This hobby laid an egg

Chickens.

"Son, you want to raise chickens."

No, I didn't.

Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.

An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.

I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.

One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.

I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.

Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.

I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.

And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.

Chickens.

I read the books on raising chickens. There were many unpleasant things about raising chickens.

For one thing, you had to kill them. I didn't look forward to that. Poor things.

And you got to be an amateur veterinarian. One activity in the book that looked like was in my future was caponizing the roosters-to-be. The thought of castrating the little chickens scared the heck out of me.

The chicken ranch was going to be in the back yard around the shed. I think that we were going to convert the shed into a chicken coop.

I don't know how close we came to rounding up the initial flock of chickens.

But Chris came first!

Jack had a friend who had a golden retriever. Karen was in love with that dog. The pooch became a parent (I can't remember whether it was the mother or the father). The friend gave us, well, gave Karen, one of the litter. This was around Christmas, 1968. He was named Golden Duke's Christmas (after his father). Chris for short.

Thank god for Chris.

He got the part of the yard that was going to be for the chickens.

NO CHICKENS!

Chris and Karen, January 1969

Thank you, Chris!

Lots of visits from Holiday Inn Cheyenne

Following Colleen's advice, I have installed some code into my blog so that I can see interesting things about visitors to my little diary on the web.

You all have lost some of your privacy.

I get to see what Google searches bring visitors to me. Today somebody searched:

snort "supernova observational radio telescope"

They looked at my little gripe about my physics lab report's missing point.

One of my sisters doesn't use a bookmark to get to my blog. Instead, she uses the link in the blog list in the sidebar of her blog to get to mine.

Many people have searched for Classical radio in San Diego and checked out my little diatribe about its absence.

A disturbing number of people have searched for a porn video and found my blog instead.

Today I had a large number of page loads from the ISP "Holiday Inn Cheyenne."

Happy reunioning, Eutslers!

MLM: Edmund Scientific

I loved the Edmund Scientific's catalog when I was a kid. It was filled with all sorts of fascinating stuff. They had scientific toys and fun pseudoscientific stuff (I got my Pyrex crystal ball from them). They had magnets and iron filings that let you see magnetic lines of force.

They had stuff that was way out of my reach that I could only dream about. There were the motor-driven Celestron telescopes with equatorial mounts! There were the oil immersion microscopes.

How I wished we were rich so I could have all of neat things in the catalog.

But it was a thrill getting less expensive things. It started with filling out the order form. You'd enter the quantity, the item's descripton, the catalog number, the unit price, and the total amount for the quantity ordered (usually just the unit price, darn it!). You'd add up all the lines and Mom or Dad would write a check (thanks Mom and Dad!) and send it off.

Then you'd wait.

Some time later the mailman would deliver a package and you'd get to live your dreams!

One of those packages had a set of fluorescent crayons.
I had a black light. This was back in the age of DayGlo posters that lit up spectacularly under black light. But those were for Hippies. I had better use for my black light. I had rocks and minerals that fluoresced (after all, the word comes from fluorite!). But while I was at it, do-it-yourself black light posters were a fun thing to make. Thus the crayons. Cool, huh?

You'll notice that three of the crayons are missing. Well, either Pough or Dough got into my box of fluorescent crayons and ate some of them. This made for an exciting tour of poop patrol duty. Crayons, you know, don't digest. They come out pretty much the way they go in. With a long extension cord and my black light, the bits of crayons in the Pough poo-poo (or the Dough doo-doo) made for easy pickins.

(By the way, I convinced Mom to throw that black light away instead of giving it to Casa Mesita. It had only a little cardboard taped to its back to keep little kids from being electrocuted.)

MLM: Such a cutup!

Did you hear about the new DIY surgery supplies chain? It's called "Suture Self."

You may remember a long time ago I posted a How To that told how you can see the backside of the word "Dial" on a bar of soap. In a comment to that post, Bobbers said that she had been unable to use Ivory soap for years because she had eaten a sliver of Ivory that came from a soap carving. (She thought it was pie crust dough.) She accused Peggy of making the soap sculpture but I was the culprit. We were studying Alaska (home of that great patriot Sarah Palin) and had to make a soap sculpture of something Alaskan. I made a totem pole.

I remember that I had to sit in the other fifth grade class and work on my soap while the rest of my class was at the high school swimming pool learning how to swim. I couldn't join them because I had stitches in my arm.

I had cut my arm rather deeply when I was playing with Johnny Showalter at his house. While he was in the bathroom I decided I'd hide from him. I ducked under his bed. When he came back to his room I looked back towards the foot of the bed to see if he had figured out where I went and noticed an odd bulge on my arm. I crawled out and there was a nasty gash. It hadn't hurt and scarcely bled. I have no idea what I might have caught it on.

His father hustled me home and I was taken to the emergency room. I got twelve stitches!

Being a somewhat odd child, when it came time to get the stitches taken out I asked the doctor if I could keep them. He put them on a piece of gauze and put it in a little box. I cut a hole in the box's lid and made a window out of Saran wrap.

I still have the stitches.
As consolation (or to keep us from suing him?), Johnny's father got me one of those newfangled Super Balls (they were compressed under 50,000 pounds of pressure!). They got banned from Mountain School's playground after they went through several windows. They were a great toy.

But I'd rather have not been cut.