month I finally did it.  As it is summer, I haven’t noticed if the kitchen tiles are colder than they used to be.  I probably should have done the geek thing and taken temperature reading of before and after.

4. Dealing with a 5 month old.  This is the age of flipping around, scooting across the floor, drool like Niagara Falls, and waking up at all hours of the night - My wife has been an angel dealing with him, but where I used to sleep through anything short of a nuclear blast - I’m starting to wake up early in the morning and taking him for an hour before I go to work so she can sleep in.  To top it off, last night my 4 year old daughter got into our bed and about 2am pushed me off the mattress…All the books say just take her back to her room, which I did.  She immediately came to “full alert”, and ran back to our bedroom.  Tired as I was, I just went and slept in the guest room.  Just didn’t have the energy to fight the epic battle of “sleep in your room”

As for the fan I keep promising to install in my daughter’s bedroom…yeah, still in the box.  Maybe tonight…after I organize the garage and finish installing the insulation under the great room, assuming she doesn’t fall asleep in her room that is.

 

The Economies of Keeping Chickens

When I first decided to build a chicken coop, there were 2 reasons.  The first was that my daughter wanted chickens.   The second was that the idea of fresh eggs was appealing and I thought it would be economical.

A recent article at the Washington Post talks about the price of eggs going up 30% since last year.  It got me to thinking how much does it cost me to keep my hens?

Now, I originally spent about $300 to put together my chicken coop, not including labor and I’ve probably spent another $30 on the roofing material and the safety hinges for the nesting box roof (don’t want that lid slamming down on any kiddie fingers), and figure around $10 per hen to get them and raise them to the point they are laying eggs.  That means my first egg cost me a whopping $370.  Figuring that they each eat about 1/4 lb of feed and free range (There is a great web page here about grass fed chickens), that’s about 30lbs of feed a month, so I spend about $6 on feed for the month.  I estimated that I get around 5 eggs per week from each hen (Although in reality they’ve been laying every day like clockwork!), and there are 4 weeks in a month.  So I should get around 80 eggs a month.  That means if I had stopped after the first month, each dozen would have averaged about $56 (now that’s some expensive eggs!)

Breaking out the Excel spreadsheet, I can see that if the national average is $2.17 per dozen, it only takes me about 41 months before I reach the break even point of buying vs. raising my own.  However, these eggs are much better than store bought.  I’ve seen some of the specialty eggs from farms that boast free range and humane treatment going for around $6 a dozen.  If I were to buy my eggs at that price, I reach the break even point a little after 10 months.

So what’s the message here?  Prices will only keep going up.  Granted, my feed bill might go up as well, but it’s costing me about 90 cents per dozen eggs in feed.

(  (30 lbs of feed / 80 eggs) x ( $12 / 60 lbs of feed) ) = $.075 per egg

Even at double the feed price, it’s still less than buying a dozen factory raised eggs from the store.

Plus, they make great pets, my daughter loves to play with them, and they all get plenty of exercise running around the yard.  It’s a win-win situation!

 

New Indiana Jones coming out May 22nd

In a recent article by USA Today George Lucas says:

“When you do a movie like this, a sequel that’s very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it’s going to be the Second Coming,” Lucas says. “And it’s not. It’s just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up.”

And I have to wonder is he knows that his last couple of movies have really sucked, and it was only the name “Star Wars” that kept them from bombing.

Now, I do have fond memories of the original Star Wars series.  My wife on the other hand wasn’t much into Sci-Fi.  So when we rented Phantom Menace, it was with two different points of view. 

I’ve seen some bad movies in the past, but Phantom Menace was pretty much unmatchable and Attack of the Clones even more so.  Special effects can’t really make up for bad acting and bad dialogue.  My wife was in complete agreement that sitting there watching the horrid acting was like watching a giant hand scrape fingernails across a chalk board for 2 hours.

Am I looking forward to Indy 4?  Heck yes.  Are my expectations low?  About as low as they can go.  This may be a movie that I have to go see alone just so I don’t die in shame that I dragged my wife to a suck-a-thon (much like when I took her to see Starship Troopers after reading the novel - I do believe that Heinlein was spinning in his grave over that debacle) .  My one hope is that Spielberg can bring this baby home.

 

Switching to Raw Milk

A couple of  month ago, I was over at a friend’s house and they had a container of “Raw Milk”.  I thought this was an incredible novelty because I’d always thought that it was illegal for unpasteurized milk to be sold in America.

I did a little digging and found out that this is not true.  Here is the law:

FDA law CFR 1240.61 states that it is illegal for anyone to transport raw dairy products across state lines “in final package form for direct human consumption unless that product has been pasteurized.”

It turns out that Organic Pastures up in Fresno, CA produces raw milk and it is available at our local Henry’s market.

Little did I know of the controversy surrounding the drinking of raw milk.  The two sides can probably best be summarized with these two PowerPoint presentations:

• Against drinking it: www.cfsan.fda.gov/~ear/milksafe/milksafe.ppt
• Rebuttal : www.realmilk.com/ppt/08rawmilk.ppt

The main arguments seem to be that because we put our cows in such crappy living conditions, they are sick all the time and pumped full of drugs to keep them “healthy”, so we must pasteurize their products so that the pathogens they are living in don’t get passed on to us. 

I don’t see this argument being much different than last year when we had that big break out of E. Coli in all the bagged spinach, or the recent tainted beef recall, or today’s recall of cantaloupe grown in Honduras.  If you treat your  food sources well and it’s clean from the source - shouldn’t it arrive on your dinner table ready to eat?  Based on the risks involved in eating foods, should we ban spinach and other leafy greens from our diet?  Even pasteurized milk can have problems, such as the outbreak in Massachusetts of listeriosis - which was eventually traced back to the processing plant actually reintroducing the pathogen after the pasteurization process.

In a recent letter to the Colorado Department of Health, Mark McAfee makes a couple of good points:

To study this issue further, Organic Pastures contracted with BSK labs in Fresno to perform multiple challenge and recovery tests on our raw milk and raw colostrum. When 7 logs (10 million counts) of pathogens were added to one-milliliter samples of organic raw milk they would not grow. In fact they died off. The salmonella was so badly out-competed that it could not be found less than 24 hours later. The listeria drop was less dramatic and was similiar to the E. Coli O157:H7 samples that were studied, but they also did not grow and declined substantially over time.

…

What is it that causes raw milk to kill pathogens? Just in the last 24 months, the FDA has approved lactoferrin as an approved method of treatment for pathogen reduction in beef slaughter plants. Raw milk naturally has levels of this enzyme-based pathogen killer. Pasteurization inactivates this and other enzymes that kill pathogens. These enzymes include lactoferrin, xanthine oxidase, lactoperoxidase, lysozyme and nisin. There are other interrelated enzymes and beneficial bacteria that also act on the pathogens to inhibit their growth. All of these systems are destroyed by pasteurization. It is no wonder that dairy plants that pasteurize must be kept absolutely spotless. There are no remaining safety systems in the processed milk.

…

The dairy industry does not understand what I have explained here in detail. What the dairy industry believes is that raw milk contaminates pasteurized milk. This is not the case. Pasteurized milk kills the safety systems that control pathogens in raw milk and therefore permit unlimited growth of dangerous bacteria if present.

It’s a pretty good argument and makes some good sense.  I don’t know if some of the “miracle cures” they ascribe to raw milk are true (cures cataracts, arthritis, asthma, etc.), but it would make sense that healthy cows can produce healthy milk for their offspring.

Being the techno-geek that I am, and locked away in a cubicle, even though I could not go out and visit the free range farm, I did manage to find it on google maps.  And yes, those do look like happy cows on a free range of grass.  It’s also interesting to note that they:

tested our milk cow’s fresh manure and did not find any human pathogens. That’s right. . . no Salmonella. She was able to show that when antibiotics are not ever used on the herd (as stipulated in the organic standards) and when cows are not stressed (grass-fed and kept healthy) they simply do not slough off pathogens in their manure.

Which not only is down right responsible of them, but if other dairies followed their practice of keeping happy, healthy, organic cows, a lot of the other outbreaks to our other food sources may not have ever occurred.  Several cases of E. Coli in spinach have been traced back to fields to close to the manure dumps of large dairy processing farms.

One of the “miracle cures” of raw milk is the reduction of eczema - Something my wife has in a very mild form on her hands and uses Eucerin for.  I’m wondering if switching to raw milk wouldn’t actually save us money in the long run if it means we can stop buying all those tubs of lotion?  I wonder if she’ll consent to trying it out for a month?

 

Useless Gadgets I’ve Seen On Amazon.com

 

This may become a regular feature.  I’m all about simple living.  Or, as my wife has put it, she’s got me on the “crap-reduction plan.”

So a friend of mine told me about this, and I couldn’t believe that there was an actual device (and apparent patent) for cracking an egg.

Seriously, can there be a more useless item to spend $6.98 on?

Sadly, the item is offered by Amazon seller “Get Organized“

Shouldn’t one of the first rules of being organized be “Don’t buy crap you don’t need, are never going to use, are uni-taskers and will just sit there collecting dust”?

Next thing you know…well, to late, I just saw it…

 

 

Taking The Train

I ride MetroLink. The trains aren’t exactly something you set your watch by.  I have a lot of fun reading the site at www.metrolinktrainriders.com which reports the delays and other information that www.metrolinktrains.com doesn’t seem to have readily available to us commuters.

Now, at my company, I’m a big fan of the phrase “No Surprises”.  I tell my direct reports that I don’t care how bad the news is, the worst thing in the world that can happen is that I’m in a meeting with my boss and he asks me about some issue or other that I haven’t been told about - wether it’s a project running late, a production support issue, or buggy software.  I extend the same courtesy to my bosses - after all I don’t want them caught out in the cold either.

So it really surprises me when a large company like Metrolink that runs our trains into downtown LA seems to do it’s best to keep it’s riders in the dark about delays.  Everyone knows delays happen, but when the causes keep getting swept under the rug - I have to wonder why they even bother to hide it?  It’s not like we can do much about it - it would be nice to have a website i can check in the morning or even an email subscription alert go out when trains I take are being delayed so I can make alternate plans or drive to a different station based on the delays.

I can’t tell you how valuable it would be to me to know my morning train was delayed by 30 minutes and be able to spend a few more minutes with my daughter before heading off to work rather than sitting on a train platform waiting for a late train.  After all, if Domino’s can track my pizza, how hard can it be to track a train?

 

A New Favorite Site: ActivityTV.com

So I recently wrote about Virtual Gardening Video Games in my quest to find fun things to do with my daughter and newborn son.  I recently came across this site and I have to say I’m quite impressed.  It houses a plethora of fun ideas- like being in a smorgasbord  of kid friendly activities.

 

Crafts, Cooking, Room Projects and Science are my favorite sections so far.  Though I have to admit, LegoTV with their Star Wars theme videos does my geek-dad heart good.  I think this quote from their parents & teachers page does a good job of summing up what you’ll find here.

This programming is intended for you to participate with your children in all of the activities. Some of the activities require the use of materials that require adult supervision.
We encourage that Activity TV be used as an opportunity to spend quality time with your child or student. Creating or learning something together can be a positive rewarding experience for both of you.
You may notice that activities are scheduled to appear on digital cable ON DEMAND for a period of time, and are then updated with other new activities each month. You can always find, and view, all the activities that have ever appeared right here on the website.

I would encourage everyone to go check out this site and all it has to offer.

 

Virtual Gardening Video Games

I’m a big fantasy and sci-fi geek.  Slowly but surely my four year old daughter is becoming one too.  We have a Star Wars piggy bank, she asked for a dragon sword for Christmas last year, and she loves dressing up as a princess.  She’s also becoming very good with the computer.  She plays games like Elmo’s keyboard-o-rama, watches online movies from netflicks, and enjoys crawling into my lap while I’m working on the computer.

We’re also setting up home-schooling lessons for her as she expresses an interest in various things.  This has involved building a chicken coop, getting an ant farm (more about that later - let’s just say it didn’t turn out well), and our most recent purchase was a butterfly farm with 10 baby caterpillars that will hopefully become beautiful butterflies.

So, I recently started my garden seeds for the spring.  I was really excited about going to the store with her and picking out seeds and getting them started in a little seedling greenhouse.  She was excited about getting the seeds - and I also picked up a 72 disk seed starting kit greenhouse for around $7.

The concept is pretty simple - you have bunch of compressed disks of peat in a plastic container.  You pour water in, plant the seeds and put the cover on.  Seeds sprout in a couple of weeks and you put it in sunlight until they are big enough to plant outside.

Unfortunately, her interest in planting seedlings got about as far as opening the seed packets and discovering that the seeds inside looked nothing like the picture on the outside of the packet.

She loves the garden - loves to pick tomatoes straight off the vine in the spring and summer and helps pick peas and beans in the fall.  But I think there was just too much disconnect between the seeds and having them grow into plants for a 4 year old.  So I was left at the kitchen table finishing up the planting while she wandered off.

It got me to thinking about how I could teach her about the planting process and gardening and somehow compress the time-to-gratification into something more manageable for a 4 year old.  And as a computer geek, my mind naturally turned to computers.

With all the simulation games out there - maybe there was something I could use to help teach her the fun and exciting world of essentially watching grass grow.  I vaguely recalled a SimFarm game from years ago.  With a little digging, I even found a site where abandoned titles go to have a second life.  You can download the game here.  Unfortunately, it’s probably a bit much for a 4 year old to handle screens like these…

 

 

So - What else is out there?  I have to say that it was a little difficult to find kid friendly games about gardening, composting, and plants.  Guess there’s not that much money in making things you can’t blow up.  However, here’s a short list of games I thought were interesting and kid-friendly:

• Compost 4 Fun : Bravekidgames.com is a great website for kid friendly games.  This particular game is a bit hard to control with the mouse (the screen sort of bounces around) but it’s a great way to start a dialogue about what can be composted.
• Garden Dreams : Well, I wasn’t able to get the online version to work for me because I’m behind a firewall - but it looks like fun.
• Alice Greenfingers: Graphics aren’t great and you only get an hour of free play before you have to purchase it, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in playability.
• Garden War: Ok, it is a war/strategy game - but it’s with garden gnomes.  Doesn’t use timers and teaches strategy so kids can probably get the hang of it pretty quickly.  Don’t know how kid-friendly tanks are though.

I’m going to have to try a couple of these over the weekend with my daughter and see if they’re really as kid friendly and interesting as I think they are.  I liked them and I thought they were fun, but as they say the proof is in the pudding…

 

Chicken Coop Update

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to spend a few moments to update, so I thought I’d spend some time talking about the chicken coop and some of the upgrades it has recently gone through.

It now has a composite roof and the nesting boxes are now finished.  I decided to only cut holes for 2 of the boxes and use the third box for storage.

I was at Lowe’s this weekend trying to find some suitable roofing material in order to protect the plywood roof - most of what I found was either to heavy (clay and cement roofing tiles) or just plain ugly (corrugated steel).

The perfect choice for me was a composite roof - light and fairly easy to install.  However, even the roofing tiles seemed like overkill for a small chicken coop.  It involved the roofing cement, felt paper, nails, and of course special pieces for the roof line, plus all the strips of composite roofing tile ( a small square of these roofing tiles was also around $50 - not what I want to spend on a chicken coop)

Then I hit upon the perfect solution - A roll of selvage mineral roofing material.  This is a big roll (108 sq. feet) of composite roofing material without the tiles pre-formed so it can literally just be laid down kind of like butcher paper on the kitchen table.  Granted, it’s meant for large flat roofs, but at $20 for the roll and knowing I could lay a complete piece down over the roof point so I wouldn’t need the special pre-formed composite tile peaks and hips, it fit the budget.

I took the roof off and cut each piece to size, with a bit of overlap along the roof edges.  I laid down a couple of beads of liquid nails on the plywood to make sure the roof wouldn’t go anywhere and screwed the hinges back on over the roofing material.

I also took the time to paint the coop as the raw plywood was looking a little worse for wear.  That was pretty much a no-cost project as I used the house paint we had left over from when we painted the exterior of our house several years ago and a paint brush I had in the garage (which I think I left in the bathroom sink, sorry hon!).  Some of the excess roofing material was laid down around the base as my drop cloth.

The result is a somewhat better looking coop that should stand up to the weather a lot better in the coming years.  I think the girls are happy about the new addition.

And of course, the reason for this whole thing - my girls are growing up and starting to lay eggs.  So of course they needed a proper nesting box and a good looking coop!

 

Right now, it looks like only the Americana and the Plymouth Barred Rock are laying (green egg is Americana, brown ones are Barred Rock) but I’m expecting the other two black sex-linked to start laying any week now.

 

Resolutions for the New Year

As 2008 approaches, it’s time to brush off those new year’s resolutions.

Mine are pretty standard

1. Exercise the Body
2. Exercise the Mind
3. Keep the financial house in order
4. Be the family guy

Towards that end, I’m doing several things in 2008.

• Body: The first is that I’m Tivo’ing the show “Biggest Loser”, and will be joining their Million Pound Match-up.  I’m hoping to stay inspired as I strive to get rid of those 25 pounds that have crept up since my college days.
• Mind: SharpBrains is a good place to start.  So is reading a book, playing word games and filling out crossword puzzles.  My daughter got a microscope for Christmas (yes, geek-in-training!) and I’m sure I’ll enjoy showing her how to use it and exploring the back yard with her.
• Finances: Well, I’m pretty good on this front, although things have been a bit touch and go the last 3 months or so.  This year was tough with the paying off of the kitchen appliances, paying the midwife for the birth of my son, and all the other various sundries that go with welcoming a new addition to the family.  I’m planning on tightening the belt (figuratively and literally) as I will be bringing low-cost and healthy meals to work more often instead of going out for high-calorie/high-fat fast food.  I’m also going to work on not being the sucker for my daughter and getting her everything she asks for.  I know I should say no, but I have to admit that getting her a pretty dress and seeing her eyes light up is certainly a lot of fun!
• Family: It’s not just about kids, it’s about my partner as well.  Somewhere along the way we lost our “date-night” and ended up with me coming home and taking care of the kids while she goes out for a kid-free breather and coffee with her friend (who also happens to have 2 kids of similar age).  Time to start reviving “family game night” and of course “date night”!

So there are the 4 pillars and how I’m going to work this year and next on strengthening them.

Oh, and of course write more in the blogsphere.  I’ve been away and quite preoccupied with the birth of my son and the holidays… time to carve out a bit more time to spend with writing.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!