chromedome

Fun fact: Jack White of the band White Stripes was born Jack Gillis (he took Meg's name when they married), and his grandparents were Cape Breton expats. Some of the musicians mentioned above are distant cousins. As you might expect, it was a Really Big Deal back in the day when White Stripes included a Cape Breton date on their Canadian tour. https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/distant-relative-confirms-jack-white-s-n-s-roots-1.638620

At the risk of *utterly* hijacking Smithy's thread, I'd recommend catching the movie "Margaret's Museum" if you can find it. It's the film adaptation of a novel called "The Glace Bay Miner's Museum," by local writer Sheldon Currie. Helena Bonham Carter plays the lead role as the daughter and sister of coal miners, who swears she herself will never marry one. So instead she finds herself an itinerant bagpiper (yes, they were a thing in Cape Breton for generations, though after the advent of radio they quickly dwindled). It's a well-told story, and HBC and the other international actors don't get themselves into trouble by trying too hard to capture the local accent accurately (must of the supporting roles went to locals, anyway). It's not entirely what you'd call a feel-good movie, because coal mining was (and is) dangerous work, but it's well worth seeing if you haven't already.

She usually performed that song with The Men of The Deeps, a choir from Cape Breton. They aren't as technically proficient as most choirs, but there's a reason: you can't join unless you've actually worked as a miner. So yeah... it was an impressive bit of theatre, but the guys joining her on the song weren't just there for show. They'd been there and done that.

Sorry for the slow response on this one. My daughter's birthday was on the 29th, and my son flew in on the 24th to visit and spend it with her. My sister bumped up her usual late-June visit so she could be here at the same time, so my mom got to have both of her kids and 2 of 3 grandkids all in the same place at the same time (and one niece, because a much-loved cousin lives in the same town just a few blocks from my daughter). The last time we were all together was eight years ago when my father was in palliative care, so while we got to visit nobody was having the very best of times. So we had a lovely little open-air party at the Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens on the campus of Acadia University (I'll drop a link below), with the group of us and also my daughter's bestie and her adorable little tot. So it was a wonderful time, but with all the running around - and squeezing in a smidge of late-month freelancing - I haven't had much online time. But I dropped my sister at the Halifax airport yesterday morning at 5AM for her flight back to Vancouver, and my son at the Saint John airport this morning at 4AM for his flight back to Edmonton, and now I finally have a moment or two to breathe. So with that preamble out of the way... Our first little hatch last year was just "whatever we get from our current mix," so we have a couple of all-Wyandotte roosters (who are destined for the freezer), one hybrid rooster, and a random mix of layers. The silkies are purely pets, so they don't really factor into our scheme of things as far as breeding is concerned. If one of the silkies happens to be a rooster, great, otherwise we'll keep our hybrid rooster to ride herd over them and keep them safe because they'll have the run of the yard. Our hybrid (the grandkids named him Chico) is our favorite of the young roosters, so that gives us an excuse to keep him around. He's a feisty guy (he's given our mastiff the right-about enough times that she'll slink away if he starts in her direction), but he's also more personable than the others. He earned my GF's affection because one of the young Wyandottes seems to dislike her and often pecks or rakes at her legs, so now Chico stays between her and that guy and runs him off if he gets too close. We're going to keep hatching out our own eggs, so we'll keep get mixed flocks from those, but unlike our initial "chicken lady" we have no interest in creating our own fine-tuned hybrid. My GF has really become partial to the Wyandottes, which are big and beautiful, so we'll simply... keep the ones that are (or look) pure Wyandotte, to maintain our flock at its desired size, and they hybrids become meat birds. It seems the simplest way to manage things, given our small-scale establishment. We're probably going to stabilize at 20-24 laying hens, which is plenty to keep us in eggs and have some to sell to friends and family to help defray the costs. Everything after that goes to the freezer, or (potentially) is offered up for sale to someone else who wants to get started with back yard chickens. Here's the promised link to the gardens, endowed by our local clan of oligarchs (the Irving family), and named for their matriarch. Those of you who live in New England may or may not know the name, but much of the gasoline, aviation fuel and furnace oil you burn comes from the Irving refinery here in Saint John. My son took a photo of it, purely because he'd flown in from oilpatch-centric Alberta and found Canada's largest refinery here on the coast, and he appreciated the irony. https://kcirvingcentre.acadiau.ca/harriet-irving-botanical-gardens/

The Rankins were part of my "homesick music" when I lived in Alberta, 20 years ago. I had copies of "Fare Thee Well, Love" (their second album, originally on an indie label and then re-released to great success after they signed with... EMI, I think?) and "North Country," and played them both regularly. Cape Breton music was having a real moment in the sun back in the '90s, and for a while it was pretty easy to find even on the other side of the country. Fiddler Ashley McIsaac's "Sleepy Maggie" was a surprise club hit worldwide; Mary Jane Lamond (who'd sung on "Sleepy Maggie") had a couple of pop-tinged major-label releases despite singing entirely in Scots Gaelic; two of the Barra McNeils' albums charted nationally (and one of their singles got as high as #12 on the Canadian charts); fiddler Natalie MacMaster had an album rise as high as 32nd on the charts; and of course in a more mainstream vein Rita McNeil was hugely successful on Canada's pop and country charts from the mid-80s through the mid-90s (sales-wise she went toe to toe with international stars like Garth Brooks in those years). It's a fact of life here in Atlantic Canada that many of our people go away to find work (I myself have Newfoundland* and Nova Scotia relatives all over Ontario and Alberta), so it's not surprising that much of the music recorded by our artists has that wistful homesick air to it. In fact, a couple of performers strongly associated with the East Coast (folk legend Stan Rogers, and the aforementioned Mary Jane Lamond) grew up in Ontario to expat NS families, where the word "home" - unless otherwise specified - always referred to NS, not the actual place where they lived. Rogers' early albums in particular were filled with songs of the East Coast, and the vanishing way of life in the scattered fishing communities; while Lamond returned to her ancestral Cape Breton to attend university and never left. *(A common joke in NL is that the population never grows, because "every time a young girl gets pregnant, a young feller runs off to Alberta!")

The latter. Our initial flock was a mixed bag, with a rooster and two hens who are gold-laced Wyandottes, a couple of white Leghorns, a black hen (I forget the breed) and a couple of plain ol' brown layers. Last year we hatched out a few more, and have a couple of surplus roosters who are destined for the freezer. The new chicks are a random mix, and between those and our own hatchlings we'll top up our little flock to a dozen hens, and the rest to to the freezer. Some of the eggs we're currently incubating are silver-laced Wyandottes. We also have 4 silkie chicks which were bought purely as pets, because my stepdaughter thinks they're adorable. My stepdaughter and father-in-law have had Meat Kings in the past and found them heartbreaking to raise, because they grow so abnormally fast that they become too heavy for their own legs, which break while they're just trying to walk around their pen. We'll happily accept a slower growth rate in exchange for a healthier bird.

My GF has set the goal that for the coming year we "should not have to buy chicken at the store, even once." Accordingly we have 3 dozen eggs in the incubator now, due to hatch out in a few days' time. Then yesterday we had a woman and her three sons come and buy a couple of rabbits from us as pets, and an hour later I was in nearby Sussex (a local agricultural hub) buying 20 week-old chicks with the money from one of those rabbits. Turning one rabbit into 20 chickens is a fine example of the rural economy at work, and a pretty fair ROI as these things go.

Okay, a couple of corrections because I posted before I'd gotten *all* the way to the end (I could have just edited the original post, but transparency etc...). There's no narrative during the restoration process, but starting at 43 minutes or so the restorer begins a verbal explanation (and visual demonstration) of how it works. It's not actually the price that the cutter calculates (I was wrong), but the weight of the wedge. One lever adjusts to reflect the original weight of the entire wheel, and then the second one sets the cutter at an appropriate angle to cut x number of ounces from the wheel or wedge of cheese that you're using. Still pretty cool, though. I tripped across this fairly randomly on YouTube, and in one of those little coincidences that make life so interesting, it happens that I'm currently (re)reading Thomas Watson Jr.'s memoir, Father, Son & Company, about IBM under his father Tom Sr. and himself.

This morning I learned that in the 1920s, the newly re-branded IBM (it had previously been the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, a name which even then lacked a certain something) manufactured a "Computing Cheese Cutter" for delis. By moving a lever, even unskilled/semi-skilled staffers could accurately cut someone "50 cents' worth" of cheese (or whatever other amount). The restorer in this case had to fabricate several replacement parts, and even replicate the wooden cutting board, but - more importantly - also had to figure out how the thing worked. It's an oddly fascinating video to watch (there's no narrative, so you can speed up the playback and still get the full benefit).

One of my uncles traveled frequently (he was a hospital administrator and his wife an anesthesiologist, so they were rather better-off than most of my family) and brought me back a souvenir piece of petrified wood from a trip there. I was fascinated by it, and very proud to own a piece. I was only 6 or 7 at the time, as I recall, and all about dinosaurs and fossils and suchlike.

Yeah, after a couple of years you'll have all the blossoms you need and still plenty of chives. Our grandkids pick them just because they think they're pretty in a vase, but they also like to pluck the little individual... blossoms? petals?... that make up the familiar purple ball (I'm not 100% clear on allium-flower anatomy) and nibble them. I put them on salads as a garnish sometimes, too.