Rancho Sin Huevos

 This is the big fire we had recently. It burned from "P Hill" to Reservation Road and a bit beyond. 

Here's another shot from the roundabout at Reservation Road and Hwy 190. Looking SW. 

Here's one the big birdies that came to fight our recent fires including the big "Shaffer" forest fire about 12 miles north of Kernville. 
This is the Lockheed C-130 and she's a heavy lifter. It's empty weight is about 74,000 lbs and she'll carry 72,000 lbs! That's about 9,000 gallons of water. 

We had to stop by the hangar the other day which is why there are a couple of shots from there. Our hangar is the second one to the right. It looks smaller than the front one but they are both the same size. 

Here's Princess Abbie doing a great impression of a worthless, lazy, uncaring, day-sleeping, bum dog. Actually, I think she just had a rough night scaring 'possums away. 

Blimey! I should really, rather, very much, quite say! Here we are dragging more of 2017 than pushing it! That’s just about on the drop edge of almost as much as I hope to commence to complain about that matter at this time.

Rancho Relaxo Report: we’re feeling the heat here, as usual. The good news is that we’re not frying our eggs on the concrete driveway….yet. If this is the normal August, then we can expect only a few days where some of our steel fence posts will sag but it should pass fairly quickly. The gooder news is that we have water with which to suppress the “brown plague” of the previous three really long years of searing drought.

Ruh-roh! Rats!! Our vermin issue is a major one. That’s a real “bummer dude” because, though we knew we had rats, we didn’t know that someone had routed LA’s sewer pipes through our back yard! We’re now ramping up (though I could really use some new rampers) for a war on rats (which of course, will delay my…day off).

I just don’t need a bloody war around here but the battle plans are being drawn. There was no choice but to go full out against these black ravenous critters who have a pronounced proclivity for introducing pathogens into their environment (“Black Plague”, anyone?) and which are pitiless omnivores.

Not only are they spooking our chickens but they are also doubling their size by gorging themselves on chicken feed! When I realized that, I immediately recalled the WW2 documentary where, early on in WW2, England was losing as much as 20% of their grain harvest to rodents!! I guess I should have been awarded the “Bright LED Award” sooner so I would have been bright enough to connect the dots (it makes you feel downright dim when there are only two of them). So, war it shall be with all of its inglorious details, expenditure for war materials, and syphoning of time and energy (enough of which already seems scarcely available at any given time).

Then, there is the second front: the fuzzers have made a large colony under the pole barn. That’s not a good thing. I’ll need to wage war against them, too. It will entail clearing out one end of the barn (my, but that’s fun)…on my day off, then taking actions to end the destructive colony’s ambitions to conquer our ranch. 

Likewise, a new colony is being constructed under the pump house and that will not be permitted either. There may be another attempt at colonizing my 2300 gallon water reserve tank (for fire suppression). So far, it’s merely a zweifrontenkrieg.

The other day, one of the buggers was parked out in front of the pole barn. It may have been just me, but I really think he was mocking me. Usually, when they see me they bolt for the mother hole and hide until I’m gone. Not this time. It just so happened I had my Ruger model 10-22 at hand and decided to make his or my day.

The Ruger’s scope isn’t quite dialed in yet (and you know exactly when I'll get around to that) so I wasn’t sure if it would hold still long enough for me to use him as target practice until I ran out of bullets. I should have snatched the 17HMR which has a better scope but that would have required an extra LED and I’m still short a couple of those.

Anyway, the scope must have been about right for the 30 yards or so range involved because it was “one shot, one kill’. One less mocking varmint. Rancher – 1; garden glutton – 0.

Princess Abbie report: as of late, the fuzzers around here have been mighty bold. They’re just getting far too close to the ranch house. In times past, they’ve been seen filching our veggies from the garden boxes and even hauling fruit off from the plum trees. Occasionally, one or two would come a bit closer but not by much. Ah, but it’s a new day.

The other day, Abbie “treed” again so the Ol’ Rancher went out back to see what he could see (which is far better than being a bear what had to go plumb over a mountain to do that). She had our patio refrigerator corned (which wasn’t hard to do seeing that it was over in the corner) and was baying away. “Ah, ha!” says I. “She’s treed a mouse…. or a rat….or a lizard (we got a million of’em)…..or a thing….or two”. Anyway, I pulled the planting pots off the top and gave the big fridge a pull away from the wall.

Boy! Howdy! Quicker than you can snap into a “Slim Jim”, Abbie darted behind the box and snatched a juvenile fuzzer and was gone with it! She took out that varmint with all of the warmth of a WW2 Russian sniper. Abbie – 1 Fuzzer – 0. Love it!

Not long ago, her electric fence collar didn’t seem to be working. She wasn’t feeling the shock when she trespassed her usual boundaries. That’s not a good thing! For instance, we found her out on Highway 190 out front and that’s really not a good thing at all! The previous neighbor across the highway lost three of her dogs that way (I didn’t ask her IQ but I think we can all guess). So, Ol’ Ran had to do something ASAP.

The something was to tighten her collar a notch and that worked. She got bit a couple of times but she’s toeing the line now. But (have I mentioned how much I hate buts?), the prongs on the shocking device managed to wear a big sore spot on her neck. Oh, great. That matter was immediately taken care of by jerking off the collar and hookin’ her up until the wound healed up (“Triple Antibiotic” works wonders). Now, I use the collar during the day and hook her up at night. I don’t like having her vulnerable like that because black bears are not unknown to these parts. I keep an ear open and a .357 Magnum nearby at night.

The next angle of approach will be to cut the fur from her neck with our doggy clippers and then not tighten the collar as much. I’m thinkin’ that that bright idea ought to at least qualify me for another “Bright LED Award”. Given enough time, I’ll earn my way up from there ‘cause I’m tired of being in the dark all the time, don’t’cha know.

Computer Dude  update: it looks like the big quad-core main workhorse computer is back in service and operating nominally. That was a real pain to have to reload the operating system after having rebuilt it only a month prior. It isn’t a technical challenge at all. It’s just that reinstalling all of the backups takes a huge amount of time (at least when you have as much to back up as I do). But, the big bruiser is purring along and earning its keep.

Wanna know what a computer dude does if he has a few minutes to deal with while he’s downloading drivers and such? He waxes nostalgic and overhauls an XP box, that’s what. Friend and brother, Rick Hardt, hauled some of his computers from his old office over to the ranch and gave them to me!

One of them was of a high enough performance that I immediately upgraded it to a Win 10 box. Another was a really nice dual-core computer with lots of RAM (RAM is our friend!) and already running XP. That spawned an idea in no time. I tweaked and personalized it and sat it next to my big bad brute Dell box.

I added an HDMI video card so it could be hooked to the 39” monitor. After that, I added a bunch of neat software in case I need (another) back up box. It’ll actually be a secondary back up since my immediate back up machine is one that’s already been used for that purpose and has most of the same software and such as the main computer.

The big HP 23” all-in-one box got conscripted as the primary backup rig when the big box took a dive. So, in the exigency, I flooded it with all the necessary stuff to keep my digital boat afloat. She’s a bone fide beaut! The specs are not spectacular when compared to the big Dell. But, she’s no slouch due to the solid dual-core processor with a healthy dose of 6 GB of RAM. The OS is Win 10, of course. It came with Win 7 but Win 10 was a free upgrade (until June of this year). It’ll make the grade any day I need it.

What makes it so cool is that I just need to add a mouse and keyboard and I’m ready to rock! Those are a wireless set so, with no hookup required, I basically just pull it out from its hiding place and turn it one. Quick and easy (Mr. Quick and Mr. Easy are two of my favorite friends).

Before the big crash, I had the option to dual-boot to XP or Windows 10 by using two hard drives. For some reason, I elected to dual-boot to Windows 7 (I really do like Windows 7).  But, I guess I missed XP. That sounds about right since I used it as the main operating system for about eight years. It’s like an old friend and difficult to leave behind.

Now I have a super-nice and super-fast little XP box that I can tinker with. A lightly loaded XP with a single core Pentium 4 processor can run wonderfully fast on 256 MB of RAM. A lightly loaded XP box with a dual-core processor with 3 GB of RAM (which is the maximum amount that XP can “see”) is a screamer! The Firefox browser actually keeps the machine Internet capable, too. It’s silly but lends a tad of fun to the ol’ Computer Dude’s day.

 Chickening Report: One of the first things about “chickening” that you learn is that the weather affects egg production. If it’s too hot or too cold, the production goes down. Hint: it's hot here so we have pitifully few eggs. 

But, it doesn't end there; if the Big Bad Biddy Committee doesn’t like your beautiful nesting boxes, production goes down (unless, of course, the hens are happier laying their soon-to-be-omelets in the ….trash barrel....I kid thee negative). If the chicken is having a bad waddle day, the production goes down. If the chickens don’t like you, the production goes down (which is why the Ol’ Rancher pampers his producers).

Another reason is if they are frightened. Now, there are uncountable sources that can spook a dumb cluck but “predators” is one of the main ones. For instance, you’d be frightened too if you saw your BBBFL (best biddy buddy for life) have her head snatched right off her plump feathery body by a long armed raccoon (oh, yeah. It does happen).

It’s not that coons have a “thing” for chicken heads; it’s just that that’s the only part of the chicken that will make it through a hole in the coop. The coon has high hopes that the hole will enlarge so the rest of the feathery meal-to-be could quickly follow. It never happens so he settles for waddle, beak, gizzard, and eyeballs for dinner. Chickens don't have a brain so there's not much meat in the rest of the head. 

The egg heads around here have recently discovered a new and better way to feed our (hopefully) temporary roosters. Connie the Chicken Canner (Rancho Relaxo’s lead factotum and bottle washer), found a website that declared that fermenting your scratch and crumble releases more protein because it makes it more digestible (I bet a lot of y’all overlooked that when you studied “Chickening 101”,eh). It made sense to me especially since we have three younger boids that aren’t on the ground to get their grit yet.

So, Connie the Braumeister (she wears so many hats that there’s no room in the closet to hang them all) hauled out her two five gallon buckets and set up shop. Into one bucket went the scratch and into the other went the crumble.

Since our modest-but-unique ranch always has an abundance of some sort of odor (the coop when wet), fume (paint, gasoline, solvents, et. al.), vile vapor (“Pass the beans and ham hocks, please”….and, if you don’t pass the cornbread with that, you will die!”), smoke (BBQ), or such emanations, we figured no one would notice the prominent smell of….fermenting corn mash. 

Now, corn mash is the main ingredient for making moonshine (but, all you bootleggers knew that already). Naw….there’s no temptation to build a still but if we ever need to come up with some alcohol …for medicinal purposes, of course…we can do that (hey, you just never know).

By the end of the next day, we saw the buckets full and “working”. …and smelling. For a moment, I thought I was in the backwoods of Arkansas at Big Bubba Buddy Rub’s moonshine still. Wheew! We’re also hoping that the “Revenuers” won’t come tracking us down and bust up our works. “Hey, Feds! We pay our taxes!!”.  So far, so good.

Connie’s efforts paid off! The mash is a hit with the beak brigade and even the little guys are chowing down on it. They almost knock each other out of the way to get to this stuff. It must be good stuff because they stagger around for an hour or so after loading up and then come back for more (and you just know I’m funnin’ you).

The crumble mash is being consumed too but not with the same alacrity. It has the consistency of a bowl of cold Cream of Wheat (when was the last time you saw that?!). We’ll keep feeding them and if it starts being left over, we’ll revert to dry crumble and stay with the fermented scratch.  There’s also supposed to be a savings in feed costs as well because the scratch swells when it ferments and takes up more space in the chicken’s crop (while providing more protein so there’s a net gain).

So, you can imagine that the pair of ranchers are delighted to be informed about and are ready for the promised increase in the taste of our eggs, too! That was one of the claims made about fermented scratch. A more desirable product means more product sold and a more savory breakfast. We just need to get our girls to understand that simple dynamic and ….start laying.

There you have it: another episode of what’s happening at Rancho Relaxo, home of Rancho Ran, the world's foremost authority (the previous one died), Connie the Canner (world's greatest side-cook), where things can get…interesting, and where… you just never know.