tracking another season of survivor

Finally got around to watching the season opener of Survivor: China last night (it'd been festering on our HR20 since Thursday), and a few passing thoughts on the situation as I see it:

• why oh why does anyone show up to meet Jeff wearing anything but sensible clothing for the 39 days ahead? This means no skirts, no spiky heels, no rompin' stompin' footwear either.
• If you know you've been chosen to be on Survivor, and you're going to be outdoors for 39 days, make it a point to actually go camping for a night or two before leaving the States.
• And there's absolutely no reason anyone going on Survivor shouldn't be able to make a shelter or (gasp!) make fire. We're fifteen shows into this thing, and folks have no excuse to be surprised at the challenge that awaits the first couple days in, no matter where the show's taking place: Australia to Africa, Cook Islands to Vanuatu.

And a few thoughts on the participants this year:

• I can't wait for Courtney (the bitchy waitress) and Leslie (the righteous talk show host) to get voted off... bonus if it's in a surprise two-fer trip to tribal council.
• From the looks of things, Ashley (the pro wrestler) is going to keep the blur-it-out censors busy since she can't seem to keep the twins in her top for more than a few moments at a time.
• Given both his accent and his attitude, I coulda told you Chicken (yes, the Chicken Farmer) was going to be first to go the moment he drawled in his only-in-Virginia-way that he wasn't going to share his opinions anymore cuz nobody was smart enough to listen to him. A shame, as I'd hope I'd pick up some chicken farming tips from him
  
• I hope James (the quiet grave digger) goes all the way.

Looking forward to the next 14 weeks of the show to see who does what to whom and when (and why).

herbivore, carnivore, omnivore... local-vore?

So, as our chickens are quickly approaching their egg-laying age and our garden is producing its bounty, I'm more and more intrigued by the challenge of cooking a meal made up entirely of ingredients produced within 20 miles of our house.

An easy win would be to create an omelet using our eggs, produce from our garden supplemented by dairy and herbs from the farmer's market.

But what if I want to get more complex? Where's the limit? I see the bounds have already been pushed.

Looks like there are folks already way ahead of me given the recent ZagatBuzz item about Spruce's ascension to be "the ultimate local-vore's gathering spot."

This will be a fun trend to follow!

new home for the chooks

new home for the chooks,
originally uploaded by thomas pix.

The Eglu has arrived, and after a little more than an hour, I was able to put it together and move the girls in.

I was really impressed with the way the packaging was handled... the Omlet folks have done a splendid job with the product design. The only nits to pick are with the instructions on how to set things up, and the expectation for how long it'll take.

The instructions start with the sentence "Assembling the eglu and run - this shouldn't take much more than 20 minutes and is very simple."

Very simple? Yes.

20 minutes? No. Not even. Maybe if you've been putting these things together for years and are racing a fellow employee for bragging rights you can do it in 20 minutes, but for the average Joe (or Thomas as the case may be)... plan on an hour.
The handy "The Omlet Guide" included with the eglu was surprisingly informative and entertaining in addition to instructional regarding how to set up the 'glu.

In all, I'm very pleased with our purchase. But I already miss hearing the girls' cheep cheep as I type my blog. Hope they're sleeping safe and sound in their new eglu.

Note: this is a duplicate post of what's appearing over on my Urban Chickens blog. I inadvertently published it here straight from my Flickr account, but it's worth keeping here if for nothing but the cool technology that the eglu represents.

use wordpress or blogger? blogger wins

Those following along know I'd started a new blog a week ago to track our progress as urban chicken farmers. I've used Blogger for over a year to publish this string of posts, and having blogged on the WordPress platform a few times as a guest blogger, decided to try something new.

After just five posts on WP, I've now moved the nascent Urban Chickens blog back to this platform. While you can still find the blog at http://urbanchickens.net, the domain now forwards here to myurbanchickens.blogspot.com. I'll be deleting the old WP blog this weekend.

Why did I pick Blogger over WordPress? for several reasons:

1. Knowing as much html and CSS as I do, it's easy to customize the Blogger template. To do the same on WP, I'd have to pay (literally) for the privilege. When I start creating artwork for the design, it'll be easy to add here on Blogger.
   
2. WP disallows all advertising and anything more than a few, relatively low-key affiliate links. I've got designs on building up enough niche traffic to Urban Chickens to warrant at least token advertising and affiliate income (enough to pay for chicken feed). Here on HVY TK, I've earned upwards of $10 in the last five months without really trying.
3. I'm comfortable with the Blogger interface. I know where to click to find things. I lived through the starting this blog pre-Beta and then moving to the now no-longer-Beta interface. Starting a new blog here on Blogger is incredibly easy.
   
4. I use Statcounter to track traffic, and WP didn't allow me to add it to my blog there. Here, I've just added the Urban Chickens blog as a new project. Piece of cake!
5. Finally, what I thought would be the deal clincher on WP is no longer a value-add: I can add guest bloggers (like left coast mom) to the Urban Chicken blog in a snap.

Glad to be back here. Be sure to change your feed readers!

cheep, cheep, meet the peep(s)

meet the chick!
Originally uploaded by thomas pix.

After much hemming and hawing and fence-sitting, we've finally got our chicks. Two Barred Rock pullets joined our family yesterday afternoon.

To spare regular readers all the bloggy details of raising chickens, I've started a new blog about them chicks here in my new blog Urban Chickens.

Only rarely will the chicken stuff bleed into this blog, and that'll only be when there's a technology or food angle to the post.

earth day: living greener in 2007

As a way of celebrating Earth Day today, I've taken inventory of how much "greener" we, as a family, are this year compared to last.

The biggest greening has come from our moving into a new home that's only a mile from my office. Not only has my daily commute shrunk from 59 miles to 2 miles, with all the carbon emission reductions that come from not having to lug my butt those 285 miles to work each week, but the house we live in now is greener, too.

Our old house was in a nice sunny neighborhood in Campbell (outside San Jose), but there was no topography to speak of. We were in a flatlands surrounded by other houses/condos/businesses, and the micro-climate of our area meant we consistently ran temperatures 10 degrees warmer than other towns around us (love those Bay Area microclimates!). Lots of trees in our neighborhood, including two huge camphor trees in our front yard, but that didn't mean it was any less hot in the summers. To help cope with the heat in our old place, we had air conditioning installed when we replaced the ancient furnace with a new energy-efficient one. While we lived more comfortably, we paid for it in our energy bills. The Springs and Autumns were the cheapest since we didn't have to pay to heat or cool the place, but we got used to shelling out over $200 a month in energy costs.

Flash forward to this year in our new home. We now live on the slope of a hill overlooking downtown Redwood City which means we get gentle breezes every afternoon and can leave the windows open most of the spring and summer to enjoy the natural cooling. Not only is the location of our home more conducive to natural climate control, but we have solar panels on the roof and an electric meter that spins both ways: when the panels generate more energy than we use, we feed back into the grid. At night and on cloudy days, we pull from the grid since the panels aren't generating anything. These solar panels have had an amazing impact on our electricity bill. Since we moved in last August, we've consumed less than $200 TOTAL electricity (compared with $200 a month in the old place). Wow.

The house we're in now is about 1,100 square feet bigger than our old home, to boot, but thanks to a dual zone furnace, we only heat the upstairs floor (where we spend 95% of our time living) and leave the well-insulated downstairs floor to its own devices.

There are other things we can do to get greener by next Earth Day, like cutting water consumption, growing our own veggies and my walking/biking to work several days a week (oh, and raising chickens!), but we've made huge strides in the last year. Here's hoping more and more of us can have similar impacts in lessening our footprint on the earth.

Happy Earth Day!

urban chickens... here we come

After several months of research and precarious fence-sitting, last night I navigated to the Omlet web site, and filled my digital shopping cart with a blue Eglu and two Gingernut Ranger chickens.

The checkout process was relatively straight-forward, until it came time to enter credit card info. A notice on the site said Omlet isn't yet accepting credit card payments, so they'll be giving me a call to get the info instead.

It's a good thing I'm getting the call back, too. Turns out my color choice isn't as popular as I thought it would be. Breakfast negotiations will ensue shortly.

I'll be creating an entirely new blog about our adventures in urban chicken farming. Will post a link to it when it's up.

UPDATE: Claire, at Omlet, called me back, and the next delivery date for chickens isn't until mid-June... given the delay, am I now back on the fence? oh, and the Eglu color negotiations settled on "green."

fresh eggs everyday? yum

This morning's Mercury News had a column about urban chicken farming, and when Mel first mentioned it (she got to that section of the paper first), I quickly dismissed the idea and then back to reading about why my beloved Sharks have been unable to score a goal for over two games in a row now.

When I finally got to the Business section myself, suddenly the idea of raising a couple chickens in our backyard was really appealing. Thanks to our participating in a CSA back in Virginia, we'd had the pleasure of tasting fresh eggs, and believe me, once you have fresh eggs, you can only tolerate the styrofoam-packaged things they sell at the supermarket by the dozen (or gross by the gross, if you're shopping at Costco).

Besides the tempting oddity of having a couple cute cluckers inhabiting the back 40, raising our own egg-makers would be yet another green thing we, as a family, can do. As a bonus, the local zoning laws allow us to keep as many as three chickens here at the house.

A couple hours research on the web has led me to the following decent resources (a lot of not-so-useful stuff is out there):

• Backyard Chickens
• The Country Chicken
• The City Chicken

But, I think I struck gold when I discovered Omlet's eglu chicken coop.

High tech meets high design meets urban living. It's all I can do not to order one today.

Instead, I've ordered Barbara Kilarski's Keep Chickens to study up a bit more before diving in with living, eating, scratching, pooping egg-makers in the backyard.

I've got preliminary buy in from Melanie (with certain agreements to do other outside chores as a condition). I'll keep you posted on my progress.