vituperation

So, what’s up?

My life’s been quiet, just working on the new chicken coop and trying to get through Portal in my spare time (level 19 now, woohoo!). Robyn went off to Maine for several days and I mostly sat on my ass and watched movies. There was one incident while she was gone where I had some massive chest pains and drove myself to the emergency room because I thought I was having a heart attack, but other than that life’s been pretty quiet.

The good news is: I finished the new coop today. I have to say, I’m pretty proud of it. It’s easily the best thing I’ve built yet. It’s mostly square and mostly level (chicken ramp excluded), and I even added WINDOWS to this one, so I feel like I’m ready to build a house now. I even gayed it up for the neighborhood by painting it sky blue with dark blue trim.

Let’s have us a walkthrough, shall we?

Looking from the front, you can see the double doors, the front windows, and the covered chicken ramp to the left. Yes, covered.

Here’s a close-up of the left front corner, to better show the two shades of blue. You can also see the chicken ramp at the bottom left.

A couple of steps make it easier for stubby-legged women to get in and out of the coop.

This is the chicken entrance / exit. I was tired of crawling over and through shit in the last coop, so I wanted one that was (a) big enough to stand in, and (b) had separate doors for people and chickens. Also, I tried to keep the coop far enough off the ground for the girls to get under it in the summer when it’s hot out.

Moving on around the coop:

Before we go inside, let’s talk about that heart thing for a moment. You didn’t think I was just going to leave you hanging, did you?

In the middle of the week Robyn was in Maine, I was sitting at my computer after work looking at pictures. In the kitchen, black-eyed peas bubbled merrily away on the stove. Next to them, some okra boiled. I had a pork shoulder from the smoker, and nothing rounds out smoked pork like some peas and okra.

Without warning, a pain slammed me almost in the center of my chest. Bad pain. I pushed back from my desk, one hand going instinctively to my chest.

In my head: Oh my God, I’m going to die.

In my head a second later: Oh my God, I’m going to die with porn on the screen.

I got up and walked into the kitchen, feeling kind of lightheaded and dizzy, though that might have been from fear. I shut off the stove, so the house wouldn’t burn down if I keeled over. Within a minute, however, the pain had eased up some, and I went back to my computer and made sure I wasn’t going to die looking like a pervert.

There wasn’t really any decision to make: I needed to get my ass down to the emergency room, right away. That pain scared the shit out of me. Hell, I’m only 40. So I got my ass to the emergency room.

After waiting 20 minutes for the chickens to go in, so I wouldn’t have to worry about something killing them while I was at the hospital. I called Robyn and gave her the “don’t freak out but I think I might be having a heart attack” talk, and then took myself to the Otisburg hospital to find out if death was imminent.

I sat in the emergency room for 90 minutes waiting for someone to triage me and get my insurance information. Not 90 minutes to see a doctor, ninety minutes just to see the first nurse. I don’t know how long it actually takes, though, because I was so pissed off I left.

Dr. Google had showed me before I left the house that heart attacks tend to be pain that doesn’t stop, not sudden incredible pain that goes away after a minute.

The next day, I made an appointment with Dr. Judy just to be on the safe side. She did an EKG, told me my heart looked fine and she didn’t think I’d had a heart attack, but said she would send me for a treadmill test if I wanted one. Her prognosis was that I had something called “chest wall pain”, which involves inflammation of the cartilage between the ribs and the sternum/spine. Oddly enough, I’ve had that before, about 11 years ago.

She gave me anti-inflammatories to take if I thought I needed them and sent me on my way with the admonition to get my ass to the emergency room and stay if I thought I was having a heart attack again. I’ve had no chest pains since that one original one.

Now I just have to work on not getting addicted to the pills, because if I take one, everything that normally hurts all the time (including my crippled foot) stops for about eight hours. That’s nice.

Moving inside now:

The new coop has 12 nest boxes, with room to add another 6 or 12 if it turns out we need more. I cut those entrances freehand with a reciprocating saw, so they look kind of sloppy. Come to think of it, most of the later things I did look kind of sloppy.

The floor is coated with an epoxy-based paint, to protect the wood from any liquids that make it through the bedding.

A closer look at some of the nest boxes. Note that I recycled scraps of siding to make the walls of the boxes. The chicken wire above is to keep the chickens from getting up there and shitting it up. Also visible in front of the nest boxes is the lower roost.

Here’s the upper roost and the chicken exit. If you look through that window to the right, you can see the makings for the next project: the fence.

I’m not so much looking forward to that.

The new coop is big enough to hold the 25 new chickens we’ll be getting in the early spring. Twelve or thirteen of those chickens will be for food.

Here’s why:

I came to be playing Portal in an unusual way. As I mention from time to time, I do a lot of lurking on TotalFark (where $5 a month makes me special). A little over a week ago, a link showed up there to a YouTube video of the end credits of Portal. I’d already seen where a couple of people mentioned an awesome song at the end of that game, so I clicked the link and listened to the song.

Wow.

It has all the things that make songs appealing to me: an upbeat tempo, a nice voice, and a disturbingly happy tune (though the words aren’t so happy). The song is sung by the computer that narrates the entire game, and as the game ends, it appears the computer is dead. The game view zooms through the Aperture Science facility (where the game takes place) to a small room filled with spare parts. The parts begin to light up, a terminal comes to life, and we find that the computer might not be so dead after all.

I loved the song so much I bought the game just so I can work through it and hear it live. That’s the level of dork I am.

Anyway, today’s video is that song. Normally I like to surprise readers with my song-of-the-day, but this one actually has some spoilers to the game so if you’re planning on playing it, you might want to skip the song. I hope you enjoy it.