Got a hundred pounds of chicken in the shop fridge

It is getting to be fall, if not winter, so it is time to start preparing for the long months of snow, ice and frozen hoses. One of the things to do in preparation for that is to kill off all of the chickens that were raised for meat (as opposed to the egg layers and a couple of "pet" birds).

We had 11 big white meat birds left. We had raised a couple of batches of them and these were the last of the chicks that we got towards the end of summer. The better ones were upwards of 12 pounds liveweight. These silly chickens are as big as small turkeys! Only two at a time comfortably fit in the drum-plucker, which is designed to hold 5 "normal" sized birds.

Plucked and dressed, the biggest bird weighed just over 10 pounds. Imagine 11 of those things, plus a bag of dog treats (heads, necks and feet) crammed into the shop fridge along with 16 dozen eggs that are stored there right now. A few of them have been cut up into quarters, but most of them are whole roaster chickens. One of these things feeds my small family for half a week!

Next step is to dismantle the pen they had been living in and scrape off the chicken poop that has accumulated there. The pen panels will then be used to contain the dozen and a half ducks that are roaming around out there. They will be kept in the garden area over the winter so I won't have to haul water too far.

Mmmmmmmmm....chicken....

Took a day off to go to the auction

Looking at this damned computer screen all day gets old. After enough hours, it really causes some eye fatigue. Today I did the smart thing and just walked away from it for the day.

Instead of working, I went to the livestock auction in Whately, MA. It is the weekly auction where the local farmers sell off stuff they have raised or stuff they are looking to cull. Other farmers buy them, as well as representatives from a couple of meat packing places and custom butchers.

I came home with 5 weened rabbits that cost me $1.75 each, 43 bales of hay at $2.30 each, and a 98 pound lamb that sold for $85 per hundredweight (AKA $.85 per pound). The lamb should yield about 60% of it's liveweight in usable food, so it should work out to roughly 58 pounds of lamb meat that cost me about $1.40 per pound. That price doesn't include my time in fetching it or butchering it, but going to the auction and cutting meat I count as entertainment.

The bunnies are probably 3-4 weeks old. it will take less than half a $10 bag of rabbit chow to grow them out to full sized meals. I'll check them out tomorrow in the daylight and figure out who are males and who are females. For a small family like ours, the simplest breeding setup is to have one buck rabbit and two or three does. Managed well, each doe can produce a litter of four to eight babies every two months. Baby rabbits are called "kits"...the act of giving birth is called "kindling", hence the rabbit logo for those silly electronic book reading devices that are all the rage right now.

By comparison, full grown meat rabbits were selling for $8-$12 each at the auction. For a homesteader, rabbits are an efficient meat animal. You can even grow them in urban areas, either in your backyard or in your basement.

Making progress on the roadway

I got an "early" start on the roadbuilding project today...5:30PM. It stays light until about 6:30-6:45 before I need to use the headlights, so I got a good hour in before I had to really narrow down my operations.

Tonight I managed to get the tractor up off of the existing logging road and onto the flat spot in front of the dining fly. Once I was up there, I concentrated on ripping out sharp rocks and tree stumps that could potentially puncture a tractor tire or be something to trip over.

What I am learning in this project is that a small tree stump is a relatively easy thing to tear out of the ground...unless that tree grew it's roots into and around a bunch of large chunks of rock. And guess what, in NH, ALL tree roots grow around chunks of rock! Big rocks, little rocks, even bigger rocks. At one point, I even struck ledge.

It is a learning curve, but I am making progress.

New roadway going in

My after-work project for the past couple of days involves ripping out stumps and big chunks of granite from the hillside.

If you have ever been here for one of our shoots, you'll remember where the "headquarters" tent is placed, up on the hill near the pond. It is somewaht of a pain to get to because of the undergrowth and glacial rocks that line the hillside.

There is a logging road that goes towards the pond and off to the north. What this phase of the project is entails creating a roadway that leads from that logging road, across the front of the "headquarters" tent, across the crest of that little hill, and right up to the wooden bridge that leads to the house.

This will make it easier for visitors to use the grill and have a clear pathway to the picnic table that is under the tent fly. On a more practical level, it will make it easier to bring 4'x4' boxes of firewood (made out of pallets wired together) right up to the end of the bridge so as to make the job of carrying wood into the house easier.

At the very least, it is an excuse to play with the tractor.

The downside is that I'm doing it "after work", so that means I run out of light fast and end up working via headlights.

The pond is low on water right now, so a big part of it is accessible to the tractor, perhaps I'll be able to dig it out a little deeper with just the bucket, since I don't have an excavator for it yet. I'm thinking that the excess dirt that comes out of the pond can be piled up along the end of the range to build up a berm at the 50 yard mark.

So much tractor work to do before the snow flies!

Hopefully, by the next shoot there will be an improved facility here!

More thoughts on the decline of phone manners

The other day I posted here about some dude who was calling and calling and calling even though it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that we weren't open that day. I checked caller ID, and he had called 21 times. That's right...TWENTY ONE times. All day long. He called, he actually left voice mail messages, then he called some more. Amazing.

Today's cranky old guy rant is about cell phones. I rarely talk on the phone because of hearing problems. Between artillery, random gunfire noise, and working in a very OSHA-unsafe mechanic environment when I was a fleet mechanic, my hearing is pretty much shot. I have lost about 1/2 of my hearing range and have pretty bad tinnitus. (ringing of the ears). It varies from day to day, today the ringing is around a 7 of the scale of 1-10. It sounds like the noise from an old-time "test pattern" that you'd see when the TV stations went off the air at midnight in the old days of television. I'm not whining, I'm just trying to make the point that if I talk on the phone, it is for a really good reason and not just for fun.

I got a call today from a satelite family member. He was calling from his cell phone as he drove somewhere. I guess that is a good use of your time, multitasking if you will. The problem with it, besides the obvious "not giving your driving 100% of your attention" part is that it puts a definite time limit on the conversation. In short, it goes something like this:

"Hey, how's it going?"

"Good, how about you?"

"I'm good too, whatcha been up to?"

...followed by a couple of minutes of story telling on both sides of the conversation. Then, the caller gets to where he was going, and cuts off the conversation because he "is there".

I think it is pretty rude. If you are going to call someone and talk with them, do it. Don't just squeeze them in while you are driving somewhere. People aren't emails, and they aren't TV shows. You can't just TiVo a real live person.

Seriously, if a relationship is worth having with someone, have it. Don't just call someone and make beleive you are interested in what is going on in their lives if you are really only bored while driving to the store, restaraunt, or whatever.

This kind of weird attitude come, I think, from the overboard way that we live. We are constantly being hammered with data. Try to watch the news, and there will be a talking head newscaster in the middle of the TV screen, the stock ticker scrolling across the top of the screen, and an unrelated news ticker scrolling across the bottom. Then, on top of that, the TV station is running some kind of commercial for one of it's shows in the corner of the screen!

People have to text with their phones while surfing the net and chatting with an IM program at the same time. This can't be good for our brains. (me, I don't know how to send a text message, and I'm getting on just fine)

In the pre-election months of 2008, we went down to Keene State College to meet Ron Paul and hear him speak. I am not a big fan of colleges, but I've bene on many campuses. This was different. The students were walking from building to building in little groups, but they weren't talking to each other. They were talking on their phones or texting to someone somewhere else instead of talking to theri real live classmates walking right next to them. What have we done to our society?

Hang up the phone and drive. Go visit a real live person and sit don to chat with them for a few hours. Treat it like a reenactment if you have to...reenact the "old days" of the late 20th century when people still had the power to communicate without electronic gadgets!

Magazine issues

No, not the kind of magazines that you read or the kind you keep gunpowder in, I'm talking about the kind that feeds ammunition into your repeating rifle.

I've got a stack of assorted 15 round WW2 vintage USGI magazines for the M1/M2 Carbine, and a few aftermarket 30-round M2 mags. Some work well, others don't. The weak point in any semi auto is the feed lips of the magazine. If they are bent, the gun just won't feed right.

The way to see which ones work and which ones don't is to try and shoot with them. Oftentimes "bad" mags can be fixed by tweaking the feed lips. In this video, the 15-round mag works perfectly. The one before that allowed a couple of short bursts, but most of the time it failed to feed the next round into the chamber. The 30-rounder before that just wouldn't feed and I had to manually push the nose of each round down towards the chamber. Not a fun way to empty a 30 round mag!



The target during all of this testing was an empty Mapp gas cannister. For reactive targets, I use the Mapp gas cans, bowling pins, and clay pigeons. The bowling pins and pigeons I gotta buy, the Mapp gas cans are free with purchase of Mapp gas.

Here is the can when I was done with it. It probably won't hold gas at this point.

Why can't people deal with voicemail?

Today is opening day for pheasant hunting in NH. Since I am the boss here, I get to decide what the paid holidays are for the MVTCo employees. Sure, there is Christmas, New Years, the 4th of July, etc, but that doesn't use up the 10 paid holidays that we offer, so we make our own up...like "opening day for pheasants" and "opening day for ducks".

Me, I am at work. Everyone else is out tramping around out in cornfields with dogs and shotguns.

When you call the shop phone number, and nobody picks up (for instance, let's imagine it is a holiday and nobody but me is here...and I don't talk on the phone anymore because of hearing problems) you get a voicemail message telling you what our hours are and it asks you to please leave a message so Kathy can get back to you.

So I'm sitting here at my desk, and the damn phone is ringing away. According to caller ID, the same person is calling, waiting a few minutes and calling, etc etc. He's called about 8-10 times so far. For some reason, he's not bright enough to FOLLOW THE SIMPLE DIRECTIONS to please leave a message. (as I'm typing this, he is calling AGAIN)

If a person can't follow instructions to be able to handle voicemail, is he really ready for the responsibility of owning a gun?

Please folks, use common sense. Calling every few minutes instead of using your head and leaving a message is as dumb as pushing the elevator button repeatedly in the hopes that it will get to your floor faster. If you get voicemail, leave a message, that's how voicemail works.

Let's imagine that Kathy is on the phone talking someone through how to adjust their flint, and it turns into a 20 minute conversation. In the meantime, Bubba calls and the line is busy, so he gets voicemail. Instead of leaving a message like an intelligent person, he hangs up and immediately calls back. Every time he calls, Kathy and the customer she is currently helping has to listen to "click-click, click-click". Because of the clicking, their conversation has to pause. What happens then is that the conversation takes LONGER, so Bubba has to wait even longer for the line to open up...so he keeps calling!

Then there are people that seem to think that since I USED to answer the phone at all hours of the day, seven days a week, that we still do. No. The business has matured enough to have ***normal hours of operation*** and these hours are Monday thru Thursday, 9am-4pm. That is when people come to work. There are people that call all weekend, assuming that they'll catch me at home. I AM home, but I am not going to answer the phone at 8am on Sunday morning. One jackass even called on 11pm on Christmas eve.

If the call is important enough to tie up the phone line with 10 calls, just to hang up and try again, it is important enough to leave a message and be patient enough until people are back at work and able to call you back.

Wow, I am amazed at how much a tractor improved my life

In less than an hour, I hauled a bucket load of firewood to the house and piled it up on the hill near where we stack it. The bucket load would have been at least four wheelbarrows full and to push a wheelbarrow over the terrain I just drove the tractor would have been strenuous to say the least.

Then, I switched the bucket for the forks (I.E. like the business end of a fork truck) and used them to pick up and haul a big fiberglass hot tub (one of those "some day" projects) from the space behind the house to a flat area over near the pond. The tub probably weighs 1000 pounds, it took four of us to lift it off of the back of my truck when it found it's way here. The tractor lifted it and hauled it effortlessly. The trail to the pond is up a steep, rocky grade that has a bunch of saplings piled on it at one point. No sweat, over the saplings, up the hill, over the rocks and to the pond.

After moving the tub, I scooped up a musket crate full of leftover lumber scraps (I.E. kindling) and used the forks to lift it up onto the hill.

All of this in less than an hour without breaking a sweat.

Yeah, the simple old fashioned life where you do stuff by hand sounds great on paper, but if they had diesel engines in the 18th century, they certainly would have used them!