My SF Novel, “One Survivor,” Almost Ready

The aftermath of my cold has slowed me down, but I’ve made my final pass through my science fiction novel, One Survivor. Karen will go over it one more time, and then I can upload it to Lightning Source. It should be available in a week or so.

And it’s about time, too, considering I started this project in 1987!

After that, we’ll finish up the third book in the Tom Slade series. And there are plenty more books where these came from — chicken books, farm books, novels, you name it — all stacked up waiting for us to find some time.

Radio Clocks and Daylight Savings Time

Ah, daylight savings time. What was the point of it again? Oh yeah … it doesn’t work, but Congress look concerned and attentive. This isn’t easy for them, so they’ll clutch at any straw.

Anyway, I have a lot of “atomic clocks,” which are really radio-synchronized clocks that get their signal from the super-low-frequency transmitter at WWVB in Fort Collins, Colorado. I like these because you can forget about your timepieces except when you need to replace the batteries five years later. They set themselves to the radio signal.

The bad news is that the radio signal doesn’t actually get through all the time. Mostly it doesn’t matter, since once a week is plenty, but it’s a pain around the daylight savings time transition. Half my clocks have updated themselves and the others haven’t. Worse, these “zero-config” clocks are very inconvenient to set manually, maybe impossible. And because resetting these clocks is something you do twice a year at most, it’s hard to remember the steps.

Once again, a promising technology gets messed up by sloppy implementation. Where’s the button to push that says, “don’t try to synch up just once per night, keep trying continuously, damn it!” Where’s the “synch over WiFi” feature? Failing that, where are the set of, “never mind, I’ll set it myself” buttons?

People talk as if timekeeping was a mature market, but clocks and watches are designed by idiots. There’s probably good money out there waiting for a designer with half a brain, provided he isn’t saddled instantly with a pointy-haired boss who prevents all progress.

Don’t Overgeneralize the Economy

The Corvallis area is suffering from its highest jobless rate in 33 years. In the midst of all this woe, the last time I visited the Corvallis Winter Farmer’s Market, it was so packed with happy customers with their wallets out that I could hardly squeeze in.

This always happens. A recession means that more people are having financial trouble than usual. It doesn’t meant that everyone is having trouble. It doesn’t even mean that the people having trouble have stopped buying fresh food. Even as people tighten their belts in some areas (for example, eating out), they loosen them in others (say, home cooking).

The mass media gives a dumbed-down, homogenized, crisis-rich view of the world that is completely useless in decision-making. The idea of newspapers has always been that, by reading along, you feel engaged — without actually doing anything. As entertainment that’s fine, but otherwise it doesn’t accomplish much.

Last year Karen and I talked it over and decided to expand our book offerings, partly to recession-proof our lives and partly because we are constantly amazed at how few of the best books are still in print. It doesn’t seem right. So we started putting more of them into print. We had been holding steady at four books for years, but we expanded to twelve in a few months (that’s what I did with my Christmas vacation).

It turned out to be a good idea, since we’ve broken book-sales records every month for the last four months, and have been getting positive feedback besides.

Admittedly, our publishing business is not so huge that setting a new sales record is going to have us lighting cigars with thousand-dollar-bills, or even with matches. But what I’ve seen in our little publishing business and the Farmer’s Market renews my faith in the concepts that (a) watching the news basically serves as anti-Prozac, and should only be done by folks who are way too happy, and (b) even in bad times, there are opportunities — especially small ones — everywhere.

Spring Cleaning

The Poultry Industries class from Oregon State University will be dropping by on Thursday to see our old-timey operation. How the heck did our pasture get so cluttered with bits of old lumber, rusted-through feeders, and other detritus? Time for a little spring cleaning!

This is not a great time of year to show off one’s pastured layer operation. Next month, the grass will reclaim all the muddy patches, but not yet.

The hens are laying very well, which is good, because the Corvallis Winter Market (held alternate Saturdays indoors at the fairgrounds) is doing a land-office business, and sales are much stronger than we expected.

The New Hampshire chicks we got from Oregon State University are doing very well and have been moved onto pasture. The girls (pullets) will be kept for egg-laying and the boys (cockerels) will be butchered and sold as “old-fashioned spring chickens” at the Winter Market. They’ll probably be the best-tasting chickens we’ll have all year, since slow-growing old-fashioned breeds raised on early spring pasture are hard to beat.

Baby Chick Time

We’ve got two brooder houses in operation now, one with New Hampshire Reds we got from Oregon State University, and another with broilers from Privett Hatchery (actually, they were drop-shipped from Welp Hatchery, but I know that anything ordered via Privett is going to be good).

We get a deal on chicks from OSU every once in a while. These were straight-run New Hampshires. Normally I recommend that people avoid straight-run chicks, because most people have no desire to butcher their own chickens, and even less skill, and the last thing you want is a zillion roosters cluttering up the place. But Karen is a whiz at chicken butchering and we can always get rid of the excess it the Woodburn Small Animal Auction.

(Important tip: never buy poultry at an auction. They’ll come with free parasites that you’ll spend ages eradicating. Auctions are for selling, not buying.)

We’re right in the middle of false spring right now, with warmer temperatures, budding plants, and occasional blue skies. This always happens, and the weather always turns savage again (well, for Oregon) later. But it’s hard to resist buying baby chicks and seeds and trowels and stuff at this time of year.

We butcher broilers at approximately 8 weeks, give or take. The outdoor farmers’ markets start in mid-April, so we’re right on schedule. Hens are in full lay at about six months, so the chicks will start laying just as the older hens enter their summer slump. Half the time we botch basic planning exercises like this (too many calls on our time), but it looks like we got it right this year.

Though the weather is still uncertain across the country, it’s a good time to start baby chicks. A lot of hatcheries have specials up until the March baby-chick frenzy starts. If you don’t know what you want, my rule of thumb is to call the hatchery and ask which of their commercial-quality layers are the most docile and non-cannibalistic. That maximizes the egg-to-heartbreak ratio.

And don’t forget to take a look at my book, Success With Baby Chicks while you’re at it. Even if you’re a pro, it’s easy to forget the fine points between the last batch of last year’s chicks and the first batch of this year’s. You’ll get your money’s worth out of the book within 24 hours of the chicks’ arrival, I promise.