Yesterday was the second anniversary of our somewhat unscheduled switch to a car-free lifestyle. Which is to say, we haven’t owned a working car in two years.
All things considered, I think we’ve done pretty well. We haven’t really used a car much at all since ZipCar and FlexCar merged. We’ve occasionally borrowed my folks’ car for some hardware store errands, but we’ve mostly stuck with the bike and bus of late. And I don’t think it’s been much of a hardship. We do have to plan things more carefully, in general, and it’s a pain when there’s a show out in West Seattle I’d like to go to, but not really enough to want to spring for a cab back. But overall, I’m not regretting not having a car at all.
We’ve chosen where we live well, which helps a lot. There are grocery stores and farmers’ markets within easy bike/bus distance, as well as shopping malls and restaurants and libraries and most other places we’d want to go. With any luck, I’ll get another job within a few miles, otherwise that might be hard. When we bought this house, I expected that I’d be working at the UW more or less forever. And I’m still hoping that’s the case; it’s just less certain.
So, go us! As gas prices rise, that decision is looking better and better.
I haven’t seen a raccoon in our back yard in at least a year, probably more. After we cut some branches out of the tree on the back property line, they seemed to be less interested in hanging out back there. I guess they were just waiting for a reason to come back.
We took the chickens out to the coop in the back yard today with the intent of leaving them overnight. Tonight’s the Great American Backyard Campout, so we figured we could set up a cot or something back there and spend the night by the coop in case anything happened. So we headed out back just now, with the light fading, to see how the chickens were doing. They were freaking out, but they’ve freaked out the last few days when the light starts to fade. They haven’t gotten used to not having an overhead heat lamp on 24/7 yet, I guess.
They were in the fenced run area of the coop, so Cam got in to herd them into the enclosed chicken house area. They flew up onto her head. It’s not as easy to get a small chicken off your head as you might imagine, at least if you don’t want to injure the chicken. They’re pointy, and I think one drew blood on its way up, so I got in to help her out. And that’s when Cam noticed a raccoon at least the size of a five gallon water bottle staring at us from the break in the corner of the fence, about four feet away. The chickens continued to freak out, and some ended up on my head. Taking one for the team, I wrangled the chickens off Cam’s head and onto my own, so she could get out of the coop and retrieve the pet carrier. The raccoon climbed the fence and disappeared, but I’m sure it didn’t go far. Not with those tasty chickens protected only by a layer of chicken wire.
We got the chickens back into the house and put them in their box. Tomorrow, I think we’ll reinforce the coop with a layer of half-inch hardware cloth, dug down a ways to prevent tunneling. We don’t want the chickens’ first night in their real coop to be their last. Stupid raccoons.
Yesterday after work (plus a bit today after I found the tin snips so I could cut the chicken wire) I built a small chicken tractor so we could introduce the chickens to the outside world. I probably should have put some more thought into the design—doors on both ends might be nice, for example—but it worked out ok, and it’ll be easy to take apart later if we decide we want something better. This isn’t going to be their permanent home, in any case; we’ve got a real coop with an enclosed yard for that. This is just so we can take them into the front yard if we want. And so we could take them out of their box in Cam’s office and into the outside world for the first time today.
They’re about five weeks old now, and they’ve got enough insulation that they shouldn’t be too bothered by a breeze. Plus, it was a gorgeous day. So I went up to the neighborhood vet and picked up a cardboard pet carrier to transport them out of the house and into the tractor, one at a time. They were freaked out by the change for a few minutes, but got used to it fairly quickly and started scratching around and eating the clover. Cam fed them some rose petals, which they had fun with, grabbing one and then running away so nobody else could take it from them while they figured out how to eat it.
Getting them back into the house could have been tricky. We don’t have a fishing net or anything to catch them with if they escape, and the tractor is long enough that we can’t just reach in and grab them if they don’t cooperate. Luckily, this time when we opened the door they came over and let us pick them up and put them back in the carrier. Cam had enlisted one of our neighbors to help if we couldn’t wrangle them back inside, but we ended up not needing to call him. This time.
If I’ve done this right, clicking on any of those images should get you a shadowbox slide show. (Looks like it worked. Now I just have to get the admin interface to flickr photo insertion cleaned up a bit. I’ve modified WP-Flickr to work with Shadowbox JS and Mbedr.)
I just got a notice that the domain registration is coming due on houseofcranks, which means it’s been almost a year and we haven’t done anything with it. With all the happenings here at the House of Cranks this year, it may be time to remedy that. So I wiped and reinstalled WordPress. I’m still working out what plugins/themes I want, but here’s a running summary as I go along:
Plugins
Star Ratings – lets us add ratings, like this: Rating:
Gravatars2 – gives us user avatars in the comments
Wordpress Flickr Manager – easy integration with Flickr
Although I’m not sure how it’s going to work when both Cam and I have Flickr accounts. Maybe we’ll have to make a group pool for cranks stuff.
To do:
Cross-posting. It’d be nice to either syndicate posts from sculpin and elsewhere or cross-post entries from here to there. There doesn’t appear to be a wp to wp crossposter yet, though. Weird.
planted two rosemaries in pots. Maybe if I overwinter them inside one year, they'll be big enough to survive future winters outside.02:19:12 PM March 24, 2010from web
Put up some old tanglefoot codling moth traps in the apple tree. The pheromones are probably toast by now, but hey. (Should've frozen 'em.)01:47:34 PM March 18, 2010from web
The plan: dry plums, eat over the winter. The reality: dry plums, eat immediately.07:03:46 PM September 26, 2009from web
All those gross old coffee grounds that were sitting around in bags in the back yard for months still had it in 'em: compost is 132F.07:01:51 PM September 26, 2009from web
Cover-cropped the shady back raised bed. Josh made a compost bin while I made encouraging noises. (That counts as helping, right?)01:28:48 AM September 21, 2009from web
Principe Borghese is a lot better dried; still, probably not on my must-grow list.01:27:41 AM September 21, 2009from web
