Gorged

What a great weekend! The weather was perfect and I spent it doing fun things with fun people :)

Saturday I went geocaching with someone who had never gone before. It was a lot of fun hiking and exploring, but it would have been even better had we found a cache. We looked for three of them, but came up empty handed on all of the them.

I'm worried that the problem might be my GPS. This was the first time I used it for geocaching, and I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't lead us to at least one of the caches. But the clues on the cache pages weren't matching up to where we were looking either, which is what is making me wonder. I don't want to log a DNF saying that the container wasn't there if we weren't even looking in the right place, so I want to go looking for another cache and see what my GPS does there. Either that, or borrow my brother-in-law's GPS and see if they match up on a location. I'm just hoping it was just a bad day of caching and the problem isn't with the GPS.

Again, we had fun hiking - but I was really disappointed that I wasn't able to share the fun of actually finding a cache with someone who was caching for the first time :( Hopefully we will have better luck next time.

Sunday was spent hiking in the Niagara Gorge. We went down at the Devil's Hole entrance, so the only bad part of the day was traversing the 410 steps down and then back up again... It was so totally worth the agony tho' :) It was a picture perfect day - too bad I didn't remember to bring my polarizing filter... too many of the pictures I took were washed out, but I still managed a bunch of decent ones.

It's so much better seeing the beauty of the Niagara River up close, instead of from along the rim of the gorge :)

With no rain the past couple of weeks, the trails were nice and dry!

That being said, I didn't think I would see many of these guys - but they were all over the place. This is a red-banded millipede, which is the largest millipede in our area - they can get up to 4" long.

How can you beat this on a September Sunday afternoon?

I put this together using six separate pictures. It's down by The Whirlpool. I thought it turned out pretty good :) If you double click on the picture, you should get a bigger version.

We hiked from Devil's Hole upstream to a little past the Whirlpool. Next time we are going to start at the Whirlpool entrance and head upstream from there.

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.