Introducing: The Chicks!

This is a guest post by Peter and Sammy.

Dad told you about building the chicken coop. Now we'll tell you about the chicks who live in it.

First there's Peter, a brown wells (an interesting species) chick that has a gnarly peck. It sort of hurts to get pecked by Peter, because if she pets you its like biting. She chomps down on you.

Next up is Midnight. She is a black sex-link. Black sex-links have a way to tell whether they are boys or girls. It is by their color. Midnight is all black, with some brown on her breast, and that's how we know she's a girl. Midnight likes perches. She usually hops on the one inside the coop, but also the one on the outside. This morning Midnight tried to escape from the coop while we were giving them more food and water. A very crafty chicken. A jailbreaker!

Next up is Kirby. We don't know yet whether Kirby is a boy or a girl. Kirby is a Rhode Island White. Kirby used to be yellow, when she was a baby chick, but now (he or) she is white.

Next up is Meta Knight. Meta Knight is a Lakenvelder. Meta Knight likes perches as well. She is black and white. She is a racing chicken. Very fast. She has cool blue feet. (That's all I can say about her.)

Today we gave them a huge mountain of spinach (that had gone too bad for us to eat). In no time at all, the pile shrunk. They were also really thirsty this morning. So when we changed the water, they were pecking at it before we even put it down.

They really enjoy the coop. But watch out! They really poop a lot too! Their favorite foods seem to be green leafy vegetables and bread. Every night, we see them bunched up in a corner of the coop near the door. When we turn the heat lamp on, they stand up and start walking around the coop, as if the darkness was holding them down.

Pecking Order

We still aren't sure of the sex of the four chickens we now keep (we hope they are all hens because I doubt we can get away with keeping a rooster in this neighborhood), but we are getting a clearer sense of their different personalities.

(l to r): Midnight, Kirby, Peter, Meta Knight

While still chicks living in the cage, Kirby (the Rhode Island White) was the most aggressive. When we opened the door to let them out, Kirby was the first one out and the last one back in. When they first moved into the coop, Kirby would often sit apart while the other three huddled together at night. This gave her something of an independent air, a trendsetter for the chickens. As they run around their chicken run, I've seen Kirby chest bump some of the other chickens and while I couldn't tell who won the bumb, Kirby looked confident. Now as they've completed two weeks in their run, however, Kirby does not seem to be the ringleader anymore. Yesterday I saw Midnight and Kirby pecking each other's beaks. After a peck or two, Midnight stretched up tall and Kirby squatted down in what looked like a gesture of submission.

Midnight (the Black Sex-link) was, after Kirby, the chick who was most interested in life outside the cage when they were little. Open the door and Kirby would pop out followed closely by Midnight. Once in the run and coop, Midnight has really opened up. Midnight was the first, and so far the only one, to take up a post on the perch we installed inside the coop (lately, that puts her closer to the heat lamp than the others). She was so consistently interested in sitting up high that we added another perch to the run. Yertle the Turtle-like, Midnight sits on high and rules all she can see. The others look up at her and seem to wonder how she got up there. At the moment, Midnight looks like the queen of the hen house.

Peter (the Brown Well Summer) was the most timid as a chick inside the cage. She never wanted to leave and essentially had to be dragged out. She was the last to leave the cage when we transferred them to the run and coop and seemed to be nearly at a loss as to what to do in her new space. Over these two weeks, however, she has grown the most. She is now the largest (and to my eyes, the most beautiful) of all the chickens and she is growing in her confidence. Peter is the most protective of her food. If she finds something she likes, she picks it up and runs away with it (the others tend to just peck together). The other day we gave them some orange slices in the kitchen scraps. Meta Knight found a piece and followed Peter's lead by trying to run away with it. But Peter showed them all a new behavior: chase the chicken with the best food scrap. Chasing Meta Knight relentlessly, Peter gave MK no rest to savor her find. In the end, the morsel was Peter's.

Meta Knight (the Lakenvelder, named, by Sammy, after a character in the Kirby video games) was supposed to be the chick that would run the most. "This is the one that will need space to run," we were told when we got them. But Meta Knight has been a pretty timid creature. Not as afraid as Peter when they were in the cage, but definitely hanging back out of suspicion. Once in the run, Meta Knight has slowly been gaining her legs. Looking outside just now as I write this, I saw all four hens tumble out of the house and head for the far end of the run. Meta Knight sprinted the distance and won the race. Midnight (typical) flew (it is all about the height with her). Meta Knight is also the only other chicken to challenge Midnight's monopoly on the perch (at least the outside perch).

So far I'm enjoying the chickens more than I would have predicted. They are kind of like an outdoor fish tank, in that I'll sometimes look up from my work (I work on the dining room table, next to the glass doors leading to the backyard) and just watch them strutting about as I would watch fish in a tank. The boys love them and, so far, they are paying them their due attention everyday. Around 8pm every night, the boys head outside to plug in the heating lamp so the still young chicks won't freeze at night. The first thing every morning, they head outside to unplug the lamp and check their food and water. Several times during the day, they give them kitchen scraps or pulled weeds. The other morning I woke up before the boys and was there when their alarm went off. Rather than whining about getting up, both boys popped up and marched out of the room, Sammy, bringing up the rear, observing, "Time for chores!"

Our Chicken Coop and Run

Our Chicken Coop and Run
Originally uploaded by Takecrew

It took us a few weeks, but we recently completed construction of our chicken coop and run for four chickens (hopefully hens) that Peter's teacher, Wendy Treat, gave us.

The chickens are named Peter (a Brown Well Summer breed), Midnight (a Black Sex Link), Meta Knight (a Lakenvelder breed) and Kirby (a Rhode Island White). Not the best names if we are trying to nudge the cosmos toward making sure they are all hens, but they certainly reveal the boys' passions at the moment of naming, earlier in the fall when the chickens were palm-sized morsels. Peter named Peter and Midnight. He had long wanted a black hen, according to Wendy, and the name Midnight is nicely evocative. In all the time they've named their mountains of stuffed animals, they've never named anything after themselves. So while I haven't asked Peter why he named the Brown Well Summer after himself, I'll just take it as a sign of how attached he is to these animals. Sammy named Kirby and Meta Knight after two characters from a video game that he is learning to play. While we know that at least Midnight is a hen, we're still waiting on the other three. I feel hopeful, but if one of them turns out to be a rooster, we'll have to find it another home.

We built the coop following a design in use at the Life Lab on the UCSC Farm program. It features a main room with an elevated perch and a nook in the rear with nesting boxes. The roof is hinged so we can raise one side and look in (in the picture, it is the side on the right) and there is also a hinged roof over the nesting boxes (the lower portion sticking out on the right as well). We also have a door on the side that we can open to clean out the inside of the coop (and harvest that reputedly fertilizer-iffic chicken poop).

I was slow in building the coop because I was feeling unsure of my very rusty carpentry skills, and because I wanted the boys to help out as much as possible. As I noted in the previous post, they used all the tools, except the circular saw, including the power drill and staple gun. I had them measuring and marking and talking about how and why we were doing everything we did. Their attention spans were often short, but managed to get it all together somehow.

Noriko and I decided to build the run around our existing planting boxes. This hadn't been a great year for our vegetable garden, mostly because of our extensive travel and Noriko's stretch run on her book manuscript. But I think the final determinant in our decision was the convenience and security. Behind our chicken coop is an area of dense over-growth at the property line with our backyard neighbors. The ancient fence there has fallen over (into our side) and has been covered over in a thicket of blackberry brambles and ivy. Underneath that fallen fence is now a tunnel that I call "Raccoon Highway." I've been trying to convince our neighbors to go in on a good neighbor fence with us so that we could deprive the raccoons of their refuge, but so far I've had no luck. So that meant that we had to build the coop with the expectation that a family of raccoons live right next to it and would surely attack. As I worked on the coop and run, my mental image of these marauding raccoons grew and grew until they appeared in my mind as evil super criminals with adept human-like hands and acute puzzle-solving brains.

As you can see in the previous post, the construction of the run was really worrying me. But the planter boxes were lined with chicken wire on the bottom (to defend against gophers), so by stapling the chicken wire for the run to the outside of the boxes, I had a fully enclosed wire box for the chickens without forcing them to walk on wire all the time. The loose soil of the boxes also allows us to easily harvest a season of chicken poop for other parts of the garden.

In the end, I scavenged posts from an elevated bed frame someone had given us (elevated so that we could place a desk underneath), which you can see as the blue corner posts on the run. That determined the height, just over four feet, which is just perfect for making the boys the appropriate people to clean it out.

Given the time it took to make the coop and the frequent fall rains that interrupted our work, the back part of the roof warped a bit. That annoys me a bit, but it is working out fine for the moment for it gives us enough room in the gap between roof and side wall to run a wire into the heat lamp we have inside (the coop glows a beautiful and expensive red all night long).

The first night the chickens spent outside, I was a nervous wreck. Almost immediately after the sun went down, the raccoons came out and began their inspection. Fearing that the boys would wake up to find shredded chickens strewn about the run, I kept going outside nearly all night long in a pointless attempt to convince the raccoons that I was watching them. In the morning, we found muddy footprints all over the coop, but the chickens were safe.

One week in and the chickens remain healthy and happy.

Chicken Coop

Back in August, I wrote about a little construction project with the boys, a bookcase for our CDs. The result was pretty crude, but functional. At the time, I mentioned that our next project would be a chicken coop. That, indeed, has been the project of the last several weeks.

Peter corrals the chicks.

Peter has a teacher at school who raises chickens and often brings chicks to the classroom. She has told us for over a year now that Peter responds to the chickens far more than any of the other children. Together, she and Peter have been plotting to bring chickens into our lives. At the end of this summer, Noriko and I finally acquiesced and the teacher, Wendy, went out and purchased four baby chicks for us to raise. We are hoping that all four are hens. The chicks are a Rhode Island White (named "Kirby" by Sam), a Black Sex Link (named "Midnight" by Peter) a Brown Wellsummer (named "Peter" by Peter) and a Lakenvelder (named "Metonite" by Sam). They were tiny a few weeks ago, but as you can see in this picture, they are now teenagers. Until now they've been living in a cage, both at school (weekdays) and in our house (weekends), but soon they will be big enough to spend all their time outside. And so the urgency of building the coop has increased.

We're working on a design we saw at the Life Lab on the campus farm. It is a nice little house, with a space for nesting, a nice perch bar, windows and, most importantly, two hinged roofs that allow us to both peer inside and collect eggs for breakfast. The folks at the life lab generously gave us the plans for free, so it isn't quite right to complain that the directions are poorly written. So I'll just say that I'm grateful for that carpenteering experience over 20 years ago (dimly, but just sufficiently remembered).

Stapling on chicken wire for a floor.

We've been going at it a little bit at a time: making the cuts one weekend, assembling the basic frame another. At this point, we're only one or two weeks from the time when the chickens will be able to take occupancy. Unfortunately, this weekend has been nothing but rain and next weekend I'll be in Chicago. We still have to attach the roof and legs, which won't take that much time. Painting it will take up another day, at least. But the thing that really worries me is how long it will take to build the chicken run. They don't just need a coop, but also a space to roam around safe from nighttime predators (mostly raccoons). That's going to take time and another round of ingenuity (dig a one foot deep trench to bury the poultry wire low enough to prevent digging entry? build the run as a fully enclosed chicken wire cube?).

Like the CD bookcase, this is not the prettiest thing I've ever built. But it is an improvement over the first. With luck, this will be another link in a series of construction projects with the boys. I'll post photos when the whole thing is done.

The Birthday Earache

I developed earaches in both ears earlier this week that, by Wednesday, were painful enough that I figured I should go see a doctor. The boys and I have been playing in swimming pools a lot lately and our first thought was swimmer's ear. Certainly swimmer's ear is a logical place to start, given my recent activities, but a couple things didn't quite sound right. First, it seems that swimmer's ear mostly effects younger people (I may feel immature, but I can't really claim youth anymore at age 47). I had no discharge (yuck!) and I had it simultaneously in both ears, whereas swimmer's ear usually effects only one at a time. The doctor looked in my ears and saw some redness and slight inflammation, but didn't give me the face that said, "Yep, that's it alright." I left the office with a prescription for an antibiotic in ear drop form and a nagging sense that the diagnosis might not be quite right. After all, the doctor said that if things weren't clearing up in two days, I should come back and see him.

Over the next two days, I used the drops as instructed and the pain seemed to subside somewhat. But last night (or, really, early this morning), I woke up with pretty sharp pains. I also had a bit of a sore throat, which now pointed in the direction of an alternative theory, a favorite of my friend Alice, that I have some kind of sinus infection. But the doctor quickly doused that theory. The particular part of my ear where the inflammation was is not really connected to the sinus passages, my inner ear and ear drum are just fine. He said my sinuses look normal and, in any case, I don't have any pain in the classic sinus areas. In addition, the slight redness and inflammation he'd seen in the outer ear two days ago was diminished even though the pain wasn't.

That led us back to the alternative theory I'd proposed on my first visit: nocturnal teeth grinding. I have had jaw pain from teeth grinding in the past, but that led to real soreness in opening and closing my mouth. It was kind of like having lock jaw, or at least so I think. But this time the pain certainly feels sharpest inside the ear, in the outer chamber. On the other hand, I'm also bedeviled by tenderness around the ear, in the space between my ear and cheek, right over where the lower jaw connects to the upper. The doctor asked me some questions about my sleep patterns (snoring? yes? difficulty focusing during the day? yes) and then proposed that we are looking at something that is a combination of sleep apnea and teeth grinding. "Temporalmandibular joint disorder," he called it.

So now we move on from a simple antibiotic to something more time consuming and lifestyle-changing. The doctor is referring me to sleep pulmonary specialists so that we can work on the sleep apnea and wants me to go to the dentist to get a night guard to take the pressure off my jaws.

Years ago, when we took Peter to the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic to be tested for sleep apnea, the doctors suggested to Noriko that I should be tested for apnea as well (Peter, it turned out, had it and ended up getting surgery). Our insurance company decided it didn't want to send me to the Stanford clinic as well, so they hooked me up with a home sleep apnea test kit. As far as I can recall, it involved a strap I had to keep tight around my middle and some monitor attached thereto (and perhaps tucked between the strap and my body). I was then to sleep with this strap and the machine tightly in place. Needless to say, I unconsciously loosened the whole contraption during the night, which led to a diagnosis of "no apnea." "No apnea" means no re-testing, so that was that. But now it looks like we should try this again.

Sometime before the sleep apnea thing, I had also gotten a mouth guard from my dentist. It was carefully fitted to my gum in a laborious process of molding warm rubber/plastic to my teeth and gums. But I found that the mouthpiece I eventually tried at home made it even harder to sleep. Anticipating that, as a teeth grinder, I would be breathing through my nose, the mouth guard gave me just three or four small holes to draw air through my mouth. But the size of the thing also meant that my face was stretched somewhat, which actually narrowed my nasal passages. In other words, breathing through my nose was harder. After three or four nights with the mouth guard, I frankly gave up.

So now I am back to where I was several years ago. I've got a number of sleep problems (regardless of whether or not they are actually related to the current ear pain). I need to take care of them and the way to get there appears to be to go back to these contraptions that gave me so much trouble before.

But I also need to develop new habits. Most basically, I need to stop what I'm doing at night and go to bed earlier. I've developed another bad habit in the past several years. Finding that I was going to bed exhausted, but not mentally ready to sleep yet, I had a choice of reading a book or maybe watching a little video on a portable device (we don't have a tv in the bedroom). I found it hard to read, because, being so exhausted, I would read a paragraph or two and then fall asleep. The next night when I picked up the book again, I'd not remember where I was and start reading again and, again, make it only through a couple of paragraphs. In short, I couldn't make any headway with a book in bed. So I stopped reading in bed and started watching video as a way of mentally making the transition. The problem is I find it much easier to stay awake during a video of something like a 30 minute tv show. Then, at the end of the show, I often want to watch another one (Arrested Development has been a consistent favorite). So I'll watch another one and sometimes a third. So, having gone to bed exhausted, I've managed to delay sleep by an hour or more. Then, during that hour I'll have an extra glass of wine and maybe another snack. The result is less sleep, more calories and no reading.  Just bad habits all around.

I am 47 years old today and while I still feel quite young, I do have to admit that I'm not objectively young anymore (even as I'm not old yet either). I now have to take care of my health at a level of consciousness that I never did as a healthy young guy. I've spent some time in the last year trying to develop new habits of spending, eating and exercising that would improve my financial and physical health. But the other day, I was thinking about how underneath to all of those changes—changes that I'm still working on—was a much more fundamental change I needed to make. I need to sleep more and better. If I sleep more and better, I'll have energy for exercising and cooking a good meal, I'll have greater clarity of mind for the work I have to do (which is, after all, mostly thinking) and for decisions I make about all kinds of things. But fixing my sleep habits and problems strikes me as much, much more difficult than learning to eat better or exercise regularly (both of which are pleasant). This will involve changing even more ingrained habits. I am going to go back to books, but now instead of looking at the books as something I want to read, I'll look at them as soporifics. The point isn't to read the book, but to change my mental condition so I can sleep. Perhaps, eventually, the desire to actually get through a novel will get me into bed even earlier, which, of course, would be a very good thing. But for the moment, falling asleep needs to be the higher priority.

Just about two weeks ago I was thinking these thoughts about my sleep problems, thinking I should get on it soon. Looks like the current acute ear pain has forced my hand.

Not the happiest thoughts on a birthday, but if I learn to sleep better, this could be one of the better birthdays I have.

Project Time

The boys aren't scheduled for any camps during the last two weeks of August, so, with Noriko neck-deep in tenure file-preparation work, I was hoping to do something that I called "Daddy Camp." I was hoping to do one relatively ambitious thing a day. I had five things in mind: bike trips, hikes, geocaching, boogie boarding and then practice at ball sports that would be useful for P.E. at school.

But then, the day before Daddy Camp was supposed to begin, Peter hurt his foot. It wasn't anything that called for a trip to the doctor. Just a deep bruise. But it hobbled him badly enough that our enthusiasm for adventure was sapped. We also did a family trip to REI (really, to Old Navy) to buy the boys some new clothes for the school year. At REI I had a chance to test out my growing sense that Peter's bike is too small for him. And, indeed, it appears that it is time to bring him up a size. 

So, the hurt foot put the kaibosh on hiking and geocaching and the bike size issue dampened my expectations for biking. In the end we went boogie boarding twice, but the trips were more like our customary late afternoon trips, rather than an actual outing. 

As we sat about feeling Peter's pain, it struck me that I'd been thinking about Daddy Camp in very simple terms. Just a series of sporting events. I recalled that one of the things the boys seemed to do a lot at their camps this summer was art projects. I never seem to be able to remember that, on a day to day basis, but they really do like that. So I began to think about things that we can do that would be creative or constructive.

I quickly hit on a plan. We have a lot of cds housed in boxes throughout the house, or piled up obtrusively in random spots. They've been stored in those places because we never had a cd storage case that could hold all of them. Noriko had bought one or two small ones over the years, as well as stacked plastic drawers, but none of these options really worked either efficiently or effectively (that is, it didn't mean greater access to our cds). I figured we could build a cd case for the hallway outside our bedroom that could store all of our cds without blocking any passageways.

So the boys and I drew up a plan and went to the lumber yard to buy the (precut) lumber (I didn't want to introduce power saws to the project and I couldn't fit the wood in the car otherwise). When we got home, the boys measured out the spots for the shelves on the risers. They drilled the pilot holes for the screws. They screwed in the shelves (I finished sinking them) and then they painted and decorated the shelves (lime green paint and musical note stickers). As a man who was formerly obsessed with his record collection, I reserved the placement of the cds to myself.

The lumber yard messed up the cuts of the shelves (they are off, from longest to shortest, by a quarter inch), so it isn't the prettiest thing to look at. But it is out of public view and the boys are very proud of their achievement anyway.

So am I.

Next up: a chicken coop!

Boogie Boarding

End of a day. Broken leash for Peter.

We've been having a lot of fun at Twin Lakes beach this summer.

We haven't gone out as much as I'd like to because Peter's thrice-weekly swim team practice eats into our preferred boarding hours. Our preferred time is late in the afternoon, usually after 6:30 pm. The parking in the area can be very hard even during weekdays, but after 6:30 most people have headed home (although the evening patrons of the Crow's Nest roll in). But we make it out there about twice a week, and that's pretty good.

As we looked at the beginning of the boarding season, around late April, Peter needed a new wetsuit and a new board. I decided that I should go ahead and get myself a suit too. Sammy would get the second child's hand-me-down of Peter's first wet suit, a short-sleeved, short-legged number that gives a few more minutes of comfort in our cold waters than his regular bathing suit. Since Sammy was still obstinate about not getting his head or face wet, this seemed seemed sufficient.

Heading out.

The big advance this season has been getting Sammy to ride. He's not actually riding a board all by himself (the two efforts I've made at that—putting him on a board, standing to the side and giving him a push when a small wave comes in—have both ended in unhappy face plants). Instead, Sammy hops up on my back and we ride the wave in double-decker style. The first few times our rides ended when Sammy got a head-soaking in waves that were a bit bigger than I thought. Once a very big wave hit me so hard as I was walking out to a slightly deeper spot (so we could ride on water rather than sand) that it knocked me over backward, right on top of Sammy. But now that Sammy is taking swimming lessons and has gotten enthusiastic about going under water, our rides have gotten more adventurous. Wearing goggles also helps.

In the churn. The waves are often much bigger than this.

These days Sammy and I try to catch a wave at its crest, rather than in its after-break churn. We have been thoroughly soaked a number of times, but Sammy holds on tight. Some of our best rides have been tandem with Peter. We all catch a wave and as we cruise in toward the beach, Peter and I veer toward each other and we all link arms. More recently, Peter has taken to hitch-hiking. As Sammy and I roar past him in a churn, Peter, who has just completed his own ride and is standing closer to shore, runs in close and dives to catch my bicep to hold on for one more short ride. It is a move made for injury, but I have to admit that it was pretty cool how he has pulled it off a couple of times.

Sammy is also picking up on the dare devil action. These days, as our ride stabilizes out of the first churn, Sammy sits up and rides me like a horse, gripping with his skinny legs, arms raised above his head, shouting, "Yee-haw!"

A satisfied Sammy at the end of the ride.

Usually we ride until the sun goes down. Sometimes, wet, sandy and shivering, we stop off for nachos on the way home. In the car, I dial Noriko, hand the phone to Sammy and he shouts, "Fire up the bath, Mom!"

(Thanks to Mitch for taking the photos.)

Carbohydrate Overload, Protein Deficit

I'm on my seventh day of trying out dailyburn.com and here's what I'm noticing.

Logging in everything I eat every day has, indeed, made it much easier to avoid snacking. I start the day aware that I have 2200 to 2500 calories allotted to me. It becomes like a game. I want to be sure that I have calories left at the end of the day so I can enjoy a glass of wine. So I've been eating really healthy foods during the day. Fruits and berries and oats (in various modes) at breakfast, lean sandwiches and veggies at lunch and smaller portions at dinner. So far I've always had caloric room for wine and I've gone over my target calorie range only once. In fact, as one can see in my Jan. 27 nutrition log above, I tend to finish the day below the lower end of my calorie target range. In the course of this, I've found that a glass of wine at the end of the day is more important to me than dessert. So I've pretty much cut desserts out entirely in this first week and I haven't missed them.

But dailyburn.com also sets a desirable ratio of carbs to fats to proteins and I'm finding it impossible to get green check marks (designating hitting the target range) for all three. The problem is proteins. I've been eating a ton of fruits and vegetables and—it feels unfair—they get registered as carbohydrates (which I tend to think of in terms of grains). So I'm usually either on the upper limits of my carb range or over. I have managed to keep the fat intake to hit their range, but I fall substantially short of the proteins. The 27th was one of my closest days on the protein range and I hit only 60% of my target. I had scrambled eggs for breakfast, a turkey and avacado sandwich for lunch, a fat free yogurt for afternoon snack, a beef and tofu stir fry for dinner and a cheese quesadilla for evening snack and that's all the protein I could get. Other days, I've just diced up half a brick of tofu and eaten it with soy sauce and dried bonito flakes and I can barely budge the protein meter. This will take much more work.

My friend Ron advised me to eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper to keep my weight in control. I've been trying to follow his advice by eating a lot of things at breakfast and lunch, a kind of grazing approach. But what I'm grazing tends to be so low in calories that by the time I hit dinner, I tend to be at the 800 to 1000 calorie level. Since I've been ending the day in the 1900 to 2200 range, that means that half the calories I eat in the day come after dinner. And that clearly isn't the way to go if I want to shed some pounds. So this eating thing is still going to take a lot of work.

The other thing I do on the site is log in any exercise I do that day. This has been the most fun. I've tried in the past to set up spread sheets for tracking the exercise I do because seeing the accumulation is the reward. What this site does extra for me is estimate how many calories I've burned, which is a bonus (again, I've never had a clue how many calories any exercise is burning). It also has a pretty good library of video tapes showing various exercises I can do with our exercise ball, etc. The stats on the left show my exercise for the same day as my nutrition log above. I couldn't get a convenient screen shot that would show the exercise that achieved this burn, but I biked 6 miles and did 30 minutes of yoga. While logging my food is a little nerve wracking, logging my exercise is like  the lab monkey hitting the pleasure button. That means that in sensing the good feelings that will come from exercise (not the endorphins, but the whatever those things are you get when you get praised), I am more inclined to do it. So this is a win!

I don't feel like upgrading to pro yet. The pro version is mostly enhanced social network stuff and integration with your iPhone and whatnot. There is better tracking of nutrition (all those carbohydrate fruits and vegetables would pay off in great fiber stats), but I don't need those. With just what I have on the free version, I've dropped 3 pounds in the first week (low hanging fruit, I know, but 3 nonetheless).

Tracking the Details

Some 15 months ago, I decided I would try to get a handle on our monthly finances by keeping track of every penny I spent. I didn't know if I would find anything in there that would help me save money, but I figured that confronting the facts of daily spending might at least help make me more conscious of money. In the end, it worked. I decided there was a lot of money dribbling out through daily purchases of coffee and lunch up on campus. I resolved to bring my own lunches and snacks from now on and use the hot water heater I'd gotten for Noriko's office some Christmases ago. I also resolved to do more cooking at home, especially of large meals that could meet our needs for days. In fairly short order, I cut our food expenses by, I think, $300 dollars. I wasn't as conscious of other expenses, but by being generally more consciously penny-pinching we managed to actually save money at the end of the month. That, in turn has paid off in easier management of our property taxes and the recent emergency expenditure for replacing our sewer line to the street. Once the mindset kicked in, I didn't have to track our expenditures so closely anymore, but I'll be ready to do so again, should we need to.

I have now decided to take the same approach to my health. Like many men my age, I could stand a few tens of pounds. I made the transition from active teenager to more sedate adult without properly figuring out how to adjust my eating habits until I had gone much too high. In the years since my initial weight gain, I've managed to move up and down about 10 pounds, but I'm basically at equilibrium, much higher than I'd like to be. Most of the movement in my weight has been from periods of exercise (lots of biking in the summers and lots of walking in Japan). But I've been inconsistent in my exercise from season to season, which accounts for some of the weight fluctuation. But what I've really decided I have to do is get a handle on what I eat.

So I've joined a free site to help me do that called DailyBurn.com. It has a variety of features, including some social media elements, but for my purposes it will mostly be a way to track my eating and exercise in the hopes that I become very conscious of food and can shift to a healthier diet. Basically, I do two things there. I have a page that lets me track my exercise and that calculates, roughly, the number of calories I probably burned in doing it. I have another page with a "Nutrition Log" on which I record everything I eat. I have never understood how to measure calories and while it is a very rough approximation here, when I type in a food, like, say, scrambled eggs, it gives me a number of choices from which I choose a description that is close to what I ate. That description lists the calories and the grams of fat, carbs and protein in the food. When I signed in, I got on the scale and logged in my initial weight. Then I set a desired weight for my goal. The site tells me how many calories I need to eat to sustain my current weight and then sets a range of calories that I should try to stay within if I want to lose weight (a couple hundred fewer calories than what it would take to sustain my weight). It also sets a target percentage ratio for grams of fat, carbs and protein to help me make decisions about food during the day (I'm having trouble eating enough protein according to their targets, but fat and carbs are easy).

My first day, I did well on exercise (bike ride and light hiking). Up to the end of the day, I was under my daily target calories. And while I knew in advance that this was true, it was the late night wine and snacks that killed me, put me over my target range for the day (by 50 calories, so not a disaster). So I know what I need to watch first and foremost, but it will be interesting to see what else I learn about timing of foods as I try this out for awhile. I'm also hoping that the childish sense of achievement that comes with recording the exercise that day will continue to be gratifying enough that I'll keep doing it.

In the meantime, Alton Brown's recent Good Eats episode (Live and Let Diet: part 1; part 2) in which he talked about how he lost 50 pounds in the last year will serve as my general eating guide. But his advice had some elements that are a little too hard. Only one alcoholic drink and desert per week? Ack!

Geocaching: Our New Hobby

The boys and I began a new hobby yesterday: geocaching. In short, you use a GPS device to locate boxes that are hidden throughout the landscape. The position of the boxes is precisely recorded and uploaded to a website so your GPS device can find them (it goes by coordinates, not by any signal that emanates from the boxes.

To the left is the device we bought at REI for $69.95. It has about 250,000 geocache sites preloaded into it. With a separately sold update kit (basically a USB cable) you can hook it up to your computer and download more sites for future adventures. The device is pretty stripped down and took a little while to figure out how to use. But once we figured it out it was so simple to use that the boys each took turns leading us to a cache.

When you find a box, you open it up and take out a piece of paper inside and log in to show that you found it. With the paper in the box is usually a little stash of toys (small plastic animal figures, whistles and whatnot). If you've brought something along with you to put into the box, you can take out one of the toys inside.

Before buying the device, I checked out how many geocaches were available in the Santa Cruz area. It turns out that there are nearly 3000. Several are within walking distance of our house. Others are a short bike ride. Many are located within some of our favorite hiking parks. so it looks like we'll have plenty to do. The tipping point for us in thinking about whether or not to get it was precisely the fact that so many caches are so close. We can easily see a couple of kids, complaining about boredom after school, getting off their butts with their GPS and finding a couple things in the area.

The boys were really excited about the experience and want to share it with their friends. Last night, Sammy said, "You know what I like best about geocaching? Finding toys!" I replied, "You know what I like best about geocaching? Giving away our toys!"

He didn't seem to think that was such a cool thing.

Wednesday Random Ten (in homage to TBogg)

TBogg, one of my favorite bloggers, does a weekly Random Wednesday thing that I've always enjoyed but have feared doing myself. He sets his iPod to "random play" and writes down the first ten things that his iPod plays. Of course, there is always room for ridicule (who doesn't have something publicly embarrassing on their iPod?), but it is also interesting to see what sets of songs can come up.

I finally decided to try it myself this week, and here is what I got:

Idle (The Rabbit Song) — Hem
Wolf in the Breast — Cocteau Twins
Red Clay Halo — Gillian Welch
How Deep is the Ocean — Bill Evans
How Deep is the Ocean — Lonnie Johnson
Are You Experienced? — Jimi Hendrix
A Promise You Can't Keep — Dwight Yoakam
Regret — Sakamoto Ryuichi
Lover — Red Garland
Try Not To Look So Pretty — Dwight Yoakam

And since TBogg usually adds an eleventh song, just in case:
Adventure Rocket Ship — Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3

Up until the Jimi Hendrix, I figured that this list made me look like a pretty typical modern urban "metrosexual." But I think the Jimi Hendrix probably only cements that image.

Well, it's not a bad list anyway.

J Lit I Like

Following up on the post below about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I've been pretty indifferent to Japanese literature for many years now. I just inhaled the stuff when I was an undergrad just beginning my foray into Japanese studies. I still vividly remember reading Natsume Soseki's Kokoro on a ferry in the Japan Sea in February 1984. The ferry ride was tough, thirty-one hours on a rough sea, but the novel was so absorbing, I barely noticed (or, I should say, I barely remember the ferry ride itself). I plowed through much of the modern classics—Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Mori Ogai, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Shiga Naoya and many others. But once I got to grad school, I wasn't finding that much that interested me anymore, although Izumi Kyoka was an exception.

But I have read two things in recent years that I found very powerful: Medoruma Shun's short story "Droplets" (translated by Mike Molasky in Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa) and Kirino Natsue's Out. Both of these books were viscerally effective.

Medoruma's story is a magical realist piece about memory anxiety and the memory economy in Okinawa. Apart from how great it is to use in a class on war memories, I think it is just a great piece of storytelling.

Kirino's novel is ultra-creepy on so many dimensions. Set in a lunch-box factory, she captures the alienation of modern suburban Japan to perfection. Once the murders start, however, the thing takes on a tremendous paranoid tension.

These are both great reads.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicles

I recently finished reading Murakami Haruki's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

I read my first (and, until now, only) Murakami novel, Pinball, 1973, in graduate school and didn't care for it much. It seemed to me to be another one of those contemporary Japanese novels in which nothing much happens to a person who can't manage to give a damn or form an opinion about anything. While I'm sure I have given all of those novels (Yoshimoto Banana's works, for example) short shrift, I've also not been able to overcome my boredom. Perhaps I'm shallow, but when it comes to pleasure reading I'd actually like a story.

I first started hearing about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle from students when I'd talk about Manchuria in class. Students would come up to me afterwards, excited, saying, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!" I'd feign knowledge (not hard after the first few times) and say, "Yes, yes. Just like the novel" and then change the subject.

While I had no intention of moving beyond the feigned interest at first, I soon began to feel like I should get over my Murakami aversion and read the damned book. In part it was because I felt some slight tingle of responsibility to the students to be able to converse a bit about Japanese literature (seeing as we have no one in our Lit department who does J Lit). In part it was because the WWII memories project I was doing with Alice made me want to read across broad swathes of contemporary Japanese writing that touched on the war. Finally, I found the references to the novel coming with greater regularity once I started interviewing a Japanese man in a neighboring town who had spent eight years in Manchuria, from 1945 to 1953. Every time I mentioned his story to someone, they would come back with, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!"

So I finally got over it and picked up a copy at the Literary Guillotine, my favorite bookstore in town. The owner, David, winced when I brought it to the counter. He said that he had tried to get through it, but just couldn't (this coming from a man who has recommended things like Don Delillo's Underworld, a novel I haven't been able to get through yet). I winced back at those words, remembering my own earlier experience with Murakami. But, I bought it, nonetheless, brought it home, started it, bogged down after 20 pages and put it on the shelf to "ripen" for several months. I finally picked it up again this past December and pushed myself through the whole thing.

I should say, at this point, that I thought it was a much better book than Pinball, 1973. The Manchurian passages were also by far the most gripping. There were, at the same time, some of the characteristic features of a Murakami novel that are far less interesting to me. (I joked with my friend Sakae that my heart sank when I opened the novel to find the main character cooking spaghetti in the very first paragraph. "What is this obsession that all his characters have with spaghetti?" I asked.) But, in the end, it is a novel that seems to be sticking with me.

For the record, the story of my Japanese man's time in Manchuria is nothing at all like the stories of Manchuria that Murakami tells. Murakami's Manchurian stories are terribly brutal. And in the context of Japanese memories of WWII, necessary. My man's stories are, to the point we've uncovered, rather different.

What I'll be chewing on for awhile is how The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a story about post-Imperial Japan, how the failure to deal head-on with the colonial legacy creates deep psychic scars. I'm want to resist the historian's tendency to read fiction allegorically, but at this point I do read the novel as a story of several people suffering the long-term effects of a past trauma (traumas not always directly related to Manchuria, but linked by the authorial voice to a kind of primal scene in Manchuria) and the transformation of the main protagonist into (and out of) a psychic detective/therapist.

It wasn't always enjoyable for me, but it was worth reading in the end and, as I said, will likely stick with me for awhile.

Nostalgia for Five Year-Olds

A couple of weeks ago, Sammy found an old Anpanman tank top in a plastic box that had been stashed in a closet. It was a shirt he wore when he was two. Thrilled to find that he could still, kinda, get into the shirt, he has since worn it under his shirts and pajamas every single day and night. And it isn't the Anpanman picture that thrills him. It is the thought that he used to wear it.

At least we know he has gained in height, if not girth.