Club Flamingo Gets A Makeover!

So the other day I drug out and dusted off all of our Chickam supplies.

When I got to the flamingo lamp, our go-to traditional baby chick keeper-warmer and pseudomama...well, let's just say that the last 38 or so years have not been kind to it.

 Yeah...YIKES. My favorite part is the burn-yer-house-down spliced wiring.

It's current state is entirely my fault. I originally bought this delightfully gaudy thing around 1980, and it sat proudly on my desk for many years as a desk lamp. It's attributed to George Kovacs as its maker, and I recall when I bought it at Lamps Plus or someplace similar, it was part of a collection of other animal-head deck lamps. Well, one day the ceramic flamingo head shade suffered a catastrophic incident and got broken into a dozen pieces.

Heartbreaking.  Oh well, that's why epoxy exists...Sadly, the gap in the shade where the initial impact powdered the ceramic proved too annoying to work with while writing, and the flamingo lamp was banished to the garage, where it became a servicable lamp for my work bench. Eventually the plastic cover on the gooseneck also crumbled and my husband replaced it with a length of heavy-duty plastic tubing he had handy. Not pretty, but servicable.

And there it stayed until 1998 or so, when we ran our first baby chick hatch without a broody hen for a mama--and I realized that the battered ol' flamingo lamp, with it's adjustable gooseneck and who-cares-if-it-gets-pooped-on style, was perfect for keeping baby chicks warm.  Not to mention it was also perfectly hilarious.

Once we created Chickam and started webcasting the hatch and subsequent 8 weeks of the chick's lives, Chickam fans found the flamingo lamp entertaining and dubbed the chick box 'Club Flamingo'.

It wasn't long before Chickam fans started creating fanart...

So yeah--the flamingo lamp was lookin' beat, I knew it was time to revamp it!

And presto--a few days later (and a heaping helping of cussing when the new wiring proved to be just the teensiest bit too thick to willing go through the metal gooseneck and had to brute-forced into cooperating), Club Flamingo lives again!

Sadly, nothing could be done about the various chips and cracks in the flamingo head, but overall the flamingo lamp just looks heaps better! Not to mention not such a scary fire hazard...