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!

Red hot poker

Jack's choices of hobbies for me weren't always as successful as beekeeping.

Out of nowhere he gave me a book on how to play poker. I don't remember ever expressing an interest in the game.

The book was filled with the obvious information about the probabilities of filling your inside straights and how likely your two pairs will be beat at a table of four players.

The most interesting parts of the book were about the psychology of the game.

Much of the book was about how to play in a weekly game against a regular group.

We learned how to observe the mannerisms of our friends to understand when they're bluffing and when they have an exceptional hand. We learned how to encourage our friends to give away information through these signals. Of course it taught us how not to have such bad habits ourselves.

It taught us how to win but not win so much that our buddies stop playing. If one of the guys is looking like he's about to drop out of the Friday night game, we were told how to start losing some of our money to him so he'd be encouraged to stay in the game and lose much more money to us.

There were many problems with taking up poker for fun and profit (mostly for profit).

Among them:

1. I was a kid (in high school, but still a kid).
2. Without a lot of money.
3. Who didn't know anybody with money.

But mostly it seemed to be teaching me how to cultivate friendships in order to take as much of their money as I could. That didn't interest me.

There must have been tips on how to win against people we've never played against. But you probably have to get good at the game by first cleaning out your friends' bank accounts.

I never played poker for money.

I wonder why Jack thought I'd be interested in poker for a living at that time.

"Here, little number cruncher, you can make a living at what you're good at."

"Here's something I wish I could have done. Make me proud."

"This is your last best hope."

"Get rich quick."

I'll never know.

Schadenfreude

Jack wasn't always uninvolved in my leisure time. Sometimes he was very involved.

He'd choose my hobbies for me.

One of the hobbies he chose for me was beekeeping. I didn't like honey back then. I'm not much of a fan of the stuff still. Give me jam for my biscuits any day. So this wasn't the most satisfying hobby for me.

But beekeeping was an interesting activity. It let me see what is the rather miraculous process of little insects gathering nectar and pollen and turning it into more little insects and wax and honey.

We got hives from Sears that we had to put together and paint. We filled the frames with sheets of foundation for the little bees to build their combs on.  Jack got me "The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture." We had the jumpsuits, gloves, and hoods that would let us work with the bees without getting stung.  Much.

We ordered the bees from Sears (is there nothing you can't get from Sears?). They came in the mail in wooden boxes with screen sides. Each box held three pounds of worker bees and a few drones and a little box with a queen and a few attendants. There was a can of sugar water that kept them fed for the days they were in the mail.  The queen's box had a plug made out of sugar that the bees would eat through to release the queen. The time it took to release her gave them time to accept her as their leader.

We'd don our protective clothes, open a box of bees, shake them into their prepared hive, hang the queen's box between two frames, put the lid on and wait.

A week later we opened the hives to remove the emptied queen's box. The bees had started building combs! This was fascinating.

My career as an apiarist had begun.

Each year we'd harvest the honey. We didn't have the equipment to spin the honey out of the combs so we'd just hack the combs into squares and put them in plastic boxes. These would get sold at work much like Girl Scout cookies. But better...people got their money's worth. I don't think I was involved in the marketing of the honey. Whew!

Those bees terrorized me for years. The hives were set up in the back yard near the gate that took us to the parking spots behind the house. The bees' flight path took them across the walk up to the gate at low altitude. Now and then one would get caught in someone's hair. Ouch.

When you're a good beekeeper you don't need the protective clothes. You know how to handle the bees without getting them riled up. We never got good at it.

My happiest day at beekeeping was when Jack was doing something with the bees by himself. He got into his jumpsuit, zipped on the veil and went to work. He didn't get the veil completely closed.

The bees found the weak spot in his protection. He got a face full of stings. He was quite the dancer while this was going on.

Finally, a bit of a comeuppance for all the terror he had brought upon me.

Schadenfreude, it's human nature.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nightlight.

Squill trying to satisfy requests

Poss wanted me or Jerry in a picture of the squills to show the scale better.  Your wish is my command!

Squill growing

I showed you my giant squills a few days ago. They're about finished blooming for this year. The tallest one is now 6'7" tall.

This is what they look like today.

Colleen's comment suggested that I should have added something that gives you the scale of the flowers so I did just that this time. You'll notice two Papo fantasy figures that Peggy and Michele gave us. There's Rhino Man on the left and Werewolf on the right. They wear skintight shorts are are very well endowed. Thanks, Peggy and Michele!

The Queen Mary

We spent a couple of nights on The Queen Mary while on the road last week. You've seen what I ate there and you've seen what we did during the day between the nights on board. There's not much to tell about the rest of our experience in the hotel.

Here's another picture I took of the ship while passing it on our way to Catalina. The window I had to shoot through wasn't perfectly clean and had the sun shining on it.

Wikipedia has a better picture from about the same point of view.

In my earlier post, I pointed out the general area of our room. We checked in at the desk near the bow and had to hike to our room near the stern. It's a looooooong hallway. This picture from in front of our room taken with my phone probably doesn't really show the length very well.

The rooms are long and narrow. This is the view of the bathroom door from the bed end of the room. The door into the room is on the wall to the left of the bathroom door. There's a vanity to the right of the bathroom door.

The walls are very thin. You can hear everything the neighbors do. They got a 7:00 wake-up call each morning. We were already awake at that time. It would have been a bit annoying if we wanted to sleep in. The neighbors were already bustling about by the time they got their call.

Here's the original (but not operational) fan.

(I couldn't tell that the picture was this blurry when I took it.)

At the right of the picture is a door that connects our room to the next room in case we wanted to have a suite. Of course it is locked. The second night we had neighbors in that room. They were unsure what the door was to. They tried and tried to open it. The knob would rattle every few minutes. I wondered in a clear and somewhat loud voice why the neighbors were trying to get into our room. With the thin walls they must have heard me. But that didn't stop them from trying to see what's behind that mysterious door. The next morning there were some more attempts to get through the door.

The portholes weren't locked shut. They're big enough to crawl through but I guess nobody bothers to get a room in order to end it. They must just take the cheaper tour and jump from the Promenade deck.

We had a view of Long Beach.

There was a problem with the air conditioning. The thermostat wasn't controlling it. So the room was very cold. We tried leaving the windows open but that didn't help much. And it let the mosquitos in. I got a bunch of bites that were red and a bit swollen but didn't itch at all. Strange.

They fixed the problem the second night after Jerry asked if there was something that could be done about the temperature.

The bathtub had some knobs that don't do anything these days. Apparently you could bathe in salt water in the good old days. Do cruise ships still use salt water?

The towel was nicely hung on the bar. The fandolded washcloth was tucked in a pocket folded in the hand towel.

It was nice to stay on the Queen Mary. I still think I'd feel too confined to spend time on a real cruise.