chromedome

I'll let you know tomorrow.

The video I didn't know I needed this morning was a time-lapse of a slug eating a strand of spaghetti. The video runs 1:23, though it took the slug 34 minutes in real time. And it's got 25K views! Clearly, it resonates with other weirdos besides me. I hesitated over where to put it, but settled on here because a) spaghetti, and b) I found it strangely funny.

Got an absolute behemoth of a quail egg, last night. The biggest one I've ever seen, and it's not even close. Here's an image to illustrate what I'm talking about (this is an ordinary side plate, for scale, maybe 6 or 7 inches?): The one on the left is as small as we ever get. They don't crop up often, mostly just when we have adolescent quail rounding into full maturity. Second is a normal-sized quail egg, the kind our quail-egg containers are sized for. Third is a large egg, which we get a number of. Those have to go in the middle row of the egg containers (the ones we buy are 3 rows of 4), because the containers won't close if they're in the "hinge" row or the "latch" row. Those two are what we almost invariably see, at a ratio of roughly 60% #2 and 40% #3. ...and then, on the right, we have last night's egg. You can see pretty clearly that it's vastly larger than #3, the one that barely fits the standard-sized egg containers. It's huge! My cheapie Starfrit kitchen scale (accurate to a gram or so, it claims) has it at 22g, or roughly 3/4 ounce by weight. A quick search of a few homesteading/poultry sites tells me that 10 to 15g is the usual range, so I'm guessing that #2 hovers around the 10g end of the scale and #3 at the 15g end. So yeah... 50% larger than "large" is quite an outlier.

May be of interest to those of us who keep an eye on nutrition. It's a review of a new book, by a fellow nutrition researcher (who's personally familiar with the authors, and has co-published with one). There are some key points of disagreement, of course, because it's that kind of a field. This is on the Medscape site, so you'll need to set up a free account to read it, but I can attest personally that they aren't interested in flooding your inbox with spam. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-nutrition-and-health-2025a1000qfa Edited to add eG-friendly Amazon link to the book itself, because duh... (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)

Putting it here, because "cake." My two random thoughts after reading it were a) "of course this was the drama class kids;" and b) you never know what can grow from a silly little thing you start spontaneously.

https://www.oregonlive.com/dining/2025/10/justin-woodward-portlands-premier-fine-dining-chef-of-past-decade-dies-at-43.html

Ours was an "indoor greenhouse," so it was smaller than that, and it lived in our laundry area (essentially a hallway). But the space was shared with a table that had an incubator and eggs, plus a 30"X30" grow-out cage for the baby chicks/quail (depending what had just come out of the incubator) as well as the laundry set and two households' worth of ongoing laundry. So yeah, pretty crowded. My nighttime bathroom runs were often rather perilous, or - as I sometimes put it - "had great comedic potential."

Wood stove, (apartment-sized) chest freezer, multiple plants under a grow light, and last winter a cage with 2 dozen live quail in ours (the latter of which are thankfully outside now, on a permanent basis). Also a "pet latrine" corner near the door, with puppy pads on a tray for the mutts and, on a stand over top of that, the cats' automatic self-cleaning litterbox and dishes. it's not a large room, so when you add in the rack for the firewood, and our respective chairs (and subtract the corner with the awkward under-stairway storage space) there isn't a lot left for actual... you know... living. This has been an ongoing complaint, because my sweetheart - despite her many virtues - has an odd compulsion about filling the available space to overflowing. I told her once that it was a passive-aggressive thing she'd learned while married to her [expletive deleted] ex. She's tiny (barely 5') but he's 6'5" and well over 300lbs (for the Europeans, that's almost 2 metres tall and roughly 150kg). I told her that her love of closely packed rooms (I tactfully avoided the word "cluttered") was a way of making him feel uncomfortable in "her" space, so he'd be motivated to head back up to the work camp (he was an oilpatch guy) instead of hanging around home. She was startled at that, but on reflection thought that I might have been right.

This has been a very bad autumn to be a pistachio-loving Canadian. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/barrhaven-market-brand-organic-pistachio-kernels-recalled-due-salmonella

I process all the birds myself, which is kind of a time-sink but it means I don't have to negotiate in order to get giblets.

Another pistachio update. Edited to correct the URL. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/pistachio-raw-recalled-due-salmonella

For no particular reason (do I really need one?) a butterfly among the asters in the beautiful early-autumn sunlight. Taken in the gardens at my mom's nursing home.

Miss Prissy's little one is growing well, and is now slightly bigger than the adult quail (and with similar coloration to some of them, which has occasionally given me a "moment" when I see him/her out roaming around). Our granddaughter, whose most recent fascination is with astrology, has dubbed named it Pisces. I remain devoutly disinterested in the topic, so while I've heard the explanation all I can tell you is that it involved the words "moon" and "rising." I was primarily amused that she would name a bird "fish," but her mom named a black cat Marshmallow, so... (shrug). I have to say, I don't enjoy the quail the way my GF does. They're quarrelsome and can be terribly vicious to each other, like chickens only worse, and are perhaps the stupidest of all domestic livestock (a category which boasts, as many of you will know, some highly qualified competition). A few months ago my stepdaughter just happened to be on the deck at the right moment to see an escaped quail come swaggering around the corner of the chicken run, and march right up to the big mastiff as if trying to stare it down and assert dominance. She had to go rescue it from the literal Jaws of Death (it helped that the mastiff was as surprised as anyone, the damned bird all but hopped into her mouth). I'd listened around that time to a CBC radio interview with researchers who had put some effort into figuring out ways of measuring relative avian intelligence, and when pushed by the interviewer they named domestic turkeys and quail as among the least intelligent of all bird species they'd looked at. We've recently weaned some baby bunnies (ie, separated them from mama and put them into a different cage). Ordinarily when we take the babies out of the cage, their mothers are either indifferent or visibly relieved; by this time the babies are about guinea-pig size and having 8-12 of them constantly trying to burrow underneath for a snack gets wearisome. This time one doe, pretty brindled Ivy, amused me by doing something different. When I pulled out the first two kits to go into the other cage, she immediately rounded on the others and began grooming them frantically. I laughed out loud, because she looked for all the world like a human mother glaring at a small and dirty boy and declaring firmly "You're not going out in public looking like that!" before vigorously applying a wet washcloth (and yes, as a boy I was on the receiving end of that a time or two). I need to start culling our surplus roosters ASAP now that they're reaching sexual maturity, because my GF wants us to focus on the gold-laced Wyandottes as our main working bird (the silkies, as I've mentioned, will largely be pets). Many of the fertile eggs we bought to hatch from our incubator were "barnyard mix," which is homestead-speak for "I have a lot of breeds and don't chaperone them." In practice, like us, many homesteaders/backyard chicken aficionados let their flocks run free until the young cockerels start pestering the hens, then consign them to the freezer. The bottom line is that you never know what you're going to get, and we do indeed have some very funky chickens. They're somewhat camera-shy (ie, very suspicious of what that human is up to) but I've done my best to get shots of a few with especially dramatic plumage. Several of them have the feathered feet you see in the middle pic. Mostly they're large grey birds, which my GF says means they're such-and-such a Polish breed, but the name eludes me at the moment. Presumably the others are hybrids of that breed. Others also have a large, bushy tuft of feathers below and/or slightly behind their eyes. Aside from location, they put me in mind of bushy old-man eyebrows (my personal frame of reference for that is my paternal grandfather, but Leonid Brezhnev is a more universally-known example). Here are a few of the quail, as well. We'd taken photos a few weeks ago to send to prospective buyers. I'll give the names where I know them, but I don't know the names of each breed, sadly. If one of the unknowns or "unsures" catches your eye, just ask and I'll check with my GF. First one's Red Range, second I'm not sure, third is Andalusian. The pure white one is... "Fairy," I think? Next one I believe is a Calico, and the last is a Red Tuxedo. In accordance with human stereotypes, the red breeds in general seem to be the feistiest.

I've missed posting a bunch more pistachio-centric recalls over the past week or so (been busy/traveling, also forgot). All Ontario-centric, IIRC. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/handfuel-brand-raspberry-pistachio-clusters-recalled-due-salmonella https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/indian-punjabi-bazaar-brand-green-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/pistachio-raw-kernels-recalled-due-salmonella https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-pistachios-and-pistachio-containing-products-recalled-due-salmonella-0 https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-pistachio-containing-products-recalled-due-salmonella-4