Rooftop

Michelle finally got her wish to raise some chickens when we picked up 3 chicks from Pistils Nursery. We’re starting with 2 Jersey Giants and a Plymouth Rock, and the girls have already grown by 50% since they moved in. I’m not so keen on the chicks themselves since they kind of smell, but I’m excited to help make the coop and to have nervous pet birds walking around eating bugs and scraps.

Several of our friends have been raising hens for a couple years, so we’ve gotten a lot of helpful advice on all aspects of the process. Our neighbors 3 doors down showed us their coop this weekend (they have a brood of slightly older chicks now as well) and were eager to share both the design flaws and benefits of their coop design. Yesterday I spent a little over an hour using Google Sketch-Up to design a to-scale model, which we’ll need to start building soon.

We each got to name a chick. Michelle picked Layla, Michelle picked Boots (for Ella), and Michelle shortened my pick (Bitchzilla) to just Zilla. The Jersey Giants are already a head taller than the others and seem to have a bit of an attitude (hence Bitchzilla’s name).

Here’s another picture of the ladies in their temporary home:

Our second mail-in radon test results just arrived. We went from 9.8 pCi/L on the first test to 18.7 pCi/L on the most recent. The EPA “action level” for radon is 4 pCi/L, which means we went from over twice the action level to over 4 times the action level. So, instead of travel or a new laptop, we’ll be dropping our tax refunds and “stimulus” check on radon abatement.

Radon is bad. It’s the gaseous derivative of Uranium, which exists naturally in the soil. As Uranium decays (a half-life of 4.4 billion years), it creates other byproducts, such as radon and radium. Radon has a very short half-life – only like 24 hours – but the derivatives are just as, well, radioactive. So, when you breath air with radon and the alpha particles released during its decay, you injure your lungs and the precious nodules that trap oxygen and put it in to your blood. The more exposure you have and the higher the concentration (measured in picocuries per liter), the worse. I don’t have the equivilency in front of me anymore (the library wanted the book back), but breathing at 10 pCi/L, you’re exposing your lungs to the cancer-causing equivilent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. The chart didn’t say if they were mentholated or not.

So now we get to mitigate. My parents recently did this, and they successfully “kicked the habit” by installing a well and active ventilation system that draws radon from the soil and vents it above the house. Since we have an earthen-floored crawl space, we have a few more options, but the likely mitigation will be to install vents and pour a slab of concrete over the floor. I’ll be calling in favors for this part, because it’ll take a bucket brigade to hand carry cement to the opening of the crawl space. Sound like fun?

I suppose the positive thing to take away is that our new windows in the basement are doing a good job of cutting down on the the drafts. And to think – when we bought the house we were worried about the furnace leaking carbon monoxide into the crawl space. Too bad there’s not billion dollar industry trying to tell us that radon is safe and non-addictive.