When Mom's Away...

...the kids will play.

I love it that when I'm gone to a show for a long weekend, Bob and Anna come out from town and stay here. Often they host a dinner or a party, this place is great for that. The backyard has a large gravelled area near the game room, with a firepit. Bob likes to cook. Mostly everything is cleaner when they leave than when they get here.

This is what was going on in Sloughhouse while I was in Washington.

Bob cleaned the garage, with help from Kevin.

Maybe putting the rooster in front of the little Webber BBQ was a training tactic?

Anna's little brother Saul got to spend some time here, too.

If there's one thing I love, it's sharing all the dirt and animals around here with kids.

Anna took the photos.

Keep On Truckin'

I've been very busy showing chickens the past couple of weeks. I have to say it gets more fun all the time, for two reasons: my birds have been winning consistently, and I've been lucky to have a couple of great travel companions.

Our California show season officially kicks off every year with the Paso Robles show. Paso Robles is about 4.5 hours away. It's an interesting place, still fairly rural because it's surrounded by wine vineyards. It would like to be pretentious, like Carmel, but the architecture is more from the fast food era than from Spanish mission times. Nevertheless, it's impossible to find a hotel room there that has reasonable prices. Paso Robles has discovered that if you have some sort of parade or "special" event every weekend, you can bring in wine tasting crowds and charge them $279 a night for a Hampton Inn room that would seldom cost more than $120 anywhere else.

In previous years I have stayed at the official "host" hotel, down the road in Atascadero. It's a Best Western and the show rate is about $140 a night. At other shows, the show rate seldom exceeds $80 a night. This time I asked for a room with 2 beds and was told they had none. "What about a room that doesn't have the show rate?" I asked. "That will be $200 a night," they answered. "No thank you," I said. (Truthfully it might have been closer to, "Are you out of your frigging mind?")

I found a room at Motel 6 right in Paso Robles. For $137 a night. Motel 6. You pay a lot for them to leave the light on for you.

I took lots of birds to the show. Anna's bird Kevin was one of them. Here she is, fluffing his butt at home before the show. It's what one does with Cochins, and involves working with a hair dryer.

Anna didn't just get Kevin ready for the show, she went with us! She helped me load and unload the birds, helped me primp them all at the show, and went to the banquet with me.

We sat at the table with three of the judges. That was fun. Our birds did pretty well. Kevin was Best of Breed, one of my Dominique bantam pullets was Reserve RCCL in one show and Best RCCL in the other.

I know, if you've seen one chicken, you've seen them all.

It was a Double Show. What they do is hire two different sets of judges and hang two coop cards on the cages. So an exhibitor can win points for two shows instead of just one. It's an economical way to enhance the showing experience. Especially if you win in both shows.

On the way home, we opted for the slower, more rural route that Carlotta and I discovered in previous years, up Hwy. 26 to Hollister. We had to go through Hollister so we could stop at Casa de Fruta, of course. We each bought some chocolate (mine is sugarless) and then tried to make it last until the top of the pass on the way back to Interstate 5. This time I failed by about 1/4 mile. Anna still had some left because she had bought a few extra pieces for Bob. I may have driven the rest of the way home with chocolate smeared on my face and clothes.

The next weekend I went all the way to Vancouver, Washington, for another double show. This time I hitchhiked a ride with Pete, one of my chicken show friends. It was a 9.5 hour ride. If you know me well, you know that it was 9.5 hours, each way, of intense conversation about a wide range of topics. I don't sleep in the car, I don't want to miss anything. When I'm a passenger, the driver had no problem staying awake.

One thing you get to see at an out-of-state show is a bunch of new chicken show people. Actually, there were 7 of us there from California, so not only did I get to meet new people, but got to spend time with old friends, too.

I only took 5 birds, two of them were sold to a new Dominique breeder in Washington after the show. Again, my birds were Reserve RCCL in one show and Best RCCL in the other show (the same pullet shown above). It was a real treat, though, that one of our California junior exhibitors showed two of his pullets: one was Best RCCL in one show and the other was best in the other show. That one went on to be Reserve Bantam of the Junior Show. The junior, Robert, hatched his pullets from eggs from my chickens this past spring.

In case you see my stripey chickens and confuse them with Barred Rocks, here is a quick comparison:

Barred Rock bantam pullet

Dominique bantam pullet

The barred rock is a beefier bird, its stripes are evenly spaced, straight across, and narrow. The Rock has a "bunny" tail, it does not stand up. The Dominique is a more sprightly bird, with a higher carriage and a smaller body. It has "tight" feathers instead of fluffy ones. The pattern is called cuckoo. The bars are wider and more random. Another basic difference is the Rock has a single comb and the Dom has a rose comb.

Next time I will test you.

There are a couple of weeks off until the next show. It will be another long trip, to Ventura. I have no one scheduled to go with me, yet, and will be taking a lot of birds. In the meantime, those of us who raise Dominique bantams in Northern California will be getting together to evaluate our birds and maybe trade a few. This is so much better than the days when I was pretty much the only one here who had this breed.

Two shows I'd love to attend are Tucson, Arizona and Shawnee, Oklahoma. Both would require pretty long car trips or, if I only took maybe 2 birds, a hassle with the airlines. You just KNOW they'd freak with chickens in a carry-on pet carrier. The show in Shawnee is handicapped by stupid paperwork requirements. You need to have a current test to show your birds are pullorum- and avian influenza-free. Both are serious diseases, but there hasn't been a case of pullorum in California for at least 50 years, and if your birds actually HAVE avian influenza, they will be dead in a day or two. The incubation period is 3-7 days, so a 30-day test is meaningless. In some states, a tester will come to your house to test your birds for free. In California, you have to pay for a veterinarian appointment, pay to have blood drawn and pay to have it sent to a lab, and maybe you'll get your paperwork within a couple of weeks, but probably not in time for it to be sent with entries and still meet the 30-day requirement. There is no do-it-yourself testing in California, where this is taken seriously. In other states, they seem to make up rules, then find ways to undermine them.

The bottom line, though, is that avian influenza is currently not a problem with show birds, all these rules are a precaution.

On the home front, it's starting to get cold. I have a mountain of wood that still hasn't been split. The guy who claimed he would do it is not that reliable (surprise, surprise) so I guess I'll have to hire someone. 

I'm trying to clear spent plants out of the flower beds so Anna and I can plant 200 tulip bulbs. It will be Bob's 30th birthday in March. When I brought him home from the hospital, the tulips were blooming. Hopefully we won't be flooded away this winter and the bulbs will make a grand show for his 30th.

Biscuit left when I went to the Paso show and hasn't been back. I know he must have a second home, when he comes back he's always fat and healthy. So far he has always come back.

Mice are starting to move in. Wesley actually caught one in the house last week. With evidently only one feral cat on duty outside, the rodent population is getting out of control. I need to put out poison, but worry about the little black cat.

It's always something when you live in the country.

Insurance – Not Reassuring

Do you recall a couple of months ago when I said I'd let my flood insurance lapse because it had gone up to $3300 a year? I'd had flood insurance for more than 20 years and every year it steadily went up, but this year there was a big jump.

Talking to my neighbors, I found that many of them have never had flood insurance, including some whose houses are practically built into the levee.

Well, son Bob lives in town, but this is still home to him. Last week he said we really need flood insurance out here, please see if I could get it reinstated, and he'd pay for it.

Many years ago we had a nearby friend who was an insurance agent. He covered everything for us and we trusted him. When he died, his sister (also a friend) took over his business and we also trusted her. But the company she represented fired her after 4 or 5 years because her sales were insufficient. It didn't matter that her customers liked her very much, that she always did a great job for us. All of her accounts were arbitrarily passed on to other agents. My new agent was someone whose office is in downtown Sacramento, a total stranger.

In the year after that (10 years ago) my Dodge Caravan drowned. I put in a claim. The insurance company sent a person to look at the car, which I'd had towed to a local garage. He decided the car bent a rod because I'd been racing it and denied the claim. The mechanic at the garage called me and said, "You need to challenge this, the guy who came out here is really a doofus, he didn't listen to a thing I told him." So I did that. It wasn't fun. The insurance company pretty much treated me like a criminal. But I won. The first thing I did after that was cancel all my insurance policies with them and go elsewhere.

For car insurance I went back to AAA. For house and property insurance, I went with a company that works through Farm Bureau. But I forgot about the flood insurance. When a statement came a few months later, I just paid it. I figured since flood insurance was through FEMA, whatever local agent I had wouldn't matter, they were just a technicality. The original fellow who set up the account had said it wasn't a money maker for him, he just did the paperwork for a minimal fee.

So. Time to see if I could get that flood policy reinstated. I called the farm insurance office to see if they had any advice. The owner of the office talked to me and took my questions. He knew exactly where I live and what the flood history is in my area. He knew that in the last big flood, in 1997, there was a levee break in Sloughhouse and only one house had water in it - about an inch on the floor.

Within an hour he called me back. There is evidently a website for FEMA where agents can get an estimate for their customers. He said the first thing it asks for is an elevation certificate. Did I have one? Because if I didn't, it costs about $700 for someone to come out and do the measurements to get one. The online program wouldn't let him go further without the elevation certification.

Well, of course I didn't have a $700 piece of paper that said what the elevation of my house is. Why would I have that? Just for the fun of it? He said it was probably a requirement so the program could compare the elevation of the house to whatever the high water elevation is for this area. I said, "I will stipulate that the ground in front of my house is 12 feet lower than the top of the levee, which is about 150 yards away. However they designate areas of risk, I'm sure this house is in the highest risk zone."

He took that information and got back on the phone to FEMA. On the phone with a real person, not just dealing with their online program.

In another hour he called back. He said that because my house is over 100 years old, it will not need an elevation certificate. That's a requirement for houses built more recently. He had found a page in the FEMA rules that said if county or state rules prevent rebuilding on the same site, the money can be used for removing what's left of the house, and then for relocation to another site. And then he said, "The policy can be reinstated, it will be $1660 a year."

What????

Guess what? That little agent lady for the old insurance company, the one I never met in person or had any dealing with whatsoever, had been raising her cut of MY flood insurance for the past few years, until she was making almost as much as the insurance itself. It would almost be worth a trip downtown (which in my mind is equivalent to a trip to hell) just to look her up and verbally spit in her eye.

Consider how much of our income is spent on insurance. Car insurance, property insurance, health insurance, life insurance. It's illegal not to have some of these things, and you're considered irresponsible if you don't have others. I have heard that doctors in California cannot take cash from patients anymore, the transactions must go through an insurance company. I have heard that people who live in areas that were recently ravaged by wild fires have had their policies cancelled, even those who did not suffer any fire damage, because now the insurance companies don't choose to cover people in those "dangerous" areas. Let's be logical, if all the vegetation in your area was recently burned, it could be 20 years before the fire danger there is high again.

Are there areas where there probably should be no houses? In California, there certainly are. More than half of Sacramento is built on floodplain, a lot of that in the past 30 years. Why? Because developers bought those properties and pushed their projects through at the Board of Stupidvisors, several of whom were elected with the support of developer money.

That isn't relevant with my house. It was built long before developers ran the county. But what a rip off for the people who have bought those new houses. I wonder if their insurance agents are also sitting in their offices, adding hundreds of dollars to the flood insurance because this is an El Niño year and everyone is panicked?

I am so sick and tired of plain old people, who work hard and try to be responsible, getting sucked dry by every business they are forced to deal with. It's indicative of our overall economic state: there are not enough "real" jobs, so we all end up like a bunch of monkeys sitting in a circle, picking and eating each  other's nits.

10-4

Happy Broderick Crawford Day

10-4!

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that October 4 is Broderick Crawford Day. You probably won't get the holiday off on Monday just because it fell on Sunday this year. No one recognizes the holiday except me and my friends.

Why do we celebrate this day? We're remembering the old actor, Broderick Crawford, from the days when he played a California Highway Patrolman on our black-and-white TVs. His character didn't have to shoot or taze people to get them to behave, he was gruffy with them and talked fast and loud.

I mean, really, if this guy pulled you over to give you a ticket, would you argue with him?