Friday Unrelated Information: Choose Wisely

This Friday night, there are no less than three (3!) events competing for my attendance:

1. The violinist from Genre Zero has taken up with an additional band, the gypsy ensemble "Juana Ghani". They are playing a show tonight at Fats Grill. Support our fiddler! And also, maybe, ask her about that certain alt-rock band that she plays in...

2. I've been volunteering on weekends with a friend, Angela Romero, who is running for the Utah State House of Representatives. Tonight, she is hosting a fundraiser/birthday party, with a 'roaring twenties' theme. The theme was explained to me as stemming from the fact that her home district is #26, so throw on your best zoot suit (isn't that from the twenties? Or more like the thirties? Oh well), shiny dancing does, and tear it up with SLC's moving-and-shaking young democrats. At the Frida Bistro/Rico Warehouse. 

3. It's the 'First Friday' of the month, and that means that the monthly community gathering is going on in the garden under the billboard, AKA Urban Growth Community Garden. This is probably where I will actually end up, as it is just a few blocks down the street. Also, I am curious to see if those hooligans will come back!

Have a great weekend, and be sure to check back next week for the return of "War Story Wednesday"!

War Story Wednesday: Panic! at the Garden

What with yesterday being the eleventh anniversary of 'September 11th', it is taking a great deal of my willpower to resist flying off the handle and writing out a manic diatribe indicting all of the people who pay lip service to 'the troops' and tragedy to make it look like they care. So, instead, I will share an anecdote from my recent life that can perhaps give you some insight into why I get so incised and consumed with the desire to go on mouth-foaming rants.

Last week, at the monthly First Friday 'community gathering' (because wine-fueled hippie party doesn't have quite the same ring), some hooligans used the giant sunflowers surrounding the garden as cover to lob apples into the crowd. Maybe they were just some teenagers getting kicks but the community garden there has been the target of some criticism lately regarding said giant sunflowers obstructing sight lines, making the intersection unsafe for motorists, so I suspect perhaps these were aggressively shitty and spectacularly immature activist cowards. The first time that their projectile produce came down on the crowd, I thought perhaps ripe apples were merely falling naturally from a tree. When one hit me in the shoulder, with a clearly thrown-not-falling trajectory, I realized that there is no apple tree in the garden.

Now, I am all for shenanigans, tomfoolery, and semi-illegal, good, clean fun. But when I was the only one actually hit with a projectile, and no one else around me even noticed, I felt like a target under attack...by indirect fire. Now, as my fellow veterans of that certain hostile-takeover-but-its-not-about-the-oil can surely attest, indirect fire was a near-constant occurrence that became very unnerving over time. Sure, the further one gets into a deployment, the less they seek cover when mortars come flying into their base. But the constant harassing attacks, by an unseen enemy that you are unable to return fire on, cause a lot of frustration and feelings of helplessness. It was that frustration, and also the fact that everyone around me was oblivious to the incoming fruit bombs, that made me acutely feel my differences from 'normal' people.

I felt suddenly like the butt of a very cruel joke, that not only had I been assaulted via food, but that if I made others aware of what had happened, they would merely reprimand me for being uptight - which some asshole did when I informed the hostess what had happened. It is this kind of thing that I have to deal with all the time - not just the panic attacks, the subtle flashbacks, the difficulty in social interactions that stems from an acute knowledge of mortality and human frailty - no, it isn't just that, or the difficulties other people have relating to it. It is the constant stream of condescending claims that people do understand and care, the laughter that erupts when an unexpected BANG sends me sprawling onto the ground, and worst of all - that people see me react to being threatened and then somehow jump to the conclusion that I am dangerous.

If you really want to 'support the troops' how about taking down your yellow ribbon sticker, and instead, just be in your veterans' lives without trying to fix them. Thank you, that is all.

##END DIATRIBE##

Lincoln, Nebraska

I survived 21 hours on two buses, arriving in Lincoln Tuesday evening. The roommate of the friend I am staying with was nice enough to take me out to downtown - we got pizza and drinks at "Ya-Ya's" (a local institution here, it seems), then moved to the bar/club "Duffy's, where we chatted and played pool. Eventually, we were picked up by my long-time buddy on his way back from playing a successful show with his group: Bolzen Beer Band.

Yesterday was the 4th, or Independence Day if you will, and we spent it with a group of very cool Lincolners. Guess what - there are lots of garden nerds up here, too:

I was able to meet a lot of cool people, the main group of which lived in two nice, old, turn-of-the-century houses; very reminiscent of SLC! 

Also: everyone in Lincoln goes crazy for fireworks! So today I am off to hang out downtown, do a little busking, and get some more pictures. The show is tomorrow night!

"Naw, I cannae work that, no way, naw..."

Life has been busy, getting everything ready for all of the celebrations surrounding my college graduation. We got a fancy new camera, which I am still learning to use, though most of its controls are fairly intuitive. I think I have a good enough understanding of the controls, and that it is a good enough camera, that I can run my mother through some of its cool features and she'll be taking good pictures. I messed around and took several hasty panoramas of the loft; these are the best:

I also got some good shots of the chickens. Here is Mother Helen (her namesake is the Reverend Mother Helen Gauis Mohiam from Dune), cleaning up with a nice cool dirt bath:

I am off to continue cleaning, rearranging, and preparing for this weekend. I have an aunt flying in this afternoon to pick up from the airport, also. I might even take some more pictures along the way - they can use their "1,000 words" to do the talking, and I can be lazy!

"...Until the birds return for Spring Cleaning"

Quite the busy holiday at our house. Over the course of about the past three years, Frog built a very sturdy workshop shed (I helped), and we are now completing the final finish work. Yesterday, with Mom having Memorial Day off from work and being home to help, we painted the shed:

 

 We also finished painting the back of the main house, and below, we painted the workshop's smaller cousin, the double-tall-deluxe chicken condo:

In the preceding days, we did a lot of spring cleaning, getting the space around the buildings clear and generally whipping the property into shape. Saturday we cleaned off our far back patio, by the chicken coop, and uncovered the brick path back to it. Our potato trench is right next to the path, and when planting the potatoes, I dumped a bit too much of the trench dirt right on top of our main brick walkway. The potatoes are all doing great, though, and the dirt we scraped off of the path filled the trench nicely. But potatoes are a post for the future...

Friday Unrelated Information

1. A fellow camper sent me some pictures from last week's camping trip. Beyond the glory of the San Rafael:

Yes, that's right: I suited up in full camouflage utilities. I explained that coupled with the red dirt, this would help me have flashbacks - sarcasm, it's wonderful!

2. Tomorrow is the Peoples' Market Seedling Swap & Sale. So if you are so inclined, you can go buy some awesome locally grown tomato starts and plant them.

Urban Chickens

We have nine chickens now. We originally purchased twelve chicks, but one died almost immediately. We've lost another two in the couple of years since, both found mysteriously dead. Still, the nine remaining provide us with the most delicious eggs, and are really fairly easy to take care of. I am of the opinion that if it is legal where you live, you should look into getting a few chickens. Just look at those silly birds, lounging in the sun!

As I mentioned, we purchased the 'girls' as tiny chicks, and kept them in the house in a box with a heat lamp for several weeks. By this time they had grown substantially, although still definitely not full grown birds. We built a pretty heavy duty coop for them from some left over wall sections from a large shed we had built the prior summer. This is the largest part of the work of having chickens; building them a coop. Otherwise, the care and feeding of these flightless birds is fairly easy. It is simple enough that my college added five chickens to their small organic garden, and the garden club had no trouble tending them, despite most of the members having no experience taking care of any kind of livestock or farm animals. Again, the biggest part of it was the coop. Below you can see the original coop the college garden club used, on the left, and then a new elaborate one which we all built one Saturday.

 

It can be any simple shelter that the chickens can fit in. The small college coop on the left above might seem like a tight fit for five full grown hens, and it was, but chickens are social animals and seem to rather like crowding into a tight space, especially to sleep. Chickens will 'roost' to sleep, which means they need some kind of horizontal bar that they can fit their feet around in their coop, which they will perch upon and zonk out for the night. Inside the coop it also helps to have a nesting space; this is where the ladies will lay their eggs. Sometimes, like during the summer if it gets too hot in their coop, the chickens will dig out a depression in the earth in some hidden nook of their choosing to use as an alternate nest. This makes an easter egg hunt out of gathering eggs!

 We checked the college chickens every day, but at home we only need to closely inspect their coop, food, and water about once ever two or three days. We supplement their diet with most of our table scraps and especially old vegetables, but otherwise they get a protein-fortified pellet feed that we can get at either the local farm supply store or at home improvement warehouse chains. The only other item we have to buy regularly is straw, to line the floor of the coop. We clean the coop out, scooping out copious amounts of poop, about once a month.

"Chicken shit" is a great fertilizer, however, it is so potent that it usually needs to be composted at least once and diluted before being spread around the garden. Otherwise, its super-high nitrogen content will 'burn up' out crops. So we pile their droppings and the used straw and then mix it with some of our regular compost when we use it to fertilize. 

That's it in a nutshell: get your chicks, raise them up in a box while you build them a coop, then refill their food and water every few days and clean their crap every few weeks...all the while enjoying rich and delicious fresh eggs..that is, when your hens aren't molting - a topic for a future post, perhaps?

"The Days Fly Away..."

So here we are on a slightly chilly Monday morning...here I thought that it was only going to get hotter and hotter. The loft collects all of the heat in the house; luckily we built in an exhaust fan behind a kick-ass trap door. Haven't needed to use that the past couple of days, what with this cold spell.

Not too cold to stop putting our garden in. Yesterday we planted a couple extra tomatoes we got from a friend, to supplement those we already had in, and also put in a bunch of seeds - squash, beans, zucchini, melons. Also a hundred or so onions from a 'set' we purchased. I've got a few more melons and such to put in the ground today. Oh, we also got another blueberry and another raspberry, and, it turns out that a blackberry plant and a grape plant we put in last year survived when we had written them off. Bonus!

So I've been playing a lot of music, naturally, and I've got three or so new songs in the works. Not a lot of lyrics yet. I'm not sure what I want to write about. I forgot to mention on my post on songwriting the other day that sometimes the easiest lyrics flow when you write about some subject or thing or place or object, and do it objectively. Or you try to be objective, and just write a song about, oh I dunno...cars? Trains? Mountains? Those kinds of songs are much easier than "I have this feeling I can't name and I want to somehow express it." Also it is painfully easy to write songs about girls, hence why people come up to me after Genre Zero shows to say "I haven't heard anyone playing a bunch of love songs in a while". Some of my songs in that vein are pretty good, but, yeah...I want to write about something else. I haven't had a significant love interest in, gosh, years? I can still think of random girls I've met and imagine something to sing about...but, yeah...I think broader horizons would be better.

So have a happy Monday, blogosphere. I've got a bunch of stuff to do.

Things I Like: Plants

I've been thinking that I would like to get some houseplants for the loft. I may be able to put together a cool indoor herb garden just by taking some cuttings from the garden. I think that would be pretty easy...to just cut an aggressively perennial herb like oregano in half and grow a small clone indoors. That would be what one would call a 'clone', right? It used to be one plant, now it is two living independently, but they still have identical DNA? For all of my practical knowledge about gardening and growing all kinds of plants, I feel like my deeper scientific and biological understanding is stuck at around a high school level, sustained by nature and science documentaries.

Having small versions of plants from outside being in the loft would be better than no plants, but, part of what is so cool about growing plants indoors is that you get to grow awesome plants that would never make it a varied and sometimes harsh climate like the one in SLC.

Plants are so cool! Exempli Gratia - I've seen a thirty or forty year old christmas cactus that had grown 3'-4' around, necessitating transplant into a big five gallon pot. Humans get old and feeble somewhat early in their lifespan, while many plants will only be growing and growing and gaining new strength all the time for most of their life, which can be thousands of years. Wow! Yeah, I like plants.

Two Houses, Both Alike in Dignity

The time has finally come to finish out our house. Starting this week, we'll begin working with a home remodel pro to put in a loft bedroom, stairs, and the finish on our front dining room. It has been about ten years in the making, and I am so excited for it to finally be nearing completion. I will probably be moving into the upstairs loft, which will feature a 1/2 bathroom, lots of closet space, and a small living area. We are also going to 'loft out' the dining room, so it will have a really high ceiling. The stairs will simply climb up to the loft, rather than going through a hole in the ceiling up to a second floor. Pretty cool.

Also going on this weekend is a two-day birthday project at my best friends' house. I have been exceptionally lucky over the past couple of years and have made some of the best friends of my whole life. They are a married couple my age that live right in my neighborhood who, between the two of them, share almost all of my interests. It is his birthday on Saturday, and his big gift from everyone is putting in a garden plot. The plan is to build two 16' x 4' planter boxes, about 2' high, in the far corner of their large and oddly triangular backyard.

Unfortunately, we won't really be able to work on each others' projects, at least not this weekend. However we have been working together on the planning, and will certainly all share in the enjoyment of the finished product. AWESOME!

Thursday Late Edition

Well hello there world! After my pouting yesterday, I figured I would talk about some fun stuff that I did today that help to brighten my spirits a bit. I am officially part of the chicken co-op at school; I will be tending to the school's five chickens every Monday. This entitles me to a share of the eggs but, as I already have eleven chickens at home, I am letting the other co-op members have my share. So, I am essentially doing this out of the kindness of my heart. Good to know there is still some kindness in there...

I also went to an open house at a CPA firm. The highlight: the firm's national recruiter complimented my tie. Twice! It was a brand new tie that I got out at the state fare. A new company out of Ogden, "Neck Strings" was there selling their not-too-shabby ties for a jaw-dropping 2 for $15. While these ties aren't actually made locally (they design them here and have them made in China), the quality is up there with designer ties from Nordstrom or Dillards, which come from China anyways but cost $50-$70. Score!

Sometimes, it is the little things that make all the difference...

Those Silly Chickens

So we have eleven chickens, who give us around 7 lovely eggs a day. Yum. One in particular is "my" chicken. She's a turken, a particular breed of chicken that has no feathers on its neck, causing it to resemble a turkey. Fitting her look, and her status as one of the alpha chickens, she is named "Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Mohiam", after the Dune character of course.

Well, recently, she has been "brooding", which is a term for the silly chicken behavior of staying in the coop and nesting on top of the eggs all the time. Also it can include acting crazy and hostile when not nesting on the eggs, as another of our chickens demonstrated last year, but Helen has been pretty docile. She just stays inside, always on top of the eggs, to the point that we wonder how all of the eggs are even getting under her. Does she move to allow the other hens to lay? Or are they laying around the coop, and then she gathers the eggs to her nest? Hmmm...

Well, this morning I went outside and there was Helen, running and scratching around in the outdoor run, like a normal well-adjusted chicken! Let's hope she keeps it up, and that her brooding days are behind her. Also, maybe this is a sign that my own days of "brooding" and being "cooped up" might be coming to a close...

Ah, the simple life of a silly chicken!

Another Week

Here we go, starting another week of school. This one promises to be full of more work than fun activities, but isn't that the point? Still, let's look back on the fun times I had last week to be reminded that there may be more fun times ahead:

1. Accounting Resume-Writing Workshop: A managing director of the local PriceWaterhouseCoopers office individually critiqued our resumes and then offered up many helpful hints about what to include and what not to, particularly when seeking a job in public accounting. My resume is pretty solid; it certainly doesn't hurt that a professional writer helped me put it together.

2. Campus Garden Open House: So my nifty little college started a nifty little organic garden a couple years ago, and this year they added chickens! I stopped by to meet the organizers and volunteer my help in caring for the chickens (since we have eleven of them at home).

3. Casino Night: I stayed late at school on Wednesday to participate in the student government's 'Casino Night'; I played in the Texas Hold 'Em tournament, staying in until about half the players had been eliminated. For quite a lot of the game, I was chip leader at my table. But, as usually happens when I play Hold 'Em, I got kind of bored and started making silly bets to spice things up. I feel good, though, because my stupidest and most costly bet furnished the lone tired professor participating with a ton of chips, getting him back in the game.

4. Meet the Firm Night: A panel of six professionals from different accounting firms, Goldman Sachs, and even the FBI came and spoke at the school. The main point I took away: I need to get a master's degree and my CPA license as soon as possible in order to really work in my chosen field in a capacity that will really suit me. Oh joy.

5. Theater Society Opening Social: Lately I've found I don't enjoy movies or television very much, but live theater continues to intrigue me. Now, I haven't acted since high school and I've only ever been to a hand-full of plays, but it is something that does intrigue me, and, the theater kids are all (as expected) very personable. I enjoyed myself very much getting to know some new people and playing charades.

So there you go...the fun fun times for him. Hopefully I can find some engaging social stuff to do this week in between the homework assignments!

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Dustin has chosen to go with Eldar as his new army, contrary to his earlier plans of Imperial Guard. He wanted the "Death Corps of Krieg" special Forge World Guard, and they were having shipping issues. He ordered his Eldar force today; something on the order of:

2 Farseer and 10 Warlock Seer Council mounted in a Wave Serpent grav tank
2 Dire Avenger squads(x12) mounted in Wave Serpents
3 Fire Dragon (x6) squads mounted in Falcon grav tanks

I am very excited to play, and I think that is a fairly solid "mechdar" (as mechanized Eldar are sometimes called) list. The weakness, which Dustin knows, is that there are only two scoring units.

2. We took the first ripe Tomato off the vine tonight. Soon we will eat it as part of a fancied-up grilled cheese sandwich.

3. Tomorrow is my 2nd Anniversary dating Better Living. I love you, honey! <3