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.