Silicon Valley Redneck

My hovercraft bathtub is full of eels ducklings.

Yeah, the five little duckies maybe could have stayed in the storage bin for a few more days, but the smell in that room was getting nasty.

They're now in the tub in the middle bathroom.  With the exhaust fan on.

And there are now seven of them; during a sort-of break in the rain, we went to the farm co-op to have a look-see, and their duckling inventory consisted of a small clump of fluffy yellow duckies (the kind Joy wanted), a day or two younger than the ones we had at home, so two of them followed us home to add some variety to the flock's gene pool.

On being put in the tub, they promptly introduced themselves to the existing denizens, then they all went back under the heating plate.  (We'll leave introducing them to the adults for when they're older.)

Still here.

Got visiting family the past few days; they're leaving tomorrow.

Currently having a partial lull in toaster work, but there's stuff waiting in the wings.

First pass of tilling is done in my fields and one neighbor's new field.  Still need to make connections with another neighbor who might want a garden patch done.

The eggy-go-round filled up with ducklings (though the one big egg turned out to be a dud).  They're now in a brooder of sorts (largish plastic storage bin with a hardware-cloth cover, a heater plate, and food and water bowls).  Their water needs changing several times a day; even little bitty baby duckies are remarkably messy where water is concerned.

Still need to do taxes.  Real Soon Now, like.  But not today; I haven't been getting enough sleep the last few nights, and my attention span is very impaired just now.

This post is probably filled with typos that I'm not seeing.  All the more reason not to attempt tax forms today.

 

Oh, yes: the eclipse.  When the Sun was 90% hidden by the Moon, they were both 100% obscured by clouds.  Not that the clouds absorbed all the light, but they scattered it real good, such that even the vague location of the Sun was hidden.  Oh, well.

Interesting times, as usual.

Lessee now....

Southmoon's condition is gradually improving.

My father's condition is gradually declining, and we keep having to make adjustments accordingly.

The weirdest chicken (which was Joy's favorite) died - apparently eggbound, but didn't show obvious signs in time for us to notice & do anything about it.

We're getting the vehicles in for overdue (by the calendar) maintenance and various repairs.  Another few weeks and they should all be functionally as good as new; the Venerable Prius could additionally use some restoration work, which may or may not happen any time soon.

Spring hath sprung; I need to do tilling Real Soon Now, plus various sorts of spraying.  Got plants sprouting in the basement; it's nearly time to move them out to the front porch to catch some real sunlight (but last night got almost down to freezing, so it's not quite outdoors time yet).  I think the nurseries may be open now; got to go look for interesting vegetable seedlings and whatnot.

Toaster work remains busy, and I'm dealing with a Mystery at this point.  Got some possibly helpful test equipment on order.

I've developed a suspicion that the Gumbyware server's blacklist status in the world of Big Corp Hosted Email may be the result of a policy change: perhaps the late-1990s best practice of rejecting inbound spam during the data phase was reclassified a few years ago as "sending" the spam by ID-ten-T corporate sysadmins at companies that run the servers where a non-trivial amount of spam originates.  Anyway, I commented out that rule in the Exim configuration, and now messages with spam scores of 10+ (highest I've seen so far was 23.2) are turning up in the spam can with the 2~10 scores instead of being rejected.  I'll see if this improves my standing with the ID-ten-T corporate sysadmin community.

(Accepted practice nowadays seem to be to accept all incoming mail from non-blacklisted servers, and, if it looks too spammy, simply delete it with no notification to anyone.  Brilliant.)

I'm preparing once again to muck about with various sorts of wireless networking, the better to upgrade the defense grid, monitor the poultry and their food and water supplies, etc.  Not sure how fast that'll progress.

Life is busy, as usual.

Household matters, work, frantically trying to get up to speed on yard stuff before we get too far into Spring....

Got a half-dozen duck eggs in the eggy-go-round; at some point in the countdown, I guess I'm supposed to candle them and see if there's anything going on.  The contraption does seem to do an OK job of keeping conditions very very warm and very damp (as the song doesn't quite have it).

Rain on the forecast again tomorrow; my previous attempts at providing shelter for the ducks' pellet feeder didn't turn out well, and I don't have time to do a proper job of building a ran-and-wind-proof shelter, so I guess I'm back to trying to put a sheet-aluminum skirt on the table-looking thing that used to be the chickens' sun shelter.  Last attempt at that didn't work very well, and scared the ducks.

Got things sprouting in the basement; sometime soon, I need to thin the tomato seedlings.

Southmoon's health remains not-so-great, but at least she's nowhere near as sickly as she was last Summer.

Ah, well.  Time to give the chickens their salad scraps, then, in a little while, move them to the ducks' day pen while I clean the coops.  Looks like the wind isn't supposed to get too bad this afternoon.  Tomorrow's supposed to get rainy, so this is the day for overdue coop-cleaning.

Also, I gotta finish editing a tech document that was a few years out of date, incomplete, and meant for internal consumption; it's mostly updated now, but needs a few extras to make it more customer-facing (like, some block diagrams).

Batteries, again.

So last night was a phone-charging night....

A very few hours into the day, I noticed that the battery was much depleted.  Like, estimated cutoff in the middle of the afternoon.  Wut?  That battery should be good for about four days from full charge.

Ponder.  Check info on phone: not helpful.

Reboot phone.  Connect to a charger for a while.  Drain is now looking more reasonable.

And it appears that Google Play Services is running amok; surely it should just be checking for updates, and that shouldn't eat the charge in a hurry... right?

 

Anyway.  Late morning, head off on errands.  Well, try to.  Prius has a dead 12V battery, again.  Well, I hadn't driven it for a week or so (errands planned for last week having gotten postponed for one reason or another).

Get out the jumpstarter.  Getting it to stay on for more than a few seconds takes several tries on the boost button.  Eventually get the car started.  Let it run for 15 minutes or so.  Go off for half an hour getting organized.  Return to car: no start.

(Oh, yes: when I first tries to connect the jumpstarter, the positive lead came loose from the battery.  Eh?  Better torque it down good next time.)

Foo faddle!

Run errands in truck instead.  Discover that the nurseries don't have the little vegetable sproutlings in yet, and the standalone nurseries aren't even open.  Buy groceries.

Afternoon, take battery out of Prius.  Got 5.5V on it, oog.  Connect it to the charger, which gets it up to 7.2V and then proceeds toward a proper 12V charge.  Currently sitting there charging.

Interestingly, the previous battery is sitting out there, disconnected from the charger the past few months, and it's still showing a bit over 12V.  Maybe I'll top it up, put it in the car, and leave the newer one on the charger...?

And: I should probably be checking battery voltage every so often.  Could be the car isn't charging its little battery properly for some reason.  (I guess checking voltage before starting, and while running, might be a good idea.  But, if it's not charging?  I think that's a function of the $$$inverter$$$.

 

Our female duck showing signs of getting up to speed on the egg-laying thing - she's been laying one egg a day, mostly the size of chicken eggs, but yesterday's was the size of a proper duck egg - I did in fact go ahead and order an incubator from Amazon, picking one that gets mostly good reviews, seems to have almost the level of automation I'd want, and is reportedly good for both chicken and duck (and possibly also quail too).  Also a heater thingy for a brooder.  Guess once the eggs are consistently large I'll accumulate half a dozen and then run an incubator cycle.

 

And, I finally got around to removing the painter's tape that had been keeping drafts out of the bedroom and installing new, more suitable weather stripping on the French doors.  It's still not right; I think some fiddling with the hinges will also be required, but we're out of Winter so it's not urgent.

There's also weather stripping on the bottoms of the doors, and that's in sorry shape, but I don't feel like removing the doors right now to examine the situation.  Again, not urgent.

 

Update, Sunday afternoon:  Topped up the old battery and put it in.  With the car in READY, I see 14.00V at the battery terminals, so it is charging.  Guess I need to drive more often.

Oh, yes.  That big duck egg?  Had two yolks.  Maybe this duck just lays eggs that are the size of large chicken eggs, except when they're twins?  Anyway, I think I'll collect the coming week's eggs for a hatching attempt.

Hmmm, incubator.

Probably buy a small-capacity one on Amazon.

But now I'm pondering.

The ones on Amazon have automatic turning, as well as temperature and humidity control, but I'm not seeing a user manual on line, so... what other capabilities do they have?

It seems that duck eggs should have the humidity setting changed at one point in the cycle, and, IIRC, turning discontinued at some point before expected hatching.  Is there a setting for this?

Is there a setting for just turning the eggs, without heat, while accumulating a clutch?

Pondering further: if the eggs are supposed to be kept at around 60°F while the clutch is accumulated... that's not ambient around here, so they'd need slight cooling.  Should the incubator be heated/cooled with a Peltier module?

So now I'm having thoughts of a controller system, with open-source firmware, maybe using an ESP32, Pi Pico W, or some such (because connectivity), that could do the "turn eggs while maintaining 60°F" thing as well as a programmable incubation cycle, and maybe a 3D-printable incubator/turner to go with it.

Yet another thing to occupy my copious free time.  Great.

Sunday update

Boy, are my arms tired!

No, I didn't just fly in from somewhere.  I turned over the compost heap.

Which, when there's a lot of as-yet-uncomposted long stringy stuff near the top, and one doesn't have a brush grapple... well, there's a lot of manual labor involved in getting the uncooperative stuff moved.

Then the loader can be used to scoop the more-composted stuff from the bottom of the old pile over the top of the crunchy stuff that's now on the bottom.

I also did a bit more driveway fixery.  I think it'll take a few more iterations, and maybe a bunch of fine crunchy rock, to get the parking area and the final slope leading up to it really properly packed and in place.

Also, I need to shovel a bunch of stray gravel from the lawn back to the driveway, but my arms are tired.

Our one female duck has commenced laying eggs.  Maybe I should get an incubator and see if I can hatch some of them.  We should also (once it gets to be properly Spring) get a few more ready-sprouted ducks to add add some genetic diversity to the flock.

Various seeds are now in little containers of potting soil in the sprouting cabinet in the basement.  This would have been about the right time for starting them last year, with the very late Spring.  I think this year planting season is going to happen early, so the home-sprouted plants will be late to the party.

And, we get another patch of winter.

Temperature almost got up to 40 today.

The coming afternoons are supposed to be substantially warmer - afternoons possibly venturing into the 60s - but early-morning lows look like 20s.  Tomorrow morning, low 20s.

We don't seem to have a lot of rain in the near-term forecast.  We need more rain, to fill up the pond!  Preferably well before planting season!

I just got around to upgrading the lighting in the plant-starting cabinet, adding 80 Watts of bonus full-spectrum illumination.  Now I need to get some seeds in pots (which I meant to do in January).

The chickens are up to 3~5 eggs/day, sometimes with an additional failed egg (fragile or incomplete shell, or no shell at all).  Maybe I need to fiddle further with their diet; they're currently on 19% protein pellets that claim to have plenty of shell minerals... but they also get scratch grains and whatever they can forage for, and they don't seem to have any interest in their nice crushed oyster shells.

No duck eggs yet; if the she-duck does start laying eggs, maybe I'll want to try hatching them.  (We should probably also buy a few more ducklings this Spring, in the interest of genetic diversity.)

I need to build a stand-alone, 2-holer nest box for those times that the chickens are hanging out in the duck pen (or any other area that doesn't include their coop).  I'd been worrying about keeping rain out, but, really, it can live in a sheltered spot, or just be kept on the back deck except when the chickens are out and about on a nice day.  Shouldn't take long to throw such a thing together, once other priorities are out of the way.

 

I installed the new KVM switch today.  It woiks!  The loaner Windows machine sees the keyboard and mouse - by their own identities, not as emulated devices (I have no idea whether that was one of the problems with the old switch, or if it was just a matter of the USB not switching to port 4, nor, eventually, to port 2).

 

One toaster project seems to be out of my hair, based on results received Friday evening.  Another... I think we've come up with a way to meet a bunch of customer requirements that assume that "a box with software running inside it" means "a general-purpose computer running a general-purpose operating system and connected to the Internet."  Blindly applying the standards for such would (1) involve an entirely unreasonable amount of effort not in the original budget, (2) almost certainly fail, and (3) be looking at entirely the wrong things.  But, there are certain things that should be examined and tested, and this is a chance to add those things to The Process.

Things are FUBAR all over

Still no official word on what was going on Saturday night, other than that the fugitive's GF definitely wasn't home at the time, being as how she was in custody until yesterday.

Amazon showed a package definitely going to be delivered yesterday, except that it didn't show actual shipping progress.  This morning, it shows as "On the way, but may be late" - and as "Shipped with USPS" - but it has a UPS-format tracking number, not USPS.  Er, hello?

Apparently the Senate finally got around to passing the border bill last night, with everything related to our own border stripped out.  That's... ever so Washington.

And I have no clue, from the available public sources, what happened to the stonk market this morning in Europe.  Japan was happy.  China was shut down for the New Year festivities.  India was happy.  Europe, very unhappy.  U.S., very unhappy.  Hello?  Yeah, I know: financial news reporting is no longer a thing, and all the information that drives trading by the big players is meticulously kept non-public.

Update:  The fugitive was apprehended this afternoon, around 1530, in Knoxville.  Rumor has it that several of his associates have also been rounded up.  Still no word on what was going on Saturday evening.

In favorable news, the chickens are ramping up production.  Four eggs today!

Year of the Dragon brings Interesting Times.

That fugitive?

The one the cops have been searching for the past two days, in an area the other side of the big crossroads, 20 minutes or so away?

Based on the twinkly lights, shouty voices, gunfire, and flashbangs, it seems he returned to his girlfriend's singlewide.  Which is about (checks Google Earth) ⅓ of a mile from here.

Anyway, the drama seems to be over; he's presumably either captured or dead.

Update:  Nope?

About an hour after things got all dynamic, the roadblocks went away.

Shortly after that, news articles appeared: he's still at large, and the reward has been increased.

So... I dunno what was going on over at what I presume to be the GF's singlewide.  Joy suggests that there's something much bigger going on; maybe the traffic stop that kicked this all off wasn't just a traffic stop?

Awaiting further reports.  Did they catch somebody over there, or did the trailer turn out to be vacant?

Coming up on Chinese New Year!

And the weather seems rather non-conducive to midnight fireworks.  Well, maybe there'll be a break in the rain at the appropriate time.  We shall see.

Winter freeze became early-Spring warm days, and now cool early-Spring rain.  Supposed to continue through Monday, more or less.  Going on a quarter-inch so far.

Woke up late last night; the weather radio was warbling its song of fear.  Grab glasses; stumble out of bed.  Radio has switched to voice.  Garble warble farble something something... oh, a description of a person.  My phone said there was a Blue Alert, but when I tried to click the link for more info it just closed the popup announcement.  Oh, well: no tornado, so back to sleep.

Comes the morning: turns out there was a cop killed, and another injured, during a traffic stop... not that far from the crossroads with the stores (other side of the crossroads from us).  Perp fled in a vehicle, and as of midafternoon is apparently still at large.  So, somewhere in the general area, probably.  Which I guess is another reason (aside from the rain) for staying home today.  And a scan of the morning headlines?  Looks like there's been an outbreak of crazy.  I mean, more than what's become usual.

On the work front, interesting times (mainly of a non-bloggable nature, unless I really file the serial numbers off).

Oh, well.  Got some waveforms to ponder.

Update:  That fugitive?  Still at large, as of 1800.  At some point, the cops went to the home of his girlfriend, on... oh, my goodness.  That's not a very long road; the closest point is under 0.2 mile from here, and the furthest is about 1.8 miles away.

I didn't see the woodchunk nor his shadow...

... but it looks like we're not getting more winter any time soon.  Conditions have gotten decidedly vernal: sunny, highs in the 60s, nighttime lows sometimes venturing a little below freezing but not much, and probably a stretch of warm rain coming up in a few days.

The frogs were out (though not in full force) yesterday evening.  The grass is starting to grow.

The lawnmower does start.  I installed a new air filter; it still needs its oil (and oil filter) changed.

I wandered around the yard, looking at all the things that need doing soon.  Lots of overhanging branches (live or otherwise) that I really ought to deal with.  A walkway that I built up last fall is in need of just a little more building up, and another attempt at planting lawn mix.

Oh, and I talked to the neighbor about that crime scene.  Turns out someone hit a deer on the road in front of his house, and he dragged the carcass down to the point on his lawn furthest from any dwellings to let the scavengers have a go at it.  On closer inspection, the large white feathers turned out to be clumps of white deer hair.  So, all explained.  Unrelatedly, he moved his goats into a larger pen last year, leaving their old pen as an area of damaged lawn in which weeds had been eaten and manure deposited, so that'll be this year's garden patch.

So here it is Woodchunk Day already.

Looks like I'm caught up on my UPS deliveries....

Talked to the driver yesterday.  Apparently the backlog packages weren't piled up in the warehouse; they were being stored in trailers... and the tracking system isn't designed for that situation, so nobody knew for sure what packages were in which trailers.  The distribution center is just about caught up now, but —

Seems the distribution center for the area north of the river is even more messed up, and is likely to take another week or two to get caught up.  Like, totally FUBAR.

Meanwhile, on the ToasterCo front, we're trying to sort out ongoing issues with two projects, and a third one (that I thought was finished several months ago) just had a new set of requirements drop.  I don't know to what extent I'll be involved in that one.

I think I need to design and 3D print a new egg holder, suitable for organizing eggs of ludicrous girth.  It's bad enough that some of the hens lay very long eggs, but Weird Chicken is back to laying actual eggs and they're very large and nearly spherical.  The current organizer doesn't deal with them very well.

And one of these days I need to chat with a neighbor about the crime scene on his lawn: the remnants of a deer carcass, a bunch of large white feathers, and a game camera watching the vultures (and whatever else might be coming along to pick at the remains).

Just for extra fun, either Huckleberry or Top Hat knocked over a humidifier this morning, so I had to mop up about a gallon of water from the living-room floor.

Also fun: I bought a used mini-tower PC to substitute for the ToasterCo-owned one that holds a special I/O card for testing certain models of toaster, because the one on hand doesn't play nice (nor, indeed, at all) with my KVM switch anymore.  I figured a slightly newer model might work.  But no: it's gotta have its keyboard & mouse plugged in directly, or maybe it needs a different model of KVM switch.  BIOS is the latest.  Windows 10 is current.  Maybe I need a new KVM switch.  Or... I wonder if power-cycling the KVM switch would do the trick?  Gotta try that in a while (crawling under my desk is involved).

Meanwhile, time to go check on the poultry.

Update:  That problem with the Windows PC and the KVM switch?

Looks like that port on the switch had gone intermittent, and is now defunct.  And the port for the mini-server has crapped out too now.  Connects the HDMI OK, but no keyboard nor mouse.

So, time for a new HDMI/USB KVM switch.  Maybe one with more ports.  I'd figured a 4-porter would be a great plenty at my desk, but throw in a Windows machine and a RasPi, and I keep having to move cables around (though the RasPi is now headless, and access is via VNC).

Aaand... switches beyond 4 ports get seriously pricey.  The current situation should be temporary anyway; someday, a 4-port switch will once again be enough at my desk - workstation, token Windows machine, and 2 extras.  Just ordered (for delivery this coming Thursday) a 4-port switch that does everything the current one used to do before it stopped, isn't horribly expensive, and gets good reviews.

The newly-acquired PC?  Might still use it for the original purpose; it takes up less space than the loaner.  Or it could end up in the lab.

Brief spring, now back to winter-ish

For a couple of days there, as the warm rain chased away the remaining snow, it felt almost vernal!

... Vernal enough that the lawn started growing.  No!  Stop!  It's nowhere near Spring yet!

Anyway, that's over now, and we're back to chill, occasional freezing nights, and assorted rain.

Most of the backlog of packages got here eventually - Joy got one today; UPS still has two of mine somewhere.  The UPS driver today (not our usual driver) confirmed that they're working through the backlog, and added that some packages are on trucks but they don't have enough drivers for the trucks, so some managers are being called up as drivers.

And, speaking of the chilly season: I think I've figured out yet another reason those cheap solar-powered landscape lights so often don't survive Winter.  It's that little LiFePO4 cell is what!  Or, rather, the charging of it.  They're OK to discharge down to -20℃, but apparently charging them below 0℃ damages them.

Ergo, if you have days that are sub-freezing but sunny, there'll be damage happening.  Taking them indoors for Winter should avoid that problem.

Thawing out

Driveway is nearly clear.  UPS came this morning (much earlier than usual), and dropped off two small packages.  Various larger packages now show as out for delivery, supposed to be arriving Real Soon Now... but the truck seems to be on the far side of Knoxville.  I think that may be the depot, and maybe the packages are on the truck but the truck isn't moving.

Assorted other packages, both UPS and USPS, are delayed, coming sometime.

Patches of the front lawn, and large areas of hayfields and pastures, are more or less clear.

I shoveled quite a bit of snow out of the truck bed.  Other snow & ice on the vehicles, I'll just wait for it to melt (which should happen by tomorrow afternoon).

Joy thinks we should have a snow shovel for next year.  I suppose I can look for one when I'm out shopping.  Might be on post-snow closeout!  Or might be sold out because everybody else had the same idea.  Oh, look: high-rated shovel of the right general character is sold out at Amazon, but marked way down for "order now for delivery sometime after mid-February."  Maybe I'll go for that.

Wednesday, rain.  Rest of the week, rain.  But not freezing rain!

Anyway... gotta run some errands tomorrow afternoon, in between the freeze and the rain.  Need straw, electrical stuff, and groceries.

Things slowly return to normal...

We got mail in the mailbox yesterday!  And parcels all the way up at the top of the driveway today!

UPS is still sheltering in place, buy maybe will start trying to catch up next week.

I eventually got the driveway somewhat usable by going out in the freezing, getting out the tractor, fully extending the fangs on the box blade, and tearing little furrows through the ice (and into the gravel), leaving a roughened surface with gravel mixed in with the snow & ice so today's sunshine could warm the gravel and melt the ice.

Sprinkling the snow with fertilizer turns out to be somewhat effective (and the runoff should be a lot less harmful to the lawn than road salt would have been).  Having much effect in a hurry, though, would take a lot of fertilizer, which I was disinclined to apply.

Anyway, the driveway is more or less usable, and the cars should be reasonably exposed by Monday afternoon.  I got out yesterday (freezing weather and all) and started all of them, leaving them running long enough to recharge their batteries a fair bit.

(Checking the Amazon orders-in-progress: we should soon be receiving one each of jump-starter pack and 12V tire pump, which will give us a total of one of each per vehicle.  Seems like a good idea.  And charging up the jump-starters can be a twice-a-year thing, maybe when it's time for the new insurance cards.)

And I'm trying to figure out fiddly details of oven installation - looks like I'll need to install a run of armored conduit in the cabinet, alongside where the oven will go, to a junction box in the top of the cabinet.  And, we'll need strips of wood (with nice square edges) for tightening up the opening in the cabinet.  Probably Tuesday afternoon I'll make a Home Depot run for conduit, wires, conduit hardware, project wood, and suchlike fiddlies.

Mighty chilly out there.

Temperature got negative, briefly, just around sunrise.  Now it's creeping up into the teens.

Joy insisted on bringing the ducks in for the night; they're making a ruckus in the walk-in shower.

The chickens' water bowl, inside the coop, froze overnight.

Yesterday afternoon, after a short-notice conference call, I did a bit of snow reduction on the driveway, using the tractor.  The snow is now thin enough in places that the sunshine should be warming up the gravel and promoting melting.  Dunno if either USPS or UPS will be attempting deliveries out here today; they both had a snow day yesterday.

It occurred to me that scattering carbon flakes atop the snow might be a good approach, if only I had a supply of carbon flakes handy, and a good way of dispensing them.  (Thought this morning: carbon-dust emulsion in the backpack sprayer?  Using hot water so the hose & nozzle don't just freeze up instantly?  Or!  I wonder how the bug fogger would work with dry powder.)

Then... I'm dimly remembering a book I read in, IIRC, junior high school.  For a class, to write a report on.  A Cage of Ice?  Sounds about right.  Dang Russkies were planning to melt (as Flanders once suggested) the North Pole.  By sprinkling it with carbon.  If memory serves, my report included an analysis of the insolation at such latitudes, the amount of ice involved and the energy required to melt it, and the amount of carbon required to cover the area, and demonstrated that the plan (as Smart remarked) would not work.

But, I'm not trying to melt the North Pole.  Clearing a mere few inches of low-density snow from a driveway in the temperate zone might in fact be practical.  Notes for next winter....

Other note for next winter: the indoor waterer for the yet-to-be-built new coop should include a 24V heater (and of course a temperature sensor).

The thing I forgot to include in yesterday's post

Minor update to the oven saga.

We did get a neighbor to help remove the old oven; it's now sitting on a dolly in the dining room.

We need to make various alterations to the cabinet: the opening needs to be taller, but not as wide.  And: we somehow need to shoehorn in a junction box in a place the cord from the oven will reach - the most likely approach is to narrow the cabinet opening on one side, leaving enough space on that side for a box.

And, now as I think of it, I'll probably be wanting to wrap the incoming power cable in metal flex conduit from wall to junction box.  Time to go measure the cable.

It's snowy out there.

Somewhere around 6" of snow accumulation on the lawn, I think.  More is still falling.

Temperature has been around 30℉ all day.  As the snow tapers off, the real cold front is supposed to move in... 20ish lows tomorrow, then getting down into single digits overnight and possibly dipping into negative territory Wednesday morning.  Mostly sunny and -1℉, how fun!

The ducks were initially afraid to leave their coop this morning, maybe because the world looked wrong or maybe because I was wearing my ushanka, but the eventually decided that snow was fun.  The chickens, meanwhile, spent the day in their coop; I brought them food pellets and water, and retrieved one-each egg.

The minimally-supported bird netting over the top of the chicken run is very saggy indeed, with its burden of ice.  Rebuilding the fence, and having a better-supported mesh roof, was on the agenda for last summer, but then all the summer plans got repeatedly put off.  Maybe this year... along with a bigger, better chicken coop, more resistant to the elements and better suited to locking the critters up for days on end in extreme weather.

Looks like Thursday afternoon will be the next reasonable opportunity to go anywhere - as in, temperature above actual freezing so the roads should be fairly normal.  Then, Thursday night, we're supposed to have snow again.  Next weekend, back to single-digit lows.  Whee!

Meet the new year, same as the old year.

No exciting new developments, and not much exciting planned.

Well... there's a lot of stuff we have planned, but the likelihood of much of it actually happening is not great.  Between looking after my father and the difficulty of finding usable contractors in the building trades, things do happen slowly if at all.

I need to line up a neighbor to help move the old oven so's Joy and I can make alterations to the opening in the cabinet and get it all ready for delivery of a new oven.  Calling neighbors is maybe a tomorrow-afternoon thing; today, I have a bit of a headache and very low energy.  Ordering the new oven (from a different store, that uses a different delivery service) happens after we've at least started the cabinet alterations.

Turns out that chickens get more seasonal their second winter than their first - between needing extra nutrition to get over their fall molt and needing enough light to feel like the days are long enough for egg-laying, they tend to slack off.  I have an interim day-stretcher set up, and have been giving them some nutritional mush (lentils, rolled oats, and calcium carbonate powder) plus kitchen scraps in addition to their upmarket pellets, scratch grains, and dried insect larvae.  They've gone from averaging a bit over one egg per day (for the entire flock) to a bit over two, which is more consistent with household egg consumption, and the shells have gotten a bit less fragile.

Still no sign of snow.  We've had some freezy mornings (some with lows in the lower 20s), and a little bit of rain, but no snow at all.  Some serious rain would be a Good Thing, as we really do want the pond to fill back up.

And... before any long strings of rainy days come along, I should build a couple of poultry feeding stations - boxes about 18" cube-ish, with one side that hinges up to become an awning.  Stick a feeder inside, and it's protected from the rain; close up the awning side, and the food is protected against rodents at night - no need to carry the feeder back & forth at dawn and dusk.  The plan is in my head, more or less; the materials are on hand; I just need to find time & motivation to build the things.

On the work front, there's still a little to be done on the current big ToasterCo project (which seems to have gotten seriously behind schedule, but I'm not the one holding up the parade), and I think there are other little sub-projects lurking in the background.

One of these days, I need to clear off the table against the side wall of the garage, install the two levels of wire shelving I bought a few months ago, and organize a bunch of the odds & ends into plastic storage bins that can go on those shelves.  I also need to re-organize a lot of the stuff that's currently in plastic storage bins on existing shelves, and label the bins so I'll be able to find things.  (This, of course, requires a cleared-off table.)

One of these days, I need to procure some proper workbenches - at least one with an upper shelf on which to put test & measurement equipment.  But there's a bunch of tidying and table-clearing to be done first.

Ah, well.  Back to whatever I was doing this afternoon.