Downspout installed so we'll call this project complete. Well, not the whole coop complete since I doubt that will ever be the case, but at least the rain control for now.

Per plan I got the Prius waxed up, and I raked the lawn. With it so thick yesterday and sorta wet it didn't mulch as well as I would have liked. Getting that extra dead stuff cleaned up makes it look better and hopefully be more healthy.

I put the spare USB wifi adaptor into the backup pi board and it immediately connected. I forgot that I had set that up for wifi long ago. So smart I am. :) Anyway, it's slow as hell but it's just the backup so it should be OK.l

Speaking of the backup, I wasn't backing up my DNS files so I've added all of /etc into the backup just in case.

Wednesday night we had a lighting strike somewhere close to the house. No power surge, but enough of an EMP to take out Ethernet ports.... lots of Ethernet ports. Lost the router, DSL box, 8 cameras including 1 of the good ones, a port on the time capsule and potentially the drive (trying to format it and get backups running again), the backup pi board, the VLAN switch, the airport in the barn, the apple USB Ethernet adaptor (that wasn't even on), the solar charge controller and the power supply to the HP laptop that runs the security stuff. I'm still piecing things back together, ordering lots of stuff off amazon. Basically sucks re-buying stuff I already own.

I did have a spare router, I bought two of the WRT54Gs so I could hack on one and have one that worked. I had been flip flopping between the two trying firmwares, etc and as such had one that was reasonably up to date. I flashed it with the latest and got us back online after the woman came back from AT&T with a new DSL widget.

Busy day today, got the laws mowed including the front by the road, got the gutter on the chicken coop and got the truck clay bared and waxed and the prius washed. Tomorrow I'll finish the downspout on the coop (ran out of spout fittings and had to go to home depot) and wax the prius.

The woman made french toast this morning using Peep's eggs. The last 3 deadbeat birds better start popping out some eggs!

The woman is bonding with the birds.

Sitting in SAN admin class. It's pretty good so far, most these guys are just "checking the box" taking the class because they need it for something else but I'm actually learning most of this for the first time so it's easier to pay attention. They supposedly have real hardware for us for the FC portion which will be cool. That's something you can't simulate in the lab, being able to actually zone switches.

Oh, and they have gun safes that go into the center consoles of trucks. SAFES! Woo!

Go birds, go!

Got a truck today, after looking at a bunch of them and missing out on a few that would have been good buys, I managed to get one that matched what I wanted at a price I was willing to pay.

This truck was sorta sold Saturday night. I called and they said it was sold, but then at 10pm they called me back to tell me the deal wasn't done and I could come by on Monday if I wanted. I did, and bought it. So what happened Saturday? The people making the deal didn't have their credit union financing lined up and wouldn't use the dealer financing (makes sense). They didn't want to put a deposit on the truck though, so it went back up for sale. In theory they were coming back today at 1pm after going to the credit union. Too bad I bought it at 10am. The guy who had the deal for Saturday was a little ticked because he lost it, but hey, no deposit, no hold.

It's weird to me that people make reservations at a dealership, but there was a whole list of people scheduled to come in that day.

Saturday we spent all day looking at trucks, Sunday we went up to a farm that a CSC member is going to let me hunt this season. The woman went along because, well, it's not clear why. The plan was to visit the farm, see the animals, check out the hunting areas, then go wine tasting. We ended up spending so much time (and by 'we' I mean the woman) playing with the animals and chatting with random rednecks that stopped by to see the funny people from out of town that we didn't have time for wine tasting. Next time I guess.

The farm is pretty nice, 300+ acres with 2 different feeders and a food plot all ready to go for bow season in a few weeks.

My 10" 556 upper came in and as expected it took all of 5 seconds to pull the BCG and charging handle out of the 300BLK upper and move them over to the new upper. You can tell that this upper is no where near the quality of the AAC upper, but it's half the price and still has all the important features. Should work well enough for my purposes. I moved the ACOG over for a test fit.

The Krav school has an "official" knife and I finally ordered up one with the dull training knife. The kydex sheath is back ordered for a few weeks.

The people we sold the land to have stopped responding to email and stopped sending in their payments. They've missed two and with no excuses this time (or even a response) we're going to look into foreclosure. The woman wants to write a letter and send it certified so there is some official record of us trying to reach them. The foreclosure people say it's not necessary since it's not a house and the laws are more favourable to lenders in that case.

Don offered to go by on his way to Reno to see what they might have done to the land, and when looking at google maps to give him some reference points I noticed they updated the satellite view:

Looks like the new owners are taking advantage of the sloping terrain, the awesome well and climate to grow themselves some dope. The white box that I'm assuming is a trailer is parked right where the woman and I camped. Sigh. Well hopefully they don't legalise pot before these guys make enough money to pay off the land!

I won a Starbucks gift card during this support training class I'm stuck in. I didn't have the best answer, but I had the most "real" answer to the lame question.

Wife texted me this image from the coop today. Lemon is our star bird, the rest are still slackers.

Busy weekend around the homestead. Lemon popped out an egg for the first time, and the woman found a bunch of mushrooms on the mushroom logs when she went out to water them. Two projects finally producing results!

We decided to actually eat the egg, and you can see how dark it is vs. a store bought regular egg as seen on the right. Once I got them scrambled together we couldn't taste a difference, but when we get enough eggs from the chickens I'll want to make pasta and see if we notice a difference beyond the color.

The woman sent me this, photographic evidence I did something with the nephews when they were here.

A spy shot for Vareck. I was finishing up a call and walking downstairs when I saw this.

Normally the cafe has really good soups. They also make their own rolls ever day so soup/crackers/roll is one of the better tasting meals they serve. Today though, the soup was not something I would consider good...

I didn't want my solar batteries to be too different in age, so I ordered a second one. Unfortunately it looks physically slightly different than the first although I just reordered the exact same thing from Amazon. The spec is the same, so that's at least right.

I ran out of ring terminals so I had to solder the ends of the wires into loops for installation. Next time I'm out I'll get some more ring terminals and do it right.

Also on home improvements I finally got tired of the duct work for the dryer popping off and leaking so I replaced the solid conduit with flexible ducting and used aluminium tape to hold everything together. It worked well, but then when I checked it today it looks like the duct has "sprung" out and now has too many bends in it. Ugh. More crawling around behind the dryer.

That can't be good.

I got this at the gun show (cheap!) over the weekend. Kinda always wanted to play with one and now that they're in 9mm I figured I would give it a try. It's useless for carry, but with snake shot it might be useful at short range against actual snakes. I'll have to pattern it at some point and see. Good tackle box gun, if I had a tackle box.

Well that's unfortunate. The wifi on my MBP just died. Fortunately I had an extra micro USB wifi adaptor that I wasn't using on my pi board at the moment so I put that in and after a little wired Ethernet action for the driver download I'm back in business. No idea how this one will work vs. the built-in radio, but since the built-in is dead now I can't exactly complain about the performance of the replacement.

Let's get some updates in here and back into the habit of writing again. Now that people are gone and I can have my laptop out again it should be easier.

Yesterday we went to An for the woman's birthday dinner with my parents. It was a very good meal, up to CA standards for sure. The woman had scallops, I had the duck. My duck was a little over but otherwise good. Scallops were excellent. The best dish though was mom's corn soup (which I don't have a picture of). You wouldn't think soup with a little corn and crab in it could be that good but it was. The "make them yourself" pork buns with pork belly was also pretty damn good. Pork belly has been overdone for a long time now, and most places don't do it right anyway, but these guys know what they're doing. I would order it again.

The woman wanted more ventilation in the back of the chicken run saying it was smelling "funky" back there even with all of her cleaning. With little airflow it just smells like... birds. Anyway, we got some hinges at home depot but otherwise I was able to finish the project with drop, except for one missing piece of trim we'll have to buy next time we're there.

Made up a batch of jerky today with the last of the deer meat that's been in the freezer for a while. Rather than using the jerky gun to make the strips I just rolled it between sheets of wax paper and cut it. They're thicker and larger than the strips that come out of the gun and that's what I wanted. I also peppered the crap out of it, the store bought stuff has pepper all over it so I figured I would try.

The woman says it's too spicy, but she's wrong. It's freakin' awesome. Best batch in a long time. The form factor is better and the extra pepper makes a huge difference. Yum!