Wasn’t me. Didn’t do it.
Learning
There are some very important lessons to be learned in life.
How to drink from the massive water dish out back. Having a big brother show how it’s done is helpful.
Because you never know when thirst will hit you.
Staying out of the way of the Princess. She is, after all, the Princess.
But most of all, how to be cute. Although this is probably something that comes naturally.
How to irritate tech support
One in a never-ending series.
1. Open a ticket whining that your site is down, and that there have been no visitors in an hour.
Your main problem here is that we have access to the monitoring reports, which show no issues, and access to your site’s logs which not only show continuous, unbroken traffic to the site, but shows you logging right in the site yourself – multiple times – in the same “hour” that you’re claiming the site has been down. If you’re going to try to exaggerate, or just lie outright, as least make a tiny effort instead of tossing something our way that can be debunked in the span of less than two minutes.
2. Whine that where you used to receive a couple hundred pieces of spam a day, you’re now receiving next to none.
Your main problem here is that you’re a dumbass: no one wants to actively collect spam except those people running honeypots. You are not one of these people. The single largest group of tickets we receive in any given day revolves around email. A large portion of that subset of tickets revolves around ways of reducing spam. We do quite a lot of continual adjustments to the filters we have at the network and server level because all your neighbors on that same server do not share in your perverse need to feel important because some spambag sends junk to your domain. I have never, in all my years of being in the tech field, found anyone who ever wanted more spam and not less. Telling us that our quality has “deteriorated” because your ego requires that you collect junk mail wins you no points.
3. Threaten any sort of legal nonsense when your site is down. Because you allowed your domain to expire.
Your main problem is that I despise it when people do that sort of thing. It’s pretty much a one way ticket to getting your account terminated instantly for being a douchebag.
There is a reason that a lot of tech people burn out and seek other fields. The 85% of people that are nice and civil when they contact support for anything are far outweighed by the 15% who are rude, clueless asshats when contacting support for something.
Moving right along
We’ve been motoring along here.
The chickens, at just over three weeks, continued in their baby dinosaur phase.
Mostly, like any babies, they ate, slept, pooped, and required frequent changes of their dirties.
A new puppy, just in time for my sister’s 29th birthday, and my 40th.
He – Einstein – sleeps quite a bit, too. But only after he’s been running around like he’s on puppy uppers, playing as only puppies can.
We were also awaiting the arrival of yet another baby, who would continue that time-honored tradition of eatings, sleeping, and pooping.
Fortunately, she held off on making the birthday party really lively.
My sister and I had been letting our hair grow out so we could then have it cut off and donated to Locks of Love. We had decided that would be a fine birthday present for both of us.
That turned out well.
Although for some reason – and we didn’t realize this until well into the evening during the party when my sister pointed it out – mom and I were wearing the same color. Must be that whole spring thing.
Life has loveliness to sell
The good ache, part two
When planning out the raised beds for the garden – since the soil is crap and will be for years while I work on it – we decided on 49 to 51 4×4 raised beds. Alone, that would be somewhere north of 800 square feet in planted beds just for things we intend to eat and provide to others.
That, my friends, is a lot of frames.
The frames themselves, though, are not the hard part. The hard part is filling them. Think about this: each frame is made of four foot sections of 1 x 6 x 8 lumber. Those of you who recall your volume measurement formulas can do the math. In our scenario, that equals 4 cu ft of peat moss, 50 pounds of chicken manure, 80 pounds of cow manure, and coarse vermiculite sufficient enough to give us the consistency we’re after – per two frames. That is quite a lot of mixing and more animal poo than most people will handle in their lifetime.
The other day, we went out and filled almost six frames (I say almost, as one of the vermiculite bags was fine rather than coarse, so the levels were a bit off).
A little out of alignment on the left, which will be fixed. The frames get knocked about a bit because of the weight of the dumping process. Which, by the way, means mixing half, dumping, mixing another half, dumping, and on and on. Heavy, sweaty, dirty work that leaves you sore and tired, but in the best possible way because you’ve spent some time working outside in the fresh air.
That streak on my right leg? Chicken poop, from a bag that got wet.
It’s also a lot of each part of the mix, given the rather largescale plans we have. That’s ok, though, because this particular backbreaking part only has to be done once unless we decide to move the frames around. I don’t think that’s in the plans for any time in the foreseeable future.
Last fall, I threw down some seeds from a butterfly/bee mix in an area around one of the hoses, just to have something in the ground when spring came. Winter was so mild, with only a couple of severe freezes, that we’ve had flowers almost all winter.
They’ve been maintenance-free, too, chugging along on their own with nothing special from us.
The good ache, part one
It had rained – a lot – but we had a break in the weather and it was time to do some layouts and cleanup, as well as check the progress of some of the things growing out in the beds.
Carrot tops are popping up, and the carrots will probably be ready to pull next month.
The garlic continues to look robust, but I’m worried about it rotting in the ground because the rains decide to come in huge storms that dump a couple of inches at a time rather than something a bit more gentle.
We managed to get a small burn pile going even though things were still fairly wet.
Some prep on the ground and the layout of (some) of the frames.
In the foreground by the chair is a frame with snow peas, thyme, rosemary, and catnip, along with another round of carrots. The snow peas are erupting and since we know how quickly they can get out of hand, my goal in the next day or so is to get the trellis in place. Shortly after we wrapped up for the day, the weather turned stormy once more, with another three and a half inches of rain before it subsided. Nice for our water shortage around here, but not so good for the remaining areas on the property that need to be filled and leveled.
Lazy day
Night, actually. I’ve never watched Lost, as I don’t watch a lot of network television and even fewer series shows. I believe the last series I used to watch on even a regular basis was ER, many years ago, and then not as religiously as some people watch “their shows”. I happened to catch pieces of it the other night (time travel? seriously?) because of this crew:
The chickens were sleeping, too, but not on the couch and not particularly interested in waking up every now and again to see what was happening on the show.
Tastes like chicken
Mickey thinks so, anyway.
The thing about chickens is that really (from a pet standpoint), they simply aren’t all that bright. Which is fine, really, when you think about it. They’re not like dogs, who need and crave attention, and not like cats with their “One day we will take over this planet, as soon as we hit our quota of naps.” mentality. No, chickens – or chicks in this case – spend much of their time peeping and cheeping, pecking away at anything that looks like food, sleeping, and pooping. Eventually, they’ll earn their keep by paying for their room and board in eggs. When Heather and Michael brought over our three on Saturday, a small moth got into the house and was flittering around, to and fro. He made the mistake of getting into the box where we’re holding the chicks until they are old enough to go outside. I waved it over toward the watering dish, and when it alit, one of the chicks snatched it and gobbled it down. Nifty. I can’t wait for them to be outside putting a hurt on the grasshopper population. They also got one worm apiece from our composting batch, but that’s it for those worms. Their future treats will be from the bait shop.
And when I said they weren’t particularly bright, I meant it. This, after all, is not what is generally thought of as chicken feed. But I suppose someone has to be the nonconformist.
Death and life and death and life
It isn’t just animals that die, of course. People can (and do) die both suddenly and not so suddenly.
Case in point: one of our customers, who had been with us since almost the very first, died unexpectedly early in February of a heart attack. We did not discover this until late in the month when one of his clients contacted us directly. While it probably will not be the last time we have to do this, it is a bit odd and sad to have to make arrangements for the disposition of his client accounts with us, as the rest of his family knows nothing about what he was doing and has no idea how to provide hosting support to those clients. I’ve been working on notices to those clients, straddling the line between breaking news they may not know and yet being businesslike enough to make sure that they understand what has to be done.
But life carries on, no matter what happens to us. It may be difficult, it may strain the people left behind (one of my chief concerns should anything happen to me), but on it goes.
Another case in point: one of my mom’s old long-term neighbors (Jo, in case those of you reading this knew her) died in February as well, the same week Boots did. She had been receiving treatment for cancer that had invaded her brain, and they found out it had spread to her liver. She’d been in the hospital for a bit, but when there was nothing more they could do, they brought her home with Hospice care. She died that same night, around midnight.
But again, life carries on, and we move on with it.
I knew someone once who was incredibly anguished about all the bad things that happen in life, and dwelt constantly on that aspect: wasn’t it horrible, life is unfair, it all seems such a waste, how can we possibly go through all this, and the same, ad nauseum, with no break of sunshine, ever.
How can we go through all this? How can we not?