Our introduction to keeping chickens, the high's, the lows and pics of our journey.

[Bens-Hens]

Crazy! When I was in the UK, it was 99p for a litre of petrol, and nearly a 3-1 exchange rate. That was over 7 years ago and they were paying close to AU$3 a litre!

I have dredged through every image gallery that I can find on here and not found the coop I was thinking of. I could probably buy gutter and make it faster than finding what I was looking for!

BUT

I did find something that might help with the aim lol
Similar principal, I would use teh lino trick to make cleaning easier though.


While I was hunting I found this pic of how one flock owner deals with hawks stealing birds. I had talked about it before but not been able to find the image. Might not go well with Inlet Farm's aesthetics though Fancy, but it works for them. Maybe a mini version just for the broodies and babies.

 

[vehve]

Cwrite, congrats on getting everyone making eggs!

Ben, soon you will be building flushing chicken toilets.

Oz, I truly envy US fuel prices...

*Edit* Oh, and the suspended fishing lines are often used at restaurant terraces and outdoor cafe's to keep seagulls away, seem to work to some extent.

 

[ozexpat]

We have hawks in the Philippines but they are so rare I don't mind if they were to take a bird - I just need to teach them how to read leg bands

 

[ozexpat]

@vehve

I may get shot for saying so but I think fuel prices in US are too cheap. They should be taxed more and that money go directly to public transportation infrastructure. This will get us out of our six and eight cylinder cars and into smaller cars and mass transit

Los Angles used to have a great railway system that was bought by auto manufacturers and shut down. Watch who framed roger rabbit.

 

[vehve]

@vehve

I may get shot for saying so but I think fuel prices in US are too cheap. They should be taxed more and that money go directly to public transportation infrastructure. This will get us out of our six and eight cylinder cars and into smaller cars and mass transit

Los Angles used to have a great railway system that was bought by auto manufacturers and shut down. Watch who framed roger rabbit.

I've been too young when watching that to read in any conspiracy theories to it's plot. Maybe it's time for a repeat viewing.

I agree completely, they are too cheap. I think they should be tripled (although not at once). I think fuel in Finland is priced pretty correctly, but it still hurts to pay for the stuff

Here people are going for the 1.6 litre motors right now, due to taxation and better mileage. Fuel is strictly taxed (when 95E costs 1.70€, which is a pretty normal price, 0.98€ is tax), you pay the annual emission based tax for your car (plus a fueltax if you don't use gas, for a diesel it's 5.5 cents per 100kg total weight of the vehicle per day), and new cars are taxed pretty hard. The 2014 business edition of Ben's mondeo with the 2 litre 140bhp engine would cost 27610€ (including VAT 24%) plus the emission based car tax which comes to 6419.92€, bringing the total price to about 32000€, or about 43400 USD or 46400 AUD.

*Edit* I meant to add, the population density of Finland is about 18 persons per square kilometer, so we have quite a lot of driving to do too.

 

[ozexpat]

Here is the conspiracy. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

Still, doing a rerun if te moviethat relaunched animation is always a good thing

 

[vehve]

It's strange how re-watching movies you've seen as a kid make you notice new things. Forrest Gump came out when I was 8, and I saw it the first time when I was maybe 10-12. It's been on the TV a quite a few times after that, and I've sometimes watched it, but it wasn't until I was over 20 when I started understanding all the cultural and historical references in it. Forrest sure did influence a lot of artist's and politician's lives

 

[vehve]

An update on Veera's possible broodiness status. I wasn't really expecting her to lay today, as she's gone 7 days straight, her longest run yet, but all morning she has been going in and out of the nest boxes. She also kept pacing along the fence in the yard for a good 10 minutes, but then it started raining so she went back into the run. Before that, she was going through all kinds of secluded spots in the yard, apparently looking for a place to make a nest. I keep hearing a bit of an egg song every once in a while too. Now she's back to checking the nests in the coop, so I closed the run door so that we don't get any accidents. Taking the golf balls out has really messed with her, but hopefully she'll manage to lay in there without them too. I'm considering putting one ball back in each nest, if this doesn't work. Viiru will be interesting to follow, she should be laying in a few hours, since she took a break again yesterday.

Also, I saw Topi mate his sister, Töyhtis for the first time today (she did not seem to appreciate incest). Wilma has still been left alone, even though her comb and wattles are much more developed, but Töyhtis does have half Araucana in her, combined with the BCM, so some differences in appearance are to be expected. Anyway, it seems our 17 weekers are starting to mature too. Strange how the boys mature earlier than the girls.

I will hopefully report another egg from Veera soon.

 

[ozexpat]

One of the fun things about living in Los Angeles is that you recognize locations in movies and TV shows.

Criminal Minds is almost exclusively shot in Culver city - the real home of movie land with Sony mgm and Culver studios.

I worked their for twenty years and had many close brushes with fame including a belly push during a full blown argument with Marlon Brando and having Lucy lui sit firmly on my hand. The hand incident was more shocking than taking on the godfather

I worked as an extra on a couple of productions.

Its a bucket list thing I checked off

 

[vehve]

That sound's like a lot of fun, Oz. Seems like you're a bit intimidated by powerful women, I bet Mrs. Oz has you wrapped around her finger

But I must admit, Lucy does seem like a force to be reckoned with. Marlon just mainly mumbles incoherently. I would love to be a extra too, not really interested in appearing on camera, but I have a bit of an fascination with the US entertainment industry, so getting to see the inner workings of a movie set would be sort of cool. Not many movies get filmed in Finland though. Sometimes Helsinki is used as a substitute for Russian locations, but not so much after the downfall of the USSR. The Gere/Willis remake of The Day of the Jackal was shot partly in Porvoo and Helsinki-Vantaa airport. Us Finns go crazy when Finland is featured on US shows or in movies somehow. One of the highlights so far was when one of our more successful actors appeared as a body on CSI

Renny Harlin has actually had some sort of success in the nineties, Die Hard 2 and Deerhunter being the most noteworthy movies that he's directed, but not much else to speak of. A Finnish short was up for an Oscar this year though, so that's something.