Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

It's just about 4:30 Saturday morning. I promised myself that I would get a good night's sleep. However I had to be up until at least 11:00 pm Friday night monitoring and setting the fertile chicken eggs that arrived earlier today. So for the last bunch of hours, interspersed with way too much late night "reality" TV, I have been checking the temperature, humidity and turning of the new eggs to hopefully not have the same results as last time, that is a little chirping, one poking its head out of its shell and then every stage of embryonic development besides a hatched chick.

The house in general is in a more crazed state than normal which I didn't even think was possible. I have been working everyday this week which means the finger I had in the dike got pulled out.

The other day, don't ask me which because the days have melded together, 24/7 for me has been replaced with 196, simply put the hours in a week, cause day/night, week day/weekend none really have too much significance when the dervishes get whirling.

So just to recap what will happen in the next bit of time:

I will check again on the fertile chicken eggs.

I will feed the worms.

I will (hopefully) deal with the mushroom kits I received, what, like a week ago.

And, and this one is the confusing one: I will determine what I can throw away/recycle/reuse/use as a teaching aid/etc.

See I have watched/read/listened to and... way too many things on Re-using/recycling/re-purposing to the point where I can barely walk through my house.

Oh yeah...there's also....

Must run

Coming up for air

I have been meaning to post for a while now, but much too busy. So as I have in the past, for better or worse, gonna run down what I want to blog about, what I plan to blog about and then we'll see what actually makes the cut as it were.....


Backyard Buddies

The Concept, The Reality, The Future

The Marathon

Did that really happen? I can tell by the difficulty getting up and down stairs that it must have but.....

Cindy...Who?

Oh yeah my lovely wife from what almost feels like another life. She was here for the weekend. It was like she never left, except of course, that the house looked like a bomb went of, literally and the addition of tadpoles, mantids, and a toad, oh yeah and 3- 8 foot long aquariums and....

Somehow we managed to reconnect with friends we hadn't seen in years whose son has known Skye longer than anyone(They watched Laker Games side by side before they could crawl, OK Rodney and I watched with napping infants at our feet), do our taxes, go out for sushi at one of our favorite restaurants, fix Skye's broken Iphone, run a marathon and remember how much we love one another.

Skye becomes a Cadet

Crossing bridges

Fertile Eggs-A-Go-Go, or the End of an Odyssey

All the stages of Embryonic Chicken development, save one...You guessed it, the cute and fuzzy chick. We came close, saw a head and heard some peeps

History for Hire

A home school field trip

The Hot Water Heater Nightmare

How condensation and cheap copper pipes rocked my world


So now you know...Where in the World is Jon?

Spring Cleaning Part 1

I hosted the first Backyard Buddies of 2010,(more on that latter), which as my events often do turned into something a bit more; wonderful and magical, but not the "let's roll up our sleeves and get something done" event it is sort of supposed to be,(again more on all this latter).

The Aftermath

The house was a wreck before the day started, add a dozen kids and half as many adults, a BBQ, two rounds of Lemonade making/experimenting, and more; details to follow, and this is a taste of what I woke up to......









The state of the disarray in photo below didn't change much from before and after the party, but it gives a bit of an idea what state the house was in pre-event. More to follow....



As I started putting away some of the clean items; a full dishwashers worth just to start, I started realizing how poorly organized the pantry was, and for that matter much of the kitchen.

Well, I certainly didn't want to just stack more stuff onto and into shelves and drawers that weren't properly organized.....

Or for that matter properly designed....

What we have and what we don't have
As I started re-arranging things, I found several bags of sugar of various types. I think we have four different bags, opened and not of brown sugar.

However when I went into the poorly designed and organized storage closet, I realized that we didn't have any furniture polish. We had a lot of other types of cleaners and again a goodly amount of redundancy, but we did not have any cleaner for wood.

At this point, I need to take a step back and prioritize, because there was still left over projects and for that matter food from Backyard Buddies that would die or rot or add to the fruit fly infestation that was exploding due in no small part to aforementioned lemonade rallies; and I needed to shower. One of the many things that didn't get done before the party yesterday. In that regard, its a good thing Cindy's not home right now.

Priorities

1. Will it die or spoil
2. Will it rot and or smell
3. Will it dry and cake and become impossible to clean
4. Does it need to go in the trash as Monday/tomorrow is our trash day
5. Everything else
   

Did Someone say marathon?

With the L.A. Marathon less than 3 weeks away, I decided I better see how my endurance was. I had not ran more than 6 miles since I ran the Death Valley Marathon a few months back, at the beginning of December. Well I ran 20 miles up in Griffith Park with my running pal and her new posse. It was a kind of slow pace but it was 20 miles, and even though I started cramping up toward the end, knocking off 20 miles made me feel confident that at least I could finish the run.

Well today I flew through 5.5 miles at an 8:37 clip which is awesome for me and puts me in my sub-4 zone as long as I can keep it up 5 more times. Ha Ha Ha

Skye and Jon's Eggellent Adventure

One of the most memorable biology experiments is hatching chickens. So of course that had to be added to the curriculum of our Ecology 101 class. Hold on to your hats.

Fertile Eggs A-Go-Go

So how to make it happen. Onto the internet and into the madness.....



Murray McMurray Hatchery, the go-to joint for all things poultry. We ordered up an incubator, an egg-turner to make it easier and semi-idiot proof and then a collection of fertile eggs called "Rarest of the Rare".



How do you get eggs from here to there? Well out of 35+ eggs only 2 were broken.



We were expecting some sort of guide as far as which eggs were which but it ended up being much more of a grab bag of sorts.




These eggs will hatch and be what????!!!!!



Here we go, let the eggs hatch as they lay so to speak....



Bring on the heat.



So gotta keep this thing around 99-100 degrees F and at a specific humidity. Chickens are't that bright, how do they keep reproducing with such specificity.



Humidity on the left, temperature on the right



One piece of art alongside the others....

In a bit of weeks we will see how we've done.