More travelin'

Word up.

I'm back. Being blogger and rad dad at the same time is hard. So I had to give up being a blogger for a bit. 

Life's been swell. Got a new roof on the house, so that's good. Solid holidays and all that. 

In the meantime I did some more traveling. In December I went back down to the jungle of Peru for work. It was more magical the first time. 

People ride motorcycles through the flooded streets of Puerto Maldonado

Then last month I went to Singapore, Cambodia and Okinawa.

Singapore has cool beer, which is nice on a warm day.

Singapore totally lived up to the hype. Everything is pristine, no litter, amazing public transit. Even away from the touristy areas downtown it's still extremely clean and orderly. The food was really cheap, and it's nice that everything is in English. Unfortunately I missed meeting my sisters there by about a week. My buddy Ryan did a jaywalk!

Singapore also has cool architecture

Cambodia was a polar opposite. Anything goes, especially when it comes to traffic. Don't like traffic, just hop your motorcycle up on the sidewalk. Any place with $1 beers is an immediate like for me.

This guy in Cambodia really loves green onion

This guy was delivering ice from a big block in the back of his truck

New places are fun, but going back to Japan is nice since I feel like I've been there enough to know what to expect and how things work (except pachinko). I'm a bit of a pro at the sushi go-round. I even learned to skateboard while I was there!

On top of an old castle in Okinawa

Getting paid to travel is still awesome, but it's hard to be away from home for long. Until next time...

Travelin'

In my birthday post I hinted that there may be a few new countries to add to my map soon. Welp, a mere 3 months later, I not only have 2 new countries, I also have a principality and a new continent. Let's see how that happened.

Early in May my childhood friend Paul got married in Germany. He is most well known on this blog for the post about the time I threw the Tau Beta Pi elections, and also for living with me for a year. We decided to make a trip of it, and visited Denmark, Switzerland and the French Riviera as well. We brought along our baby, which was easier than we thought.

In Zurich

The Ice Bear having a snooze

This Wedding had Falconry. That's right... FALCONRY!

At the Stuttgart Spring Festival

There are some big-ass yachts in Monaco.

A week after getting back to the US, I was back on a plane to the eastern hemisphere. This time to Ghana for work. It was a short trip, so I had limited selfie time and only got one off. Since I was working I didn't get to do much exploring of Ghana, so perhaps I'll need to go back one day. But I've now been to 5 continents. I'm hoping to visit Australia next year, so perhaps I'll get to 6 soon.

Not sure why I wanted a selfie of this road.

The Dirty Thirty

Ol' man Russell here with another installment of my annual birthday post. It's been a good ride so far. Maybe time to look back at some accomplishments of the first 30 years of my existence.

In no particular order:

- Procreated

- Driven across the country

- Learned to ride a unicycle

- Built a chicken coop

- Drove a bus

- Graduated college

- Ate a spaghetti taco

- Watched all of The Wire

- Solved a Rubik's cube

- Sung a love song, like the way it's meant to be

- Shredded a Double Black Diamond (EXTREME)

- Went on the Price is Right with Bob Barker

- Slammed Poetry

- Fell in love

- Won a salsa contest

- BLOGGED FOR OVER A DECADE!

Alrighty now, enough of that.

In my first 30 years, I've also been a few places. Not probably as many as I would like, but I'm looking forward to going to some new spots soon.

Countries I've visited.

Counties I've visited.

OK. NOW THE MAIN ATTRACTION:

The annual chart of how many people wished me happy birthday. 

• The numbers: 36 facebook posts, 2 calls, 4 cards and 8 other electronic messages (texts slightly nudged out snapchats). Twitter remains a weak birthday message medium.
• My facebook posts are slowly declining. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and there are more facebook friends that I rarely interact with. But I did hope this would be a big year for me since I had a substantial birthday AND because it was on a Sunday which is a day that I assume people spend more time on facebook than other days of the week. Maybe in the future I'll track the day of the week as a data point.
• As promised a year ago, the feature you've all been waiting for is finally here. The facebook friend trend line. It's so scale-skewed! But I have the same number of facebook friends as last year.
• Speaking of facebook friends, I'm considering purging some of my friends. There are considerable numbers of facebook friends who I have no idea who they are, or why we became friends in the first place. I've been waiting until after this data pull to do it, but next year I might have 100 less friends. But I'm planning to not delete anyone who wishes me happy birthday to hopefully lose the dead weight and improve my ratio.  I recently did the same thing with my phone contacts. It was a sober reality that I'll likely never call/text the 20 girls I had crushes on in High School ever again.
• While my overall numbers have remained in the 50s, I'm pretty sure the number of people that actually wished my happy birthday is much lower. I had several people call or text and then also throw something on facebook just to get their stats in. Pathetic. It really calls into question the meticulous data I've been gathering.
• Ray = Total Fraudster. He's auto-happy birthdaying for sure. There's no doubt anymore. I'm not even going to mention him next year.
• It's the 5th annual "Happy Birthday Fartface" post. So that's still happening.
• No double Rachel Morgan this year again :(
• Going international. I got facebook posts from both Africa and Australia. I'm branching out worldwide!
• People often ask how to get mentioned in this post (Forno). There you go.

Eggs and Other Updates

Hello friends!

In my last post I noted that it would be a few months before our chickens started laying eggs. Well today we got our first egg. It was from Rose.  It is hopefully the first of many. The chickens have gotten quite big!

Rose up front. They think I'm their rooster.

So I'll lead with the good news, but here's a brief life synopsis since my last post. I'll hit the highlight of each month.

The firefighters had to put it out with my garden hose.

In June my beloved 1984 CJ7 Jeep caught fire. It was a total loss. But insurance did pay me more for my claim than I paid for the jeep. But it did not cover all the hours of labor and parts that I put into that wonderful vehicle. It's probably for the best though because Carly didn't like it and now we have more room in the garage. 

The Alamo

I also brought Carly along to a work trip in San Antonio.  That's a city that you can do everything there is to do in about 18 hours.

Tubing in Virginia near the West Virginia border

In July all of my cousins on my dad's side met up at my cousins house near Blacksburg, VA for a cousins weekend. We went to a hippie/folk festival called Floydfest. We also went tubing on the rivers of Appalacia. Early in July I went to Denver for a work conference, and really had a good time in Denver.

Friends from Seattle visiting San Diego

In August I took a work trip to Guam. In terms of minor US possessions, Guam has to be one of my favorites. It's like a more relaxed Hawaii. So many beaches and unmolested nature. I would have no problem living there even if it meant the main store I shop at is K-Mart.

At Andersen AFB on Guam

September also took me to a far-off locale. This time it was a week in Peru, again for work. I spent most of the time in Lima, but also went to Puerto Maldonado along with Iquitos.

On the Amazon

On the way back I stopped in Ann Arbor to hang out with the collegiate crew. It's too bad I was deathly ill the whole time.

It's always good to be back in the big house

Starting in October I scaled back the travel. The best think we did in October was take a little weekend trip to Palm Springs. Carly's boss warned us it is a gay Mecca, and he wasn't wrong. We had a delightfully relaxing time and at some food that a couple on the street recommended as being "super yummy!". It was.

Drinking a poolside beer in Palm Springs

The other excitement from October was finally getting rid of the Barbie collection (and other dolls) that Carly inherited. We decided to donate them to Toy-For-Tots. Hopefully the kids who get them won't be too confused as to why they are getting a 90210 Brenda and Dylan doll.

The Barbie Collection

We'll that's all the big news. Although in a week or so, I might have another small post announcing something. We'll see...

Brian Builds A Chicken Coop

As my followers are aware, back in 2008 I attempted to raise chickens in the backyard of my college house. I ultimately was stifled by the unfair chicken laws of Ann Arbor which favored the landed gentry.

But alas, I vowed to one day fulfill the promise I made to myself to build my own chicken coop. Friends, that day has come. I proudly present the greatest and most challenging project I have ever undertaken, and one for which I am exceedingly proud.

The Completed Coop

When we bought our house two years ago, one of the immediate plans I made was to construct a chicken coop. A few other projects took priority, but eventually this spring I just decided to go for it. I spend a few weeks researching coops, and then made a few sketches and started building. I didn't have a real design to go off of, so I just kind of designed it as I went. I think it worked out okay, but there were some things I would do differently if I could build it again.

Here are some pictures from the project.

The base - with clean out opening.

The walls framed and ready to be assembled.

The cupola in progress.

At this point the chicks arrived in the mail. They lived in the shower so the cat wouldn't eat them. I still had plenty of work to do, and their smell really added to the urgency of getting the rest of the coop finished.

The day old chicks.

The walls up and assembled. Probably more solid than needed for a chicken coop.

The roof and sheathing were done the next weekend.

Me roofing the coop.

At this point I had the roofing done, the access door on and the chicken wire around the base.

The chicks are a few weeks old and watching me build them a home.

The run structure is built and ready to be installed.

The run structure in, and ready for the chicken wire.

The inside of the coop, pre-chickens.

The nesting boxes inside the coop.

The hens exploring their new home. Their roost is behind them.

The hens looking outside the coop.

Finished Product! The extension cord is temporarily there for the heat lamp.

In case you're wondering, the hens are named Dorothy (Easter Egger), Blanche (Easter Egger), Sophia (Welsummer), Rose (Barred Plymouth Rock) and BONESAW MCGRAW (Australorp). It will be another few months before we start getting our eggs, but the hens seem happy in the back yard. When they start laying we'll be getting 20-25 eggs a week.

I really enjoyed the challenge of building the coop myself, but it took a lot longer, and a lot more trips to the home center than I anticipated. I really couldn't have built this without having a pretty big collection of tools. Carly doesn't understand why I need 5 types of saws, but I swear I used them all on this project.

I feel like after building this coop, I can pretty much build anything. I'm not sure if that's true, but I was able to imagine something and then build it in real life, and the sense of accomplishment is without compare.

Happy 5th Birthday to my most reliable content!

THE INTRODUCTION!
For a five years now I have annually blogged about how many Happy Birthday Facebook posts I receive. I now have 11 years of data going back to 2006. I think I can safely say that I am the only person in the world who blogs about about their yearly Facebook Birthday posts going back to 2006.

This year didn't see anything earth shattering. I clocked in at 42 Facebook posts. The exact same number as I pulled down in 2015. But for the first time I have also included other birthday messages in the chart using data I have going back to 2013. The non-facebook breakdown came in at 5 text messages, 2 snapchats, 3 emails, 2 calls and 2 cards. I got nothing on my newest social media platform Instagram even though I posted a picture of me having a birthday beer. 

THE CHART!

As Brick pointed out - I was a real asshole in 2011.

THE DETAILS!

I'm down a Rachel Morgan. This year I received a facebook post from only one of the two Rachel Morgans in my life. This is disappointing.

Total Friend Count. I'm officially at 600 Facebook friends, which is up from 590 last year. There were several messages from my newer facebook friends. So maybe I need to make at least 10 Facebook friends each year just to maintain my status. This seems like a lot of pressure. Eventually once I have a little more data the bar graph will feature total friend count as a line on the chart. I gotta save some new features for next year.

The Ray-Man. For the 7th time in 8 years Ray has dutifully left a "Happy Birthday" post on my wall. It's always exactly the same message "Happy birthday". I'm starting to wonder if Ray has a Happy Birthday facebook bot, which apparently do exist! Which would be cheating. But then why didn't I get a message in 2011, and how come in both 2009 and 2010 he left "Happy Birthday" with a capital B? What's the story here? I implore each and every one of you to become friends with Ray Smith and track his birthday postings.

*Also, what if you have a FB Happy Birthday bot, and then the person dies and you wish them happy birthday after they are dead. That would be bad.

More Investigation. In my quest to determine more about Ray I went to another Michigan Alumnus's FB page that has a birthday on March 4th and saw that he too had a "Happy birthday" post from Ray. I suspect he is equally as acquaintanced with Ray as I am. But the real shocker was that with only 690 facebook friends this guy is getting 79 facebook posts on his birthday. You guys need to step your game up.

Lastly. I have now been called a fartface on my birthday for four years in a row by my friend Beth. 

Asia Adventure 2016

I just returned from a 3 week trip to Asia, and have decided to memorialize it via the blog. It was a work trip, so most of my time was spent doing work stuff, but the trip did take me to 4 cities in Japan along with visits to South Korea and the British Indian Ocean Territory. 

The Ramen Game in Japan is strong!

A street in Yokohama

The team I traveled with left on a Friday and after a short 12 hours of flying we landed in Japan on Saturday night. Sunday was a rest day due to the time change so we made the most of it by walking around Yokohama where we were staying. It's Japan's second largest city and had some cool attractions, most notably a HUGE museum to the Japan's favorite invention of the 20th century - instant ramen. 

Me at work. Working.

The work week was long, but during the nights we were able to get some authentic Japanese food and Chinese food, as we were staying in Yokohama's Chinatown.

Yokohama's Chinatown

On Thursday we went to the base of Mt. Fuji. Luckily it was a clear day so I was able to snap a pic with the mountain.

A clear day at Mt. Fuji. The locals taught me how to pose.

On Saturday we spent more time in Yokohama and relaxed a little bit before moving down near Nagasaki on Sunday. Saturday night had a beer festival, which was a great time. I had a coconut stout that blew my mind.

Relaxing by having fish eat the dead skin off my feet. Kinda gross, but it felt terrific.

Yokohama at Night

The team enjoying the Yokohama beer festival

Riding the bullet train

On Monday we traveled to outside Hiroshima, but between the work and travel didn't have much time to enjoy the local culture.

On Wednesday we took a ferry boat over to South Korea. It was a high-speed hydrofoil ferry that put the Seattle ferries to shame. A smooth ride was further made enjoyable by a couple of Japanese beers.

Getting off the Ferry in Busan, South Korea

We were only in South Korea for two nights, but it was a fun little adventure. I found the part of South Korea we stayed in to be very interesting, but the people didn't seem as friendly as they did in Japan. Due to the language barrier we ended up accidentally ordering Chicken Feet for dinner the first night. The second night we played it safe with a seafood barbeque hot pot type meal.

Enjoying some Soju before the accidental Chicken Feet order.

The accidental order of Chicken feet. I tried to eat one but gagged.

The better meal the second night. It was real spicy!

The second weekend we spent in Tokyo at a very nice hotel that is run by the DoD. It is in a great location.

We were close to nightlife in Roppongi, so of course we had to leave our mark on Tokyo by becoming the shot champions. And then going back the next night to re-take the record away from our challenger.

Becoming shot champions of Tokyo the first time.

Becoming shot champions the second time.

We also did a tour, since we felt we should do at least some tourist things and see the sights.

The view from the Tokyo Tower

We hit up the Tsukiji fish market, the worlds biggest and enjoyed our last sushi of the trip.

The fish market had lots of fish and other odd foods.

Sunday was a hangover day.

Monday we flew out to Diego Garcia which is in the British Indian Ocean Territory. We flew 8 hours to Malaysia and then another 5 to Diego Garcia. We flew in a plane than had been converted to mostly haul cargo. It took a long time to get there.

Diego Garcia from the plane

We were only in Diego Garcia for 30 hours, and then started our trip back to San Diego. That trip was even longer, and took about 36 hours, including 22 hours in the air. I was exhausted by the time I got back to San Diego.

I got to spend a total of about 10 minutes on the beach at Diego Garcia

Everything is a long way from Diego Garcia

We went to a Mardi Gras party in Diego Garcia. The cover band's guitarist did this during the solo of Freebird. Epic.

It was a good trip, but very tiring. Lots of moving around, and long work days. But it was cool to experience the different cultures and while I would go back, I wouldn't ever travel to or from Diego Garcia without a stop in between!