Just no need for that.

There are very few new ideas out there, and Hollywood has been in full-on reboot/remake mode for...a while.  Over just the last two years we've had Red Dawn, Dredd, The Amazing Spider-Man, Carrie, Old Boy, and Man of Steel...with Robocop queued up to come out soon. 

But now, with word that they are starting to work on a 'Naked Gun' remake...enough is enough.   You can't top perfection...and there is no doing it better than Leslie Nielsen played Frank Drebin. 




I am the opposite of excited about this news. 

Indications are it's a bit cold, still.

So, even with a 25-watt bulb going in the chicken coop, things still seam to be getting a bit cold in there.  How can I tell?  Well...this is an egg that must have been laid Tuesday afternoon and missed by the kids.

Yeah...looks like the water inside of the egg kind of froze, and split the egg as it expanded. 

Sad. I thought it was warmer in the coop than that.  But then...it might be where the chickens are roosting, up closer to the light.

Either way, I'm still doing more for my birds than some people around here do...I guess I just happy chickens to make happy eggs!  Happy eggs contain good karma, which is WAY more important than Omega's 3's from feeding them flax seed. 

Heck of a way to keep warm...

It looks like our younger cat, Dahlia, is trying to a job where I work...not many other places I have ever seen a head that far up an ass...

Ve appreciate your help, comrade.

Couple face fine for removing trees near Spokane River

This kind of chaps my hide.  The rules themselves are dumb...I hate rules telling people what they can and can't do with the property....but rules I see as dumb get passed every day. 

My real problem here is with loyal Party Member Guy Gardner, who out for a walk, found the downed trees, and felt it was his duty to report this 'amazingly irresponsible' act of cutting down trees which are not the least bit endangered in the hills around Spokane. 

The article says that the action was not clearly visible to the public, so dude, MIND YOUR OWN F-ING BUSINESS!  What are you doing taking your morning walk through their property?

If they had gone on to state land, or someone else's property to do this....then they are bad, bad people.  They simply cleared a few trees that had grown taller and were blocking their view of the river.

I'm sure everyone feels safer now.

Place somewhere warm to rise...

You see...that's a problem.  Having recently watched a video for making Portuguese Sweet Bread, I decided a day with a high temp of 19 degrees would be a nice time to try it, since it was too cold to do much yard work. 

The only problem is, I keep the temperature in the house right around 65 degrees during the day(it's set at 63 overnight)...although I do spike it up when the girls take their showers. In search of a 'warm place', I left the bowl on the stove top while I prepared a few other things in the oven...but it just wasn't happening.  After two and a half hours, I finally gave up.  I had some rise, and I got a little more when I proofed the formed bread....but nothing like I should have.

The finished product tasted really, REALLY good...and while it was denser than it should have been...it was solid without being dry, or hard.  Hot with some butter melted onto a slice, it tasted just like I remember Portuguese Sweet Bread tasting. 

My wife is the one who introduced me to this guys recipe's...White Trash Cooking, on youtube.  He also has his own website set up, where all of his recipe's are archived in PDF form.  It's neat, because he shows you don't need a fancy kitchen to make good food...and he goes into a lot of detail on his recipe's without coming across as condescending. 

Rebelle

I'm kind of an old-fashioned guy, and I lack the enlightenment to think of boys choosing to play with dolls, or girls choosing to play with footballs.  Not that girls can't toss a football, or boys can't play with dolls(or 'action figures')...I just think even in 2013, if you have a table with a football, or a doll on it, greater than 90% of kids are going to pick along 'traditional' lines.

Now, this doesn't apply to all toys, or even most toys.  My daughters have stuffed animals, and dolls, and a dress-up clothes bin...but the dress-up bin isn't just princess clothing...it's got detective gear and werewolf masks in it also.  I would estimate that video games, Lego's and tinker toys occupy over 2/3rds of their time...and those are gender neutral as things can be. 

All of this is to point out that for Hanukkah, I got my girls new Nerf guns, and I was NEVER tempted to get them anything from the new Rebelle line. 

I don't blame the Nerf folks for trying to cash in on 'The Hunger Games' by strapping cross-bow braces onto their Nerf guns, or creating a neat little Nerf Bow...but I'm pretty sure that the bow Katniss used in 'The Hunger Games' didn't have pink and purple trim. 

Nope...my daughters got the Nerf Sidearm Blaster.  Now...it's not the fanciest blaster in their line up...but it's a load of fun.  What I like is that just like my Black Hawk, you can hold the trigger down and the gun will fire as fast as you can cock it. 

Hopefully Santa brings me something so I can play with the girls. 

Cluckin' and Sproutin'.

Well, the chickens seem to be doing okay with our recent cold snap.  I have a 25-watt bulb going in their coop, and while I don't have an extra thermometer I'm willing to let get pooped on, by calibrated hand, it feels 20-30 degrees warmer in the coop than outside.  On the colder nights, where it is predicted to be single digits, I actually close the door to the coop too, trapping the girls inside from 9ish until 5ish.  Tonight will be the real test...they are predicting temperatures of less than zero tonight.  I will probably close the door, AND add a gallon jug or two or hot water to a corner of the coop.

With the colder, darker, shorter days, we have seen a decrease in chicken productivity.  In the fall, our 5 chickens were giving us 5, and sometimes 4 eggs a day.  Now, we are getting 3, and occasionally 4 eggs a day.  Still more than enough for our family...it just takes longer to build up to the point where we feel the need to give some away.

I also did some actual data collecting on my sprouting efforts.  Sprouting is good for two reasons...it converts some of the hard-to-digest part of the seed into more a more easily digestible form...plus, it DOES give you a return on your investment...more food mass.  If I was squared away, I would have this in a graph...but it's the weekend.

Starting with 52 grams of wheat berry's, I ended up with 152 grams of sprouts, 64 grams of lentils ended up with 294 grams of spouts, and 34 grams of clover seed gave 292 grams of spouts(showing here):

 

I actually let my stuff go a little further than people normally would for sprouts...the finished product is closer to fodder, than spouts.  The greening is a little better for the birds.

 



So yeah....from a straight 'mass' standpoint, the clover is the clear winner...but the clover seed I bought was over $6 a pound from an organic food store, while the lentils are like a buck a bag...and the lentils I've been sprouting so far are not new.  They are ones we bought in bulk and vacuum sealed some number of years ago (4-6?). 

We haven't found any type of spouts yet that the birds don't like.  I even did up a quart jar of kidney beans, just because I wanted to see if it would work.