Chickens now uncomfortably large, says National Chicken Council

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Several things about this article jumped out at me as I read it.

First off, it seems that we are doing a FANTASTIC job of breeding chickens in the last 50 years or more.  How good are we at breeding chickens you may ask?  Let me tell you.  It seems that overall the size of a chicken today is 4 times that of a chicken in the 1950s.  For some perspective, this means that we are probably going to manage to breed a chicken large enough to feed a whole street, followed immediately by creating a chicken large enough to kill many streets of peaceful humans, all of which could happen within my lifetime.

Rise of the Chickens

Who wants chicken fingers now, Timmy?

This is all very reminiscent of a Patton Oswalt bit, in which he eerily predicted this very outcome.  I give you:  MEGALEG

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeEnhoL4hSg
The second thing that I noticed about this article is the fact that there is a National Chicken Council, which fortunately (or rather unsurprisingly) exists in the US.  It had not occurred to me that this would be a necessary organization, but then again with the inevitable Rise of the Chickens ™, it would probably make good sense to keep a close watch on these terrifying, but still tasty critters.

Football Update

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Howdy folks.  As I mentioned briefly a while ago, we jumped into the football (weird shaped ball variety) world this summer in a big way, with both boys practicing all summer long with the Bell Warriors.  This is a competitive league, with a limited number of spots available on the teams for kids to play on.  Full tackle football, with excellent coaching to get the boys ready to play in the fall.  It’s been a blast.  Cael was playing with the tykes team and Quinn is on the mosquito team.

This past weekend they had the final pre-season evaluation in the form of a mini-tournament with the other teams in the league.  For Cael it was Friday Night Tykes, and for Quinn it was Mosquito Madness.   There were lots of butterflies in the tummies leading up to this weekend since it was really the first game-like situation that most of the lads had been in.  In both cases, the Bell Warriors teams did really well, probably “winning” about half of their mini games, although scoring was not really maintained.  The Vallentyne boys can play football it seems.  Who knew?  Certainly not my younger, scrawnier asthmatic self, who never would have played in a million years.

So needless to say there was a lot of strutting around with pride, puffing out of chests, etc.  And that was just me.

Anyway, here are some pics of the event, which have already been on Facebook but of course I like to roll my own solution so that these things will live on once Facebook finally dies (what, you forgot about Myspace already?).

Cael ready to rock
Bell Warriors TykesThree knuckleheads The boys!

Quinn ready to rock

Unfortunately, as we were told was a possibility when we started, Cael got cut from the team this week.  It was not very fun, but he will be playing in the Beckwith league this fall hopefully and gain some valuable experience.  We will come back strong in the spring for the Warriors again.

So there you go.  The real football season is just starting for Quinn, and Cael will have lots of games in September and October too.  More pics to come then for sure.

My First Zumba Class, ever. 12 Things I learned….

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Krumping. It’s a thing, and I did it.

Go pee before you zumba….’nuff said.

It’s like line-dancing on crack, with more variety, way cooler, Latin and sexy

If you consume more than 250mls of water during your workout, it may not play nice with your stomach. (Limits not tested to evacuation but let’s just trust that guideline, mmkay? Good. Moving on.)

I’ve never been more intimately acquainted with all the non-toned parts of me. Ever.

You can barely hear the pulsing, awesome and fun music over your ass and lungs screaming.

Your gym clothes slide off you after as though you were an oil slick.

The thought of a hot/warm shower afterward is as appealing as hot-tubbing with a bobcat.

By the time I convinced myself my own stench was worse than the thought of showering I had burned 650 calories. (This is more than any Greco or P90X workout I have ever done.)

I am a Latin goddess and didn’t know it.

Once I nail these moves, my sexiness will be so great it will arrive 10 minutes ahead of me wherever I go.

I have never worked out with a bigger smile on my face in a room with complete strangers.

Here is what I think I look like doing Zumba:
1 - J Lo in Manila 4

Here is what I actually look like doing Zumba:
1 - napolian DB954C1D-8DDB-DD98-FBAF-8C917EBCBCD9
…but that’s ok, I’m working up to J-Lo status my fellow babes!

Weird Al still gots it*

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Weird Al Yankovic has a new album coming out, and there has been a flurry of videos released recently for it.  Well this video is bordering on genius, and send up of common grammar mistakes.  I have to say this kind of thing bothers the CRAP out of me.   I make mistakes from time to time like anyone, but some folks really have no idea what bad grammar is and how stupid it makes them look.  This is a perfect send up of those folks, and happily the result is a much better song than the original.  By far.  Easily.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc#action=share

 

*Yes, that was intentional.  The other mistakes in this post are not intentional.

The shifting sands of (deck) time

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A couple of years ago we built a deck, some of which got documented here.  And here.  And here.  Here.  Here.  Here. Here. Here.  Anyway, you get the picture.  So last year I got almost nothing done, or rather nothing that I ended up writing about here.  Actually I got tons of stuff done, some of which even made the deck almost usable for humans.  But in the end I traveled for half of the summer which made progress on the deck pretty tough, much to my dismay.  But not this year.  Nossir, we have been busy little beavers this year.

First off, it seems that leaving cedar untreated for even one summer really changes the colour from that awesome reddish gold to, well, grey.  So, I decided that we would sand the deck back to it’s original luster before we stained it.  If I can offer one word of advice however, it’s to actually wash the deck with a commercial product before you try sanding.  That stuff brings the colour back way faster, and with much less effort and time than sanding.  We did it both ways, and in some places the effort and time to sand grey cedar back to new was long indeed.  Where we washed the wood first, it was trivial to sand it quickly and stain it.  So there you go.

Read on for obsessive documentation….

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Air Duct Telemarketing Defiance

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We have had a long and interesting history with telemarketers at our house.  As did every household in Canada, we signed up for the “Do Not Call” list, which like every household in Canada knows, does absolutely nothing.  Most notably we seem to be on the list for duct cleaning.  This particular problem is not limited to just us, it seems.

Since the government doesn’t seem to have much power to stop them, and they won’t stop calling just because we tell them to (and believe me, we have been yelling at these guys for years now), my fantastic and gorgeous wife Nikki decided that the best way to handle these guys was simple:  book an appointment every time they call.  They call at least once a week, often once a day.  So we try to book an appointment every time.  Sometimes it doesn’t work, since it seems that the call center guys don’t have very good computer systems.  But sometimes it does, like tomorrow when if all goes well we will get a crew showing up to clean the ducts.  The thing is, we won’t let them clean the ducts.  The idea here is to increase the friction that the actual duct guys get from using these call centers.  It wastes their time, which hopefully translates back into a nuisance to the local company.  Ultimately we hope that one fine day we will finally get removed from their list (btw they have admitted on the phone to us that we are on the Do Not Call list, and they can see that, but that means nothing to these guys).

It’s a very small act of defiance, but it makes us feel so much better.  I highly suggest that more folks do the same.