Eggs, Drunken Birds, and Peeps, Oh My!

With owning chickens comes collecting eggs. Fresh eggs was one of the excuses that my wife gave me for springing the little pecking, clucking, escape artist surprise on me a few years back. With six chickens you we usually get three or four eggs per day. They have to be cleaned off, then packed away in the refrigerator. Now one thing I learned while working with assembly lines for many years is that you want to use your oldest stock first, in a production environment we call this First In First Out or FIFO. So in order to ensure we were using our stock of eggs properly I instituted a FIFO process by taking a marker and marking arrows on the top of the carton. Eggs come in one side and get taken out from the other side, this seemed to provide ample amusement for my wife. If I can't manage suppliers in Singapore anymore, then I damn well will manage the feathered suppliers that poop all over my back yard.

And speaking of birds, our Mountain Ash out front is starting to drop it's berries, and you know what that means? Drunk birds of course. Every year our Mountain Ash, also known as Rowan in the UK produces bright orange little berries. The berries get ripe, then they start to ferment on the tree. Flocks of Cedar Wax Wings swarm the tree, get drunk, and start hitting our windows. We have tried stickers of hawks on the windows, and all sorts of other things to try and make them stop breaking their drunken necks but nothing works. Our cats have started their own restaurant under the window. The other neighborhood cats show up at their reserved time, get seated, then wait for dinner to fall on their plates. I guess it's an efficient way of taking care of the suicidal little drunkards. But I would rather they joined a twelve step program.

This week I had my oldest son home for a couple of days with some sort of stomach virus. I took him in to see the doctor, she said he would live and off he went back to school the next day. It's really amazing how one child can throw off your whole day. It's hard enough trying to get things done without someone hanging around making comments about everything you do. I like to talk to myself when I'm researching or writing, and my son will pick up on whatever I just mumbled and make a song out of it.

"Um, alright, uh huh, that's interesting, uh, huh ,uh, huh" he will start singing. Talk about throwing your train of thought out of the window.

And this has been upgrade week, I turn on Ubuntu, and it wants me to upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10, I turn on iTunes and it wants me to upgrade my iPod to version 5, Windows is downloading a boat load of updates. Don't I have better things to do with my bandwidth than down load hours worth of updates? I don't see any real improvement, but I'm sure they are there. I can't tell any difference at all between iOS 4 and iOS 5. Maybe iOS5 contains Steve Job's consciousness.

*Shrug.

Meanwhile on the home improvement front, I got the opportunity to replace our stove top that had one more burner finally give up the goat, so the taste of power tools is fresh. That taste got me working on plan. Even though I have a small two bedroom house, it has two garages. The space isn't being used efficiently, and I need another bedroom, a man cave, and more storage. So I drew up my master not so evil plan today. Oh the thought of shopping for more power tools, it just doesn't get better than that. Well, maybe shopping for more computer hardware would trump it. Which reminds me I'll have to wire my man cave workshop, so I can listen to tunes, and do research. I really need a little place to escape to.

Well I better get busy, and if you aren't able to read this right away because you are protesting "The man" on Wall street, or some other street around the world, then I forgive you.

"Power to the Peeps!"