Au revoir Henry

We said goodbye to Henry yesterday. He had started to anticipate the dawn and his crow was only getting louder. The day it woke both myself and Kelley up we knew we had to find him another home - nevermind the neighbors - pregnant women need sleep.

He should be settling into a new life on a farm by now, thanks to a generous offer from a Travis master gardener.

A rooster named Hen

While out working in the garage this weekend I heard a strange muted noise that sounded almost like a cock-crow. Sure enough as I approached the chicken coop “Henrietta” stretched out her neck and crowed at me.

Kelley and I had discussed this possibility a week before - and I’d maintained that her much more developed comb and waddle was just a variation in the breed. A week makes a big difference, and she/he now had the long legs, drooping tail - and apparently something to crow about. Very sneaky - she’s not exhibited any rooster-like herding or beady-eye-meeting at all up until now (at about 4months old).

This leaves us in a bit of a quandry: we live in a regular suburban neighborhood where the quaint rural sound of a cock crowing from 3:30am onwards might not be appreciated (which was why we stumped up the extra for sexed pullets.) Not to mention we now have 5 potential layers instead of the 6 we’d planned on.


We’ll see how that crow develops. If he behaves we might even call him Henry.

Grown up chickens

Grown up chickens

The young chicks made the move into the large pen with the other 3 older hens a week or 2 ago. Ever since we’ve been going in there at night and perching them on the branch with the other girls (they huddle in a corner otherwise - not safe and very damp in the recent weather.) Tonight when I went out there, the two black australorps (Henrietta and Dorothy) were perched all by themselves. Buffy (the buff orpington ) had gotten as far as the nesting box before giving up.


It was a sweet scene - they’re almost there. I better hurry on the new nesting boxes, they should be laying by the fall and might start any week now.

New worms

New worms

Our new composting worms arrived from Territorial Seed. They are installed in the worm bin (we got it cheap through a city program in Berkeley) and settling in. I have high hopes for them - I just hope they handle the transition


I did call the local bait shop btw on a tip that they were a good source for the same, where they go by the name “red wigglers”. They wanted $2.50 for a “handful” - about 20 worms the guy estimated. Territorial charge $33 for 1000. I don’t think anybody’s really counting, but there’s certainly hundreds in there.

HTML::Index on CPAN.

HTML::Index on CPAN.

This is a set of (perl) modules for creating, storing and searching indexes of html files that looks like a handy starting point for my html indexer. Seems like I might be able to sub-class it to use my own parser and store the code and throw out the content. So I could search for things like which pages on site.com are still using font tags? Which call such-and-such stylesheet or javascript library.

The real trick is going to be getting useful search results for tag combinations.

And don’t forget I want to offer a download of the results in csv or xls format!