Frozen

Yay! We didn't get all the snow that we had the potential of getting. I like snow, but I'm not ready for real snow yet. Tuesday morning there was snow on the grass and on my truck, but it was only 1/4" - if that. It sure was cold tho'. The forecast looks really nice for the next few days, relatively speaking. Yay again!

It was really cold overnight, and the water in the chickens' waterer was frozen this morning. It was funny watching the babies trying to get a drink. They now know what ice is :) And yes - I gave them fresh water.

Channel 4 is back - I'm actually watching Survivor on the TV instead of my computer monitor. I think I would rather watch it on my computer and keep the free HBO.

Why is it when I go grocery shopping, and there are only five people in the whole store, no matter what it is I am looking to purchase, one of those five people is standing *exactly* where I want to be???? Why can't I have that kind of luck when it comes to the lottery?

I hope I don't forget to turn my clock back Saturday night.

Rushing the Season

Last week I went into Home Depot to pick up a new drill bit (why does it always seem that I only misplace the bits that I have only *one* of???). It shouldn't have surprised me, but I guess I wasn't thinking about it at all. It just hit me in the face: Christmas. The whole front part of the store was totally decked out in Home Depot's finest Christmas attire. Fully decorated and lit trees, lights, extension cords, timers... you name it - even the handy-dandy Extendo-arm light hanging kits. I like Christmas just as much as the next person, but the fact that stores extend the season earlier and earlier every year makes me sick of the holiday before it even gets here. I mentioned this to one of my co-workers, and she said that a bunch of the stores she shops at have had their Christmas stuff out for a while already. Ugh. I really long for the days when Christmas stuff didn't come out until after Thanksgiving. I'm just really glad I haven't heard any Christmas music playing in the stores yet.

I also want to share a really poignant post from BUFFALOg... it gives you something to think about before going to the polls next month.

Channel 4

I'm down to my last five tomatoes. I picked them right before I left for Philadelphia. While I was away we had a really hard frost, and I wasn't able to cover the plants so they all died. All I have left now is five tomatoes' worth of vBLT's. ~sigh~ Maybe the price of tomatoes will come down at the supermarket. Maybe they would even taste good. Probably not. I already can't wait for fresh tomatoes next year :)

The weather guys are saying that we have a chance of a couple feet of snow early next week. I guess it's a small window of 'opportunity', but it's there. There are still a lot of leaves on the trees, so here's hoping we don't have another event of October Storm infamy...

Speaking of snow, the New York State Golden Snowball Award site is back into action for the season :)

I think that LIN Television really blew it when they tried to bully Time Warner. The longer I don't have Channel 4, the more I don't miss it. The shows they air that I like (The Amazing Race, Survivor, etc.) I can see either on the Canadian channels or online. Plus, while Channel 4 and 23 are off the air, I get free HBO from TW. Channel 4 can stay off the air as long as it likes!

I am curious to see how this is all going to get resolved. LIN Television is probably going to end up begging TW to take them back. Wouldn't it be ironic if it ended up costing them money, instead of them making the extra they wanted in the first place?

Road Trip

I spent this past weekend in Philadelphia - I've never been there before, so I was excited at the chance to visit somewhere new. I arrived at the hotel at about 12:30 Saturday morning. I left right after work Friday and only made two stops on the way in - one to pick up some dinner and once for gas. New York really kills us with taxes on gas. At home I paid $3.58 a gallon to fill up my tank (I always get the middle grade). When I crossed the Pennsylvania border, I paid $3.08. At home I pay an extra $5.00 for every 10 gallons of gas I buy - that really adds up :(

Anyway, I digress... I left for home on Sunday afternoon - I had a lot of fun and managed to see a lot in my day-and-a-half stay:

Independence Hall was a disappointment - I was expecting something big and grand, like something out of National Treasure, but all we got was a half-hour talk by a National Parks volunteer and saw a couple of the rooms where our forefathers sat while coming up with the Declaration of Independence. We didn't even get to see the Declaration of Independence. That was very disappointing.

I have to say that children under the age of seven or eight shouldn't be allowed on these tours. The parents don't watch or discipline them and they are very disruptive. When the kids are so little, they don't get anything out of what's being narrated anyway.

We went by the United States Mint, but being the weekend, they weren't open for tours.


We visited the Mutter Museum which was very interesting. It was neat to see everything in person, but there really wasn't much more than what's been shown on the TV specials about the museum. Picture taking wasn't allowed in the museum. We had dinner at Ralph's - the nation's oldest Italian restaurant owned and operated by the same family. I opted for the cheese ravioli and it was fantastic. Saturday night we went to see a Comedy Sportz show. Randy drove in from Maryland and played with the Philadelphia group.


On Sunday, after another fantastic breakfast from the hotel, we headed out to Eastern State Penitentiary of Ghost Hunters fame ("Run dude - Run!") - that was a lot of fun. I have visited Alcatraz and this tour was just as good, if not better.



What I thought was different was the fact that they incorporated a lot of art exhibits throughout the prison. The one I thought was the most interesting was the Ghost Cats.


We took a stroll through Chinatown...


What is this fine for?


A visit to Benjamin Franklin's grave and lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe rounded out my visit to Philadelphia.


I had fun over the weekend. I loved the mixture of old architecture and new. I loved seeing all the horse and buggies around. We did a *lot* of walking.


But being a city, I could never live here - I like lots of space and privacy at home. Visiting a city = fun. Living in a city = not fun :)

I got home late Sunday night. I was *really* tired at work yesterday :)

9 to 5

Just about all my life I've had jobs with weird working hours. I either had hours that fluctuated or just had strange start and quit times. I can only think of two jobs I've had with 'normal' Monday through Friday hours. It didn't matter then because I was young and still living at home. As a homeowner, odd hours definitely have their advantages - it seems like there was always time to get stuff done. I could go to stores during less crowded times. I could do projects around the house while the sun was still shining. Appointments were easy to schedule. Things were way more flexible.

My present job is Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. How does anyone who has a house and/or a family get anything done working these hours??? It's getting even harder for me as the days get shorter. It seems like after I get home from work each day, I check my email, eat dinner and then it's already too dark outside to do anything. I find it really hard to get motivated to get anything done when it's pitch dark outside. Not getting things done during the week pushes everything to the weekend - and that is just not enough time for me.

My original plan today was to head out to Akron and pick up a travel bug that made it to New York from a friend of mine in California. It's been a long journey getting here and I am anxious for it to complete it's travels. I didn't get out of work on time - only about 15 minutes late - but I knew that I wouldn't be able to make it to the cache site and be able to find it before it got dark. The new plan when I got home was to skip dinner and email and cut my grass. I ended up finishing the last part of the yard in the dark. It was like a race between me and the sun - and I lost. I do have to say that the lawn looks like a perfect golfing green by the light of my mower's headlights. I can't wait to see what I missed and what it really looks like tomorrow morning :)

Business

Old business and new business today :)

The Big Chicken Move happened Friday night. Eight of the chickens made the move to my sister's house. From what I've been told, everything is going well. The bad news is, I ended up giving my sister and brother-in-law my only layer. I gave them six babies, Mr. Rooster and The Bantam. I thought that the egg-a-day I was getting was from Gray Chicken, which is why I kept her. Lo and behold, Jill isn't getting any more eggs; Jill's sister is now getting an-egg-a-day :( Hopefully next summer I'll have all layers ~crossed fingers here~

I also wanted to post some pictures to back up my adopted chicken theory:


Mama Chicken





Bantam Chicken





Baby Chicken

You decide :)

Randy and I made giant leaps today on the heating project (Thanx again Randy!). No more forced-air heat for this house - radiant floor heat is what we'll have here when it's done. It was a very satisfying work day, especially in the fact that parts of the project I was really afraid of worked out/will work out better than I could have hoped. I'm very excited to keep moving on this project.

And I've had the chance to play around with my new GPS. I have to say that I am very surprised by the fact that even tho' it is the same make as my old GPS, the menus and display screens are really different - It is going to take me a while to get used to the new setup. It definitely picks up satellites a whole lot quicker, that's for sure and it downloads waypoints in the blink of an eye - both pluses. The real test is when I go out for a full day of caching - we'll see how many smilies I will log.

Stay tuned :)

Frosty Chickens Who Don't Know Where They are Going

OK not really, but the title covers most of the post :)

Last night we had the first frost of the season. I was really glad that I covered my tomato plants. The parts of the plants they were sticking out from under the tarp don't look so good, but most of them still look OK. I am definitely not ready to give up my (veggie) bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches quite yet, so I hope that I'll be getting tomatoes for a while yet. From the time that my tomatoes start ripening up until the time when the plants stop producing, I gorge myself on vBLT's. Tomatoes from the store just don't taste very good, not to mention that they are waaaay too expensive, so this is the only time of year I allow myself to indulge in the yumminess of the vBLT. And I take full advantage of fresh tomatoes from the garden - Mmmmm!

Every morning, when I let the chickens out of the coop for the day, I like to watch them for a while before I have to get ready for work. They are very entertaining, and it's interesting watching the baby chicks grow. Today I noticed something I didn't really think about before - one of the chicks looks an *awful* like the bantam I have. I'm willing to bet that Mama Chicken wasn't sitting on only her eggs - I think that the bantam snuck one of her eggs in clutch! Time will tell :)

My GPS officially died over the weekend. It was in it's death throes the last few times I've used it, but the inevitable finally happened. I don't use it every day, but I do feel lost without it. I needed to do some maintenance on one of my caches over the weekend, and of course that's when my beloved Garmin Legend decided to bite the dust. Fortunately my brother-in-law loaned me his GPS so I could take care of business. I have a new Legend CX ordered and can't wait for it to get here. I have a travel bug that I need to moving, so that will be the christening when I get it.

I know that it's been blogged to death already, but to put in my two-cents worth I hope that Time Warner doesn't give in to Channel 4. I definitely have my issues with Time Warner, but they are definitely in the right here . LIN Television’s side of the story is here and Time Warner’s side is here. Time Warner had better not cave in on this.