Ciaran’s Random Writings

We must have done something bad because someone or something has decided to unleash a plague of vermin on our garden.

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Despite the sudden explosion of techy posts on here, life in the real world goes on. The highlight in recent weeks was my sister’s wedding, which was a brilliant day. Mia, in particular, enjoyed it immensely, singing away to herself throughout the service. Afterwards she played the church organ and followed that up with running round and round the outside of the church at high speed with me in tow. You might think that would tire her out, but she later spend a solid four hours on the dancefloor at the reception.

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Two quick snippets of unrelated randomness:

1. The things that were recently tasty eggs are now cute chicks, as of last Sunday, hence the picture. Only two though - one yellow, one black. The majority weren’t even fertile this time around, so perhaps Fred is losing his touch.

2. I was planning to go to bed two hours ago, then I started playing with Mnesia, which is Erlang’s distributed database. Very interesting indeed, but I need to stop doing it immediately and go to sleep instead.

Having been abandoned for the evening, I was feeling rather peckish, and all we had in were eggs, so I decided to poach a couple. The eggs in question are earmarked to go into the incubator tomorrow, and should emerge as cute baby chicks in exactly three weeks.

For some reason, it felt rather odd eating these eggs, compared to ‘normal’ eggs. This was doubly strange, considering that I ultimately intend to eat them anyway when they become big fat chickens.

As an aside, something else that’s odd is that pretty much everybody who discovers that we intend to eat our happy and healthy chickens expresses their horror with a “how could you?” and then zips off down to Tesco to purchase a tortured beast that is frankly lucky to be dead, having spent its ‘life’ in a dark cage.

Anyway, back to my ‘point’ (there isn’t really one of course) - a vegan wouldn’t eat the egg no matter what, that seems pretty straightforward, but I believe that a vegetarian would eat an egg. However, at some point during the next three weeks, it will magically turn into something they wouldn’t eat. When does that happen? At the point where we said “these eggs are going in the incubator”? Tomorrow? Next week? When it hatches?

I can’t figure it out, but they were very tasty eggs anyway.

The ducklings are now on the loose in the orchard during the day, but still going back indoors to the garage at night. Luckily this is an easy process, no sheepdog required, since all eight move as a single tightly-packed unit and can be easily ’steered’ around.

The young chickens are not quite sure what to make of them though, and much fun was had today herding the ducks towards them and watching them scatter left, right and centre. I tried to capture the excitement on video, but I guess you had to be there:

Talking of the young chickens, they’re doing very well. Unlike the ducklings, they’re extremely friendly and like nothing more than to be picked up and stroked. They have no idea that they’re going to end up on my dinner plate, and that’s just the way it should be. In the meantime, they’re a happy bunch, at least when the ducklings are not bearing down on them.

I seem to have gone into ranting mode this week, so I’m going back to cute pictures until I can think of something nice to say about someone or something.

So here’s a picture of my big fat cock.

I haven’t done any work today. Actually, that’s a lie, I’ve poked around in Bugzilla a bit, reviewed some check-ins and discussed a few issues by IM. That probably adds up to a total of 15 minutes though, which is as near to no work as I’m ever likely to get. So, ignoring those 15 minutes, something interesting must have happened, let’s see…

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The new chicks we’re about to have are ducks. I have no idea what a newborn duck looks like, but this looks like a duck’s beak alright. Apologies in advance for the awful soundtrack - you might want to turn your volume down before pressing play!

A quick picture of the chicks on their first or second adventure outdoors. This was a while ago now - I’ll probably post some up to date stuff later on. At the moment I’m just trying out posting via Flickr while I eat lunch.

Last year, we got involved in hatching chicks by accident, after I thwacked a mother pheasant off the nest by swinging some shears. She flew off and never returned, but we got hold of an incubator and hatched all 10 eggs which went on to become healthy pheasants. This year, with Fred the cockerel in residence, it’s on purpose - a batch of eggs have been in the incubator (a more sophisticated one this year that slowly rocks the eggs) for three weeks.

Seven chicks hatched yesterday and one today. There are five yellow, two brown and one black, and three possible mothers for each, but only one father. They’re all set up today in a new pen, complete with heatlamp, and all eight look healthy and very cute and fluffy.