Author: Eric

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Where Do You Get Your Chicken?

Murray McMurray day old chicksOur chicken comes from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa via the USPS as day old fluffy little puff-balls. Most of these buggers are from the “Barbecue Special” package of broiler and fryer types (we call them Meat Blobs); the brownish fuzz-balls are Red Leghorns for our layer flock; and that grey guy is the “Special Chick” which is a free addition to every Murray McMurray order, who almost always turns into a rare-breed rooster — a neat way for Murray McMurray to get rid of the chicks that no one orders. By the looks of this guy, I’m guessing we got a crested Polish breed of some type who will eventually have a “top hat” of feathers.

After this first important day of getting them out of the little shipping box and into a run with water and feed and a heat lamp, they will spend about four weeks down in our barn basement under the lamp until they feather out. Then they will transfer into our “chicken tractor” which is a simple 10′ X 4′ chicken wire box with no bottom. They will eat grain and grass and bugs for another six weeks in the “tractor” until the Meat Blobs are slaughtered and put in our freezer. The layers will be put in with the rest of our laying flock.
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Flyday

Flyday

Pictured are nine of thousands of flies that appeared in the sun of our dooryard today; it happens every year on the first warm day of spring.

The life cycle of the Muscidae family of flies is probably better detailed somewhere other than Wikipedia, which maintains most of its information on these common flies in the “Housefly” article on this otherwise very accurate and thorough source of general information (no joke! gotta give th’Wiki some props since it has recently become the butt of jokes in mass media based on a few sensational examples of its widely known weaknesses, weaknesses that really describe human nature rather than this ambitious, excellent and almost always useful project…is there such a think as a “perfect” source of information?). Their page talks only on the breeding cycle with flies laying eggs on “decaying material” which hatch, grow, then pupate before becoming new flies.

Up here where it gets cold for a long time, the Muscidae have another trick for survival. They squeeze into cracks (like between wooden boards or shingles — and you can see from the corner of our barn that we have plenty of cracks and shingles to offer) and hibernate through the coldest weather. On the first warm day of spring (which today, Friday, April 20th was this year, after a week of wet snow followed by torrential rain) they crawl out and swarm together, no doubt mating and laying eggs for the first of many summer generations. They must need to re-learn how to fly after the hibernation because they’re pretty slow and logy on this first day, and they hover around the ground in the morning, then start climbing up walls. In the afternoon they dissipate, and we never see flies in these numbers ever again for another year.

In another sign that spring is coming, Alison heard the “Peepers” (tiny tree frogs that sing their mating “peepeepeepeep” song as soon as the pond ice melts) last night while walking Corky.

Letter From Languedoc

chirac_sarko.jpgThis morning Chirac finally (and tepidly) endorsed Sarkozy as his choice for prez. Much was made of the wait and basically it was about as climactic as Clinton endorsing Gore in 2000 (or Bush Jr. endorsing whatever fascist gets the nomination next year). There was a big thing on the noon interview show that the lab lunch crowd watches (of which I join about 3 days a week) about the impending (5 weeks!) first-round of the election. The main reason is that last time (’02) Le Pen came out of nowhere to make the top two (who advance to the second and final round).

This time the left learned their lesson and anointed Ségolène Royal and are more or less standing behind her (last time, the left was much more split than usual, which contributed to Le Pen sneaking into the 2nd round with 17%). The right is more or less united behind Sarko.

[also for reference: No Sex, Please, We’re French, an NYT op-ed by Stephen Clark printed 23 March]
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Tourney Time

bball_david_spin.jpgIt’s impossible to resist filling out a bracket for the Enceedubelay Mensmarchmadness event, and the big web sites have caught on and are offering their own ways to do it on-line. (I also couldn’t resist using the kih-kass graphic I put together last year at this time…)

It would be nice if all the Rectors who were similarly inclined would use the same tool so we can easily compare and contrast. I look at the NYTimes every day, so I’d prefer to use theirs — the NYTimes site always seems to load very quickly on my cussed dial-up line, while the SI, ESPN and CBS sports sites take FOREVER to load, probably because of the million little ads they sprinkle around. I have gone ahead and picked my bracket on the NYT site, and also created a “group” called HilltopGang (see below for group code) if you should decide to join me there. (Their bracket page is actually VERY cool because you just click and drag your picks, and you don’t have to wait for the page to update each time because they’re using Shockwave in a very clever way…sorry, but this geek is impressed.)

NYT Bracket Group Code: 99369b0cecCJtW9063K1BdQ2FcdeAJnUoQ51

The Duke men, alas, will probably not go far this year (they look pretty slow, though the ladies are going to be #1 seed on their bracket), but there are seven ACC entries, and I’m going to root for them all, except for UNC.

Meanwhile, the Buckeye mens BeeBall team better play as a better favorite than their EffBall brethren, and the only way they can exact some revenge on the Gator team would be in the final game. I know that Celtic fans will be watching young (but elder-looking!) Mr. Oden while he’s still in the mix.

Good luck gentlemen — may the upsets be “obvious” and your biases not blind you.

Big Snow Storm

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It’s likely that you have heard about the big snow storm that just walloped the Mid-west and then the East coast; meteorologists called it “explosive” because the low pressure was able to draw on big hanks of moisture off the Gulf and Atlantic as it spun across the country. It has been very very cold in Maine for the past few weeks (regularly averaging below 10 °F), but we’ve had little snow — just enough to keep your steps squeaking as you cross fields, go into the woods, or finally be able to venture out onto the frozen skins of our lakes and ponds.
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Doc B cooks a fish

loup-in-new-fish-pan.jpg

Doc B got a fish-poachin’ pan for Xmas, so he went down to his local fishmonger and picked him out a nice, local fish. Here she is, a two-pound Mediterranean sea bass (called loup in French, which also means “wolf”; smaller ones are called bar — sort of like “cod” and ‘scrod,” I guess), posing in the pan next to the fancy Japanese knife that I also got for Xmas, plus a bunch of Italian “palm cabbage” (more about that to come) and a very handy local fish cookin’ book. btw, those are her egg cases at bottom right in the pan. The fish guy asked if I wanted to keep them and I figured they weren’t heavy so I’d at least carry them home and figure out what to do with them later. I ended up just seasoning them and stuffing them back in the fish, natural-like, before cooking. They were extremely fluffy and rich when cooked and Valérie gobbled them up without flinching. I wasn’t as crazy about them but what do I know? I guess I was just expecting something more dense and salty.
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