Link: http://www.nortoncreekpress.com

I've been using my vacation time from my day job at Citrix to catch up on publishing tasks. In particular, I'm getting Karen up to speed on this whole publishing thing, since she's got an immense list of books that ought to be made available again.

We're giving ourselves permission to be eclectic and print what we love, so not all the books will fall into neat categories, but mostly Karen's line is going to be "adventure books." We've got three basic categories in the pipeline (click the highlighted text to take a look at the books):

• Boys' Adventure Books, starting with Percy Keese Fitzhugh's boy scout novels. The first two volumes of his Tom Slade series are already available. (Amazon's listing of Tom Slade #2 is incomplete, but it'll be fine by tomorrow or the next day.)

• Amelia B. Edwards' books on Egyptian travel and Egyptology. If you've read Elizabeth Peters' Amelia P. Emerson mysteries, you'll instantly recognize that Amelia Emerson was based on Amelia Edwards, a redoubtable Victorian novelist, travel writer, and Egyptologist. Her works are charming and informative. I can't praise them enough. A Thousand Miles up the Nile should be live on Amazon and other booksellers in a few days.

• One Survivor, a science fiction novel I wrote years ago but couldn't find a publisher for. Well, having my own publishing company certainly takes care of that problem! Read the sample chapters.

I'm on the look out for more good poultry and country living books to republish, too, of course. My short list includes:

• Animal Breeding by A. L. Hagedoorn. Wonderful book, but I'm not sure how to acquire the rights to it, since this would involve identifying and contacting Dr. Hagedoorn's heirs in Holland.

• Poultry Breeding and Management by James Dryden. I'm mostly trying to nerve myself up to believing that it will sell well enough to pay for the extra processing the photos will require.

• The Henyard by Geoffrey Sykes. Similar rights problems to Hagedoorn.

• Another volume on chicken housing, since this topic holds tremendous interest for people.

I've spent a good part of my life thinking about chicks -- by which, for the moment at least, I mean "baby chickens." It's just about the new year, which means that hatchery catalogs will start arriving in the mailbox any day now.

One thing I've been doing over the last few years is popularizing the insulated electric lamp brooder developed by the Ohio Experiment Station in the Forties. I have their paper on it here, and I devote two chapters to it in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. It's done us proud over the years and I routinely get fan mail about the design. Check it out. Your chicks will be warmer and you'll use less electricity, and the whole shebang only takes a couple of hours to knock together.

Another trick I'm fond of is using the little quart-jar waterers, but with narrow-mouth glass canning jars instead of the horrible plastic jars the feed store wants to sell you. Glass jars glint like water, and you can watch the baby chicks wander over and peck at the glass a couple of times before finding the actual water. Also, the plastic jars are hard to clean, and they're not clear enough to see when they've gone empty. Just buy the bases and leave the plastic jars alone.

I don't like bigger waterers (gallon waterers, say), because they have too much water area and day old chicks get soaked, then chilled. The quart-jar waterers are tiny enough that this pretty much doesn't happen.

If you're wondering about what kind of breed to buy, try one of the brown-egg commercial hybrids if you haven't already. Not only do they lay a lot more eggs, but they do this largely by laying in the off-season. If you've found yourself having to buy eggs at the store in the fall and winter, a handful of commercial layers should fix this. My personal favorite is the Red Sex-Link from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. They are just about as docile as Barred Rocks but lay a lot better.

Every time I go out on the pasture, I have to feed the chickens some scratch feed. They come running out, eager for a treat, and it's really hard to look at all those expectant faces and disappoint them. Besides, it's a good practice. By feeding your animals kinda-sorta by hand, they come a lot tamer, you become a lot more attached to them, and you get a good look at them, close up and in good light.

I didn't always do this. For a while, I just kept the range feeders topped off and didn't feed anything by hand. But the whole exercise of poultrykeeping became mechanical -- just another chore. And the free-range egg biz doesn't pay anywhere near well enough unless you enjoy it. Things got better when I started using scratch feed again.

I use whole grains, usually about a gallon or so. You want to feed enough that every chicken can get some, even the timid and the latecomers, but you want it all to be gone within a few minutes. If there's still grain leftover from last time when it's time to give them some more, they don't much care about the new feeding. Sorta defeats the purpose.

I broadcast the grain into the grass, as if I were sowing the seed rather than feeding it. I like to cover the area thinly, covering an area roughly a hundred yards long and a few feet wide. I try to do this in the greenest, cleanest grassy area available. If the grass is reasonably short, the chickens will find every single grain. Ground grains or finely cracked grains will be wasted, though. They shouldn't be fed on the ground. The chickens scratch up the ground looking for the grain, so the area looks a little shopworn after a few feedings, so using new patches of grass each time is a good idea.

You get extra credit for using a kind of grain that's different from what they have all day long. Usually we have whole corn in some of the feeders, so something else -- whole wheat or whole oats -- works best as a scratch grain. Chickens like variety.

If the chickens seem unusually happy to see you, your feeders are probably going empty. If they act as if you don't exist, either you overfed them last time or something has happened to put them off their feed -- being chased by a dog, for instance.

Most chickens will rush out for a treat (including the ones loitering in the nest boxes and who otherwise make it hard to collect the eggs). The ones that don't are likely broody or sick. Separating the sheep from the lambs in this way makes it easier to spot the ones that need attention.

The snow continues, but a lot of it has melted. For the first time in two weeks, then hens came running out with their usual headlong greed when I appeared with a bucket of grain. Previously, the thick and unfamiliar snow had made them reluctant to spend any more time outside than absolutely necessary.

The snow should be gone tomorrow, and we'll be back to normal Western Oregon winter weather -- plenty of rain, occasional frosty nights, but daytime highs above freezing.

We have some pullet that need to be moved out of the brooder house. We kept them back due to the unseasonal snowfall. Other than that, things are pretty quiet.

I'm taking advantage of the holidays to prepare more books for publication. The second Tom Slade boy scout novel will be available in the next week or two, plus Amelia B. Edwards' true-life travels in Egypt in the nineteenth century, "A Thousand Miles up the Nile." (Amelia B. Edwards was clearly the inspiration for Amelia P. Emerson in Elizabeth Peters' wonderful series of Egypt-themed mysteries.) And there's even a novel of mine coming out soon. Stay tuned.

I ended up in the egg business because I couldn't resist a 25¢ hen.

We were raising our very first batch of chicks, 25 New Hampshire Reds we got from Oregon State University. At the same time, a barn owl was raising its own offspring in our barn. One day, we saw one of the fledgling owls flying around at dusk: a beautiful sight. A little later we discovered the body of our sole rooster, which was probably the owl's first kill. Oh, no!

So I called up OSU to see if they had a replacement rooster. "Sure," I was told, "and plenty of hens, too. We're having a hen sale." I bought three replacement roosters, then lost my marbles and bought $7.50 worth of White Leghorn hens at 25¢ each. This brought our total flock up above 40 layers.

Within a few weeks, our New Hampshires started laying, and our Leghorns started laying, and we had more eggs than we knew what to do with. The rest is history.

And the owl? We guessed that it was a practice kill, since the dead rooster (which was delicious, by the way) didn't have a mark on him. We did nothing about the owl, and it never killed another chicken. Would that other predators were so wise.

Since then, we've bought a great many hens from Oregon State University and a few other places. Older hens are called spent hens in the industry. Some people call them rescue hens. (Why it's a "rescue" when it's a hen and an "adoption," when it's a cat, I couldn't tell you.)

Rescue Hens 101

Let's not be superficial. Hens that have been kept in laying cages always look terrible, but that's not the problem. Their neck feathers have generally been rubbed off (the feed trough is outside the cage and they rub their necks against the bars when reaching for distant morsels), as have the ends of their tail feathers. Their toenails are too long. Their combs often have a bleached appearance. Their beaks have probably been trimmed. None of this matters.

The problem is that they've been cooped up in a tiny cage with (usually) two other hens, and this makes up their world. Drop them into an existing flock of uncaged birds, and they will be bullied mercilessly by the other hens, and will probably retreat into a dark corner and refuse to come out, even to eat and drink. Rescue hens need to be transitioned slowly and gently, left alone except by other hens that were removed from their cages at the same time. Keep an eye out for hens that may be hiding. Driving them out of the corners may help. Be prepared to move some to an isolation ward where they won't be as freaked out. Later, when they've adjusted to a cage-free life, you can reintroduce them to the main flock (preferably at night).

This timidity problem is, I think, the main barrier to success with rescue hens.

They are also clumsy from their long confinement. They can fall into a bucket of water and drown. They can't make it up onto perches or generally move without stumbling. This wears off completely within a few days, but don't expect much until then.

The stress of the move will cause the hens to stop laying, and they'll all molt. Don't expect a lot of eggs until a couple of months after you get them.

My experience is that, in the fullness of time, they learn to act exactly like chickens that had never been kept in cages. Spent hens don't lay well enough to be profitable in a normal commercial operation, but commercial layers produce so much better than standard breeds that a three-year-old commercial hen will probably outlay a standard-breed pullet.

Picking and Choosing

There are basically two kinds of spent hens: ones that are culled periodically from the flock because they look like they aren't laying (or look ill), and the entire rest of the flock, which is gotten rid of all at once. Generally speaking, you want to avoid the culls, who have been selected specifically because something's wrong with them.

My preference is to get birds from full-time poultry professionals, because they can be counted upon to know diseases when they see them and do something about it. Every time I go to the small-animal auction, I see diseased poultry from backyarders and small farmers. Mostly scaly leg mites. (An auction yard is a place to sell poultry, but never to buy.)

I should point out that one of the reasons everybody buys day-old chicks is that a hatchery that's run halfway competently can guarantee that you get disease-free chicks (because the eggshell is a highly effective barrier to disease transmission, but this just isn't the case with older birds.

Connecting with good sources of spent hens may be tricky. Find out who your area's Extension Service Poultry Specialist is and ask: that's probably the best way.

Link: http://www.nortoncreekpress.com/tom_slade.html

One of the nice things about owning your own publishing company is that you can publish what you like. My wife Karen likes old-fashioned boys' adventure fiction, which she rediscovered when our son Dan was in cub scouts. Some of these books are very well-crafted and are buoyed up by the optimism of a can-do age where anything seemed possible. (An attitude I far prefer to today's mood of learned helplessness.)

Karen has collected an impressive library of first-rate adventure fiction, most of which has been out of print and forgotten since around WWII. Well, we know what to do when that happens!

First out of the chute is Percy Keese Fitzhugh's Tom Slade, Boy Scout. Tom Slade is a young teen hoodlum who discovers that the local boy scout troop is having way more fun than he is. Almost by accident, he pulls himself out of the downward spiral that is claiming his drunken father. Any synopsis of the book reads like a melodrama, but the book is put together with more sensitivity and realism than one would expect from the genre. I liked it far more than I expected to. It turns out that the characters were based on real boys. This is a great book.

First published in 1915, the book has a fascinating retro quality without being hard to understand.

Anyway, check out the book's Web page and read the sample chapters.

This is just the first volume of the nineteen-book Tom Slade series. We intend to print them all, plus the books about Tom Slade's friends: Roy Blakeley, Westy Martin, Pee-wee Harris, and the rest.

Go Karen!

When I was working with the game designers at Activision in the Eighties, it was a truism that most players don't really like randomness. They want games to be predictable. If there has to be some randomness, users want it to behave like a shuffled deck of cards -- you don't know what card will come up next, but you can be sure that you won't bet dealt the Ace of Spades twice in a row.

True randomness isn't like that: true randomness is the equivalent of using a zillion decks and shuffling them after every hand. Sometimes you'll get the Ace of Spades sixteen times in a row. It doesn't happen very often, but it really gets your attention when it does! And not in a good way. As with poker, you tend to conclude that the dealer is cheating! At Activision, we treated this as a basic fact of human nature.

So I was surprised when, all these years later, both Apple and Pandora have gotten this wrong. For example, I've recently started using Pandora (http://pandora.com) as my Internet radio player. It has a spiffy thumbs-up/thumbs-down system, but it has no clue about how to repeat songs properly. It will take a song I like okay and then play it over and over across the next several hours, until I never want to hear it again, while ignoring a long list of other songs that I told it I like. It's maddening. All they have to do is shuffle the playlist and deal it out one song at a time until they've all been played once. Then reshuffle.

This is what people expect, and what they want, across a whole range of options: playlists, meal plans, store specials, gambling -- whatever. The concept can even be jiggered so that favorites show up more often in the rotation than non-favorites without straining the analogy. As far as I can tell, the only barrier to doing it right is that people haven't learned what we all knew at Activision ages ago.

Chickens in the Snow. 7:30 AM, 18°F, Light Wind

It's 18 F outside and there's about four inches of snow on the ground. My chickens are all in open coops that most people would consider suitable only for summer housing. All my feeding and watering is done outdoors. What's up with that?

Yesterday there was snow, and the day before there was a little bit of snow, but it was above freezing. My chickens didn't like the looks of the snow and most of them stayed inside. To get them out to the feed, water, and nest boxes, I drove them out of their houses. The first time, there was hardly any snow, and you could see their reaction of "Hey, this isn't bad!" Once out of the houses, they were in no rush to go back in. Later, with more snow, they were less certain, and some jumped back inside right away. We'll see what happens today. They'll get used to it eventually, but they need to keep eating if they're going to keep laying, so I want them to get used to it now.

Today, the temperatures are going to stay below freezing all day, so I'm going to have to schlep buckets of warm water out to them. In very cold weather, the water in the buckets will freeze, but I just bring them back inside and put them next to the stove, and eventually they thaw. A lot of people like rubber feed pans because the ice can be dumped on the spot, and I'll be trying that, too.

My houses don't have insulated roofs. It usually it doesn't matter, because with open housing like mine, the inside temperature is the same as the outside temperature, so water doesn't condense on the ceiling and drip on the chickens. If temperatures are above freezing but there's snow on the roof, this isn't true anymore. The floors in the houses were pretty nasty yesterday. No doubt they're frozen now. I haven't been out to check yet.

I'll report back later and tell you how it's going. Based in past experience, the chickens' health will be completely unaffected by any of this, just like it says in Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, (great book, by the way). I'll post some photos, too.

First Look, 8:15 AM, 20°F, Light Winds

This photo shows some early birds hanging around the range feeders.

Here is one of my "low houses," whose occupants don't seem to want to go outside. Note that some of the hens are roosting on the front wall rather than inside. The cold doesn't seem to bother them.

Only a handful of chickens were moving around outside, but I scattered some whole wheat and drove the chickens outside. Once there, a lot of them started their usual routines, heading off to the feeders or the nest boxes.

Here's a view after I scattered some grain and made them go outside. Business as usual, more or less.

The snow is a very light powder and my houses are very open, which means that there's some snow in all the houses. The chickens look active, alert, and dry, though they would like the snow to go away.

The chickens all looked fine, except one hen who was shivering badly. I think she spent the night outside. I put her in a nest box, which gets her out of the wind and should allow her to warm up quickly.

Later I'll bring them some warm water. Their waterers are hidden under the snow and are frozen solid.

Noon, 21°F

Partly sunny. I brought two buckets of water out to the chickens, who pretty much ignored them. Obviously, they aren't very thirsty. They showed more interest in the grain I scattered for them, but they aren't acting like they're starving. There were a reasonable number of eggs to collect. The hen I'd put in one of the nest boxes died, which surprised me, because I didn't think she was in that much distress. I also thought the nest-box trick would work. I have community nests (with are big nests that hold a lot of hens at once, and have no interior partitions), and I knew that there would be other hens right up against her in there, which would help warm her up. It wasn't enough.

All the other chickens look fine. The situation looks stable. Tonight at dusk I'll go out with a flashlight to make sure there aren't any other hens sleeping outdoors.

This cold snap is supposed to last about a week and will reduce egg production significantly unless the hens get used to snow in a hurry. I don't expect any other ill effects (except for any remaining chickens that sleep outdoors).

This kind of cold snap occurs only about once every five years. If it happened more often, I'd have feeders and waterers in every house. Filling them would then become such a nuisance that I'd have fewer, larger houses.

7 PM, 19°F. All Quiet

I took a a tour around the houses. One hen was sleeping on the roof of a house, a couple were roosting on the side walls, and at least a dozen on the low front walls. I moved them all inside.

I retrieved the two galvanized buckets I'm using for waterers, since they'll just freeze solid if I leave them out. I'll take them back onto the pasture first thing tomorrow morning. I used to have some bucket heaters, which would keep the water in the buckets from freezing, but I tossed them after I stopped running hundreds of feet of extension cord onto the pasture for winter lighting. I still have enough extension cords, but no heaters.

By the way, I have two products to recommend. One is Coleman's wonderful new LED flashlight, as shown in the Amazon box below (though I bought mine at BiMart):

The other are "Hot Shot Hunting Gloves." These are wonderful winter gloves: waterproof, with Thinsulate insulation that keeps your fingers toasty. I have the kind that are fingerless gloves with mitten flaps. The standard gloves are probably even better.

I forgot to mention that I've seen weather this cold before, and this much snow before, but not both at the same time. Before, with cold weather but no snow, the hens were not reluctant to leave the houses and visit the feeders, and my only problem was providing water. In previous snowstorms, the above-freezing temperatures meant that the watering system worked and (more importantly) that the snow didn't last long enough to cause much trouble. We're in for a week of this snowy, below-freezing weather.

Tuesday Evening, 19°F

Today was more of the same, except that the chickens look happier now that they're getting used to the snow. They're spending more time outside. They greeted buckets of water and scratch feed with little more than polite interest, meaning that they're probably making it to the feeders on their own and learning to eat snow. If anything, they looked less cold today, although the temperatures weren't any higher than before.

Bottom line: except for one hen sleeping out in the open, none of the chickens seem affected by the cold, in spite of wide-open housing and temperatures as low as 15°F. Being freaked out by their first encounter with snow has been by far the biggest problem.

The weather report is for pretty much the same kind of weather for another week -- highs in the twenties or low thirties, lows in the teens or twenties, occasional snow -- which is very unusual for around here, a once-a-decade event at most.

Our household water system nearly gave out, but we kludged a fix for it. We have a two-pump system, with a submersible pump in the well, which pumps water into a 1500-gallon cistern, and a jet pump that pumps water out of the cistern and into the house. The path between the well pump and the cistern was frozen. I didn't notice until I peered into the cistern this morning. It was almost empty and had a skin of ice on top. Not good! The pipe-heating cable that was supposed to keep things flowing had failed. We managed to bypass it with a length of garden hose from a convenient spigot at the wellhead and into the top of the cistern. The water comes out of our well at 50°F, which should prevent any more ice from forming in the cistern.

(In a colder climate, we'd have put this 1500-gallon black plastic cistern in a shed, but as it is, we just left it out in the open.)

Saturday

The weather is slightly above freezing but there is more snow than ever. The chickens are behaving normally and there are no problems. As I said before, my previous problems were not caused by the cold but by the chickens' reluctance to go out in the snow, but they had to in order to eat and drink. In a normal operation with feeders and waterers indoors, there would have been no difficulty at all.

The snow causes another problem, though. Normally, my highly ventilated houses don't have any problem with condensation. The air inside the house is the same temperature as the air outside the house, so there's no tendency for moisture to condense on the ceiling or walls. But when the temperature is above freezing and there's snow on the roof, water condenses like mad and drips into the house.

I only have to put up with this for a few days a year in my highly ventilated coops, but people with ordinary coops put with this all winter. By going to great lengths to shut their coops up tight and to keep the temperatures higher inside than outside, moisture is condensing on the walls and ceiling all winter long and dripping back into the house. It turns the chicken house into a disgusting, unhealthy mess. The dampness leads to frostbitten combs, the sight of which tends to make people redouble their attempts to add heat and prevent ventilation. It's a vicious cycle.

I've republished Prince T. Woods' excellent book, Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, to help get the word out. You should at least click on the link and read the sample chapters. This week's bout with unusually cold weather (for here) has certainly vindicated Dr. Woods' main points.

To misquote Polonius, "Neither a sucker nor a charlatan be." People spend a lot of their lives deluding themselves, often spending vast amounts of money in the process. Don't do that.

There's good money catering to suckers. Being a charlatan pays. You help them along with their happy delusion, and they'll love you for it. Don't do that, either. It's dumb to sucker yourself, but it's loathsome to sucker other people.

When I started out at the farmer's market, I didn't fully understand this. Customers wanted to project their suckerdom onto me. Okay, fine, it's a free country, but the bad thing is that I really felt the pull of their expectations. I wanted to nod my head when they talked about organic certification when, in fact, I think that the organic movement is a hollow shell (besides, I don't join things that want me to fill out more than two sheets of paper per lifetime.) I wanted to agree with them when they said that raising eggs the way I do is VERY IMPORTANT. Come on, let's get real. Much as I like the whole process, free-range eggs do not peg the Important-O-Meter.

I even felt that I was letting the team down by openly drinking diet sodas.

Well, this spasm didn't last very long. I'm used to being an authentic eccentric, and I reverted to form pretty quickly. I don't even bother concealing the McDonald's bag if that's what I'm having for breakfast.

Which has worked out pretty well. The fact is, a couple of color photographs with chickens, green grass, blue sky, and fluffy clouds are better than political correctness anyway. (Especially if there are also little kids in overalls.) Consumers know that they're constantly being suckered, so it can come as a relief to them when you show 'em a little reality. It doesn't work on all of them -- look at all the suckers who are buying bottled tap water because they don't trust tap water -- but reality-based marketing has enough appeal that you don't have to be a con man if you don't want to.

Of course, the product has to be good, too. Real free-range eggs off a green pasture look good (with dark yolks) and taste good. People who start off thinking that my farm is just a scammy way of getting five bucks a dozen get converted after trying them.

This is where the organic biz has fallen down on the job. If you grow the same old crops but leave out the chemicals, you get the same old produce. It doesn't look or taste any better, but it costs a lot more. How much fear of chemicals must a consumer muster to buy produce that isn't worth a second glance otherwise?

The local organic growers are starting to distance themselves from the organic movement because all the supermarkets are full of boring organic produce from out of state. So they grow better-tasting and more interesting varieties, leveraging the fact that they are extremely skilled farmers who care a lot about food. One local farm has opened a restaurant! They aren't afraid of low-grade organic produce from Mexico. Sure, the same people who buy bottled tap water will buy low-grade organic produce, but these folks aren't paying enough attention to be captured by a high-class vendor anyway.

So my advice, as both a consumer and a producer, is to see trends as a warning sign and be extra careful. If you find yourself repeating what people expect you to say, you're doing it wrong. And if you shell out big bucks to buy what other people are buying, you're really doing it wrong!

For those of you who know how to mess around safely with car batteries and other high-amperage/low-voltage applications, here's an interesting one (please note the warning below!:

APC makes an extended-run UPS called the Smart-UPS XL, which supports external battery packs. The ones I have (Smart-UPS XL 1000) are a 24V system, which means that the internal batteries and the external battery packs are all 24V. The external battery packs and replacement batteries are expensive.

So when my batteries gave up the ghost, I wondered what would happen if I replaced the 20 amp-hour gel-cell batteries with 100 amp-hour RV batteries, which were cheaper in spite of having five times the capacity.

Using a battery connector from a spare/dead battery pack (you can also scavenge them from most dead APC batteries), I wired up two new RV batteries in series and plugged them into the expansion pack connector. Result? Greatly extended run time, as expected.

The batteries have been in use for five years now and have been slowly losing capacity. It's about time to replace them. Five years is what I got from the APC batteries when the units were new. (By the way, this really does mean that an APC UPS will last more than ten years if you replace the batteries.)

Now, RV batteries are deep-cycle versions of car batteries, which means that they outgas hydrogen and need topping off, so use them in a well-ventilated area. Also, since they're full of sulfuric acid, they are a little harsh on the surrounding area, as you know if you've ever looked at the area around the battery in an old car. Thirdly, gel cells use a slightly higher charging voltage than flooded-cell batteries, so water evaporates out of the battery faster than it should, and you need to top the cells off several times a year with distilled water.

All of these problems would be solved by using gel-cell batteries instead of the cheaper flooded-cell batteries. Good maintenance-free batteries would help but would not solve the problem.

I have also tried this trick on two Pacific Power Vanguard 1200 UPS systems, systems that I got for almost nothing years ago. Converting these was trickier because I had to open up the units and add external battery cables. The APC Smart-UPS XL is the only line that I know of with a convenient external battery connector. The Vanguard overcharges more than the APC, and was generally much less satisfactory.

I'd stick to Smart-UPS XL units for this trick if I were you, but if you ignore this advice, one thing to look for is a UPS with a cooling fan inside. I think that some of the short-duration UPS systems expect to run out of battery power before they have time to overheat, and thus would be lousy candidates for having their battery life extended.

Tip for anyone who would rather do things more conventionally: replacement batteries are very heavy and expensive to ship. Ask at your local car-supply stores and battery shops if they can get what you want. They get daily delivery by truck anyway, and the shipping should be free (ask). This will save you beaucoup bucks.

Tip #2: The world is full of low-quality gel-cell batteries that are shipped halfway around the world just to fail immediately in your UPS. If you buy them locally, you'll probably get a warranty that means something. Ask. If you have to ship them back, the shipping alone will kill you. I know that APC batteries are good, and I think that ABC batteries are also good.