Life Goes On...

 The Covid lockdown officially started yesterday here in the US.

So we've stocked up on people and animal supplies, now just to go into near-100% hermit mode. I've traded in my perfume for the oh-so-alluring scent of Lysol and Comet. Sanitized is the new sexy!

This coming Saturday I'll set eggs in the ReptiPro incubator for a planned hatch date of April 11th--because if ever the world needed Chickam, it's this year, dammit. We'll be hatching all eggs from our own flock, although I'm hoping to get a few buff Brahma eggs from a neighbor...fingers crossed!

Although given what our girls are offering us these days...

Strange days, indeed.
Rafe, my youngster Russian Orloff rooster, found the tiny egg out in the chicken yard, he called the kid over and drew her attention to it by clucking at it in a most concerned way. I'm just glad Rafe is finally getting his rooster thing goin', he was a slow starter.

We were going to run the camera on the adult flock last weekend--I had a cabbage on a string all ready to go--but the weather ruined things. We'll try again this coming weekend, because...yeah, the world needs some chicken-y distraction these days.

Meanwhile, we had about two weeks of lovely warmish spring weather, which fooled my plum tree into blooming--something it hasn't done during the last three years. Then this weekend we had a sudden, three-day snow/wind storm.

Yup. Snow on the blossoms. The ones the wind didn't just rip off the tree, that is.

Yeah...I didn't actually tear my hair out,but there was much grumbling as I stared out the window at the storm lashing my tree around.

We'll see if it fruits this year. This particular variety is a self-pollinator, and I had gone out with my dry paintbrush to play pollinator the day before the storm hit; since I have yet to see a bee or wasp so far.

The water drops do look pretty, though, I'll give it that.

Lastly, the Northern Lights afghan I was making is basically done!

Okay, so I got a little carried away on expanding the size of it, it's roughly 71 x 52. I also used a basic ripple pattern rather than the one that came with the kit, and plan on edging the long side edges with a single row of a simple shell pattern, just to give the edges a finished look.

Since I made it bigger, I ran short of yarn and had to order more, but I wanted an afghan that was both wide enough and long enough, dang it! Nothing's worse than trying to grab a couch nap and having to fuss with positioning an afghan so your toes don't stick out.

Anyway, that sucker's warm.

Weird Food And Winter

So...it's been snowing. And snowing. And icing up. And so flippin' flappin' cold we have chosen to hunker down and bake cookies to have with our coffee as we watch the snow fly. The dogs are asleep in the corner and Pong naps under her heat lamp.

Meanwhile...I've been noticing things, cooped up in the house as I am. Like when I opened a new jar of peanut butter and realized it possessed a...belly button.

And an outie, at that.

The next day, lunch surprised me with...a face.

Heh...cabin fever is FUN!

Now to be fair, this is what it was like outside.

It got to be a proper two-day blizzard and laid down about a foot of snow, complete with whiteout conditions making the houses across the street cease to exist and black ice everywhere.

The back yard. Even though the coop and run were open, the chickens refused to come out. Snow must NEVER touch chicken foot, after all.

I leaned out the back door and called, 'Chick-chick-chick!'

Predictably the response was a universal 'Screw you' from the grumpy poultry. They wouldn't even come out of the coop.

Meanwhile, the next morning, the 2019 icicle crop was coming in nicely. This was the view from my kitchen window.

The next day, and now we're talkin', baby.

 Ignore the cobwebs, the spiders took a hankering to this side of the house recently, way up I can't reach and before I could get out there and remove them the bad weather hit.

Also, the one icicle on the left outside the kitchen window is busy forming A HAND.

It'll be the perfect murder when it strangles us all in our sleep, melting away and leaving no trace of itself.

Lordy, things need to thaw out so I can get out of the house again. Meanwhile, off to make zuchinni bread...
Oh, and look on ebay for hatching eggs...Chickam in April!

How Chickens Do Halloween

The other day the kid and I went out and wormed the chickens...a good time had by all, as always. In two weeks we get to do it again, as you must to catch any hatching worm eggs and break the cycle. Some of the implements of chickeny terror:

Broad-spectrum paste wormer, which kills everything, both mixed with water to be given orally and applied straight to that little bare spot in each wing pit and masssaged in, so:

 Chickens do not appreciate a wing pit massage and resist this procedure. Especially proud pretty bois like Milton, here.

Dog toenail cutter to trim any claws/spurs that need it and Adams Flea and Tick mist, sprayed liberally deep into the No Man's Land of chicken butts (where angels fear to tread, sister) and fluffy thighs and feet to take care of any mites. Since the kid holds the bird while I do all these things to the chickens, I am also free of worms and/or mites since I never fail to get that stuff on me. Not pictured: the goodie dish holding bits of diced ham, a few pieces given to each bird at the completion of worming along with a sincere apology...and boy, you'd better make it sound good, they can tell the difference.

But what the hey, it was also a good time to get a few pictures of pissy chickens!

Because most of the time when you try to photograph chickens while doing the semi-annual worming, they know what's coming and get all snotty and squirmy, so you wind up with pics of thrashing poultry like this one of Tater Tot:

It was also a good time to update on Blossom, my half-Silkie who this year decided to start shedding toes like a maple tree in Fall. We figured it was frostbite from last winter and her toes waited until months later to actually fall off.
Blossom *had* ten toes--Silkies have 5 toes on each foot instead of 4 like normal chickens. Blossom being a little weirdo from the get-go, she had two of her toes fused together at hatch, the two rear-facing toes of her left foot. I expected for her to have problems with *those* toes, if she ever did have foot troubles...

Nope. Weirdo mutant fused toes are just fine, as is ONE other toe. Blossom has shed all of the rest of her toe tips, though.
Even worst, she did this while staying in the house recovering from another injury...all of a sudden I started finding the ends of her toes, claw and all, lying in the middle of the living room.
FREAKY.
To make things even MORE gruesome, I never found two of her toes. Either the dog ate them or they are lying in wait somewhere in my house for me to have forgotten all about it and then pop up someday.
ICK. Zombie Chicken.

Speaking of zombies...
Happily, some of the other chickens posed nicely for head shots. Although I didn't realize until later that my daughter's zombie bunny Tshirt had lined up perfectly...

 Cam, my big Americaunas/Giant Cochin mix Head Rooster doin' the zombie bunny thing...

Several others got in on it.

 Pie, an Americaunas/Buff Brahma mix hen

 Tater Tot again, (once she calmed down) a bantam Cochin/MilleFleur Belgian d'Uccle mix hen

...and Rambo, the Head Hen, a 7 year old buff Brahma hen who is WAY too dignified to wear zombie bunny ears and is NOT amused by all this tomfoolery.

Meanwhile, In Nevada...

You never know what you'll see on the highway...

Peering through the ever-present forest fire smoke...uhh, is that a tank...? 

Hmmm...get closer.

I'll be damned, it is.  Or at least, some kind of heavy-duty military vehicle.  My favorite part is the packing slip stuck on the back.

 There were two of them. 

Just another day in Nevada...

So It Seems...

...that a peacock has thrown up on part of my head.

Yeah, got a wild idea and kinda ran with it.  Normally I have a single blue streak in my hair that I've been wearing for years.  Although the green didn't take as well as I'd hoped it would and I need to touch up some spots, and the lightener I used first fried my hair a bit, it's gonna be a few days before the frizz calms down.

Everyone stares and asks, 'Why...?' the answer to which is, of course, 'Because I wanted to.'

I'm seriously considering doing the rest of my hair like this, I like it a whole bunch!  I offered to do the kid's hair and she looked at me like I was crazy.

Hey, get hip, kid.

Nature, Ever Mysterious And Majestic...

So we went to pick up my mom from the airport tonight, and I finally remembered to take along the camera and get some shots of my favorite 'nature' diorama at the Reno-Tahoe airport.

Now to give them credit, these are created from confiscated illegal trophies, and they do what they can with them rather than the animals going completely to waste.

But still, 'Deer Emerging From His Cave After Hibernation' (as I call it) just cracks me up.

I mean, how did he get in there?  Where's the rest of his body...?

He's wearing that damned rock like a turtle wears it's shell! 

Even the poor puma looks freaked out and decidely not happy to be there.

Can't say as I blame him one bit. That thing is freaky-deaky.

What's That Say...?!

Local humor on the back of this guy's business van...

I've seen this thing driving around town before.  It's written in even bigger letters on the side of the van.

WTF, indeed!

A Brief Announcement, Please...

Baby chicks make excellent pillows.

That is all.

THAT Isn't Food!

Want to see what a bad girl looks like?

 Pumpkin, The Idiot Queen.

 The kid noticed her acting a bit off this afternoon and brought her into the house so I could observe her. It was nothing really obvious, she tooled around the living room kinda foraging but not *eating* any of the Cheeto I'd just been feeding Zevon, one of our 12 year old bantam Frizzle hens who has been a house chicken for the last few days due to the weather. Now, a chicken not eating=something wrong, so I felt her crop...yup, no food in it.

VERY unusual, so while my husband grabs her and holds her, I start to check her over. Suddenly she opens her beak a bit, and I juuust see a glint of silver. Oh dear, there's something metal in there!

This. Wedged deeply into her mouth.

It had come off the power strip in the coop and was basically a washer, and the dumbshit had tried to eat it. It was in there so deep that I could barely get my fingertips on it, it was, 'brace the chicken head and force your fingers in there to get the thing'. I knew I had one chance to get it before it went in deeper, and luckily snared the thing on the first try.

The kid got all kinds of kudos for following her gut and bringing one of those, 'something isn't right' things to our attention. Pumpkin seems OK now, if nursing a sore mouth. She had some mealworms and went back out.

Damned dumb bird.

What The Well-Dressed Snowperson Is Wearing...

So tonight we had to run to the store for FFA uniform-style clothing for the kid's upcoming poultry judging event.

While we were there the kid fell in love with these...

They look like a Technicolor yeti yawn, but hey, they *sparkle*!  And are totally fabulous.

Meanwhile, for me the plans for an upcoming run to southern California for another sweet, sweet knee injection are coming right along.  I'm going to end up driving because trying to attempt to book flights, a rental car, etc. just got too damned frustrating.  Hopefully we won't get a huge snowstorm just before but I'll bet we will, haha.

Wheel...Of...FOOD!

So...what can you make with an old bicycle wheel, some chain, threaded rods and assorted hardware?

Why, a chicken consternation producer, of course!  Just add food!

Thanks to a swivel at the top of the chain, the Wheel of Food spins freely, the treats also spin on their rods when pecked.

...then hang the Wheel Of Food at chicken level from a sawhorse in the chicken yard.  After that, just stand back.

Bloop supervised it's installation.

Although to Zip goes the credit for being brave and approaching the thing while a bunch of the others milled about at CMSD--Chicken Minimum Safe Distance.

But Zip took her time studying the Weird New Thing. It has yet to win chicken-y approval.

Criminy, it's like she's studying the thing for her doctoral thesis.  At this point we sprinkled chicken food beneath the Wheel of Food to tempt them in.

Eventually (think a couple of hours) most of the rest of the flock unhinged themselves enough to go ahead and peck at the food, although there was no shortage of staring.

The rest of the afternoon we were rewarded with the occassional 'Twang!' over Chickam as the food disappeared.  I'm thinking as they get more used to it the Wheel of Food will be accepted more quickly and *maybe* the old ladies will join in instead of sitting huffily in the coop.

Now to figure out how to make the treats bob up and down ala a merry-go-round... 
...and maybe make a clown-horn 'Honk-a!' sound with each peck.

Y'know, nothing too extravagant.

DIE, School!

So the kid's binder broke in class the other day, and her teacher was kind enough to lend her a used one until she could get home for us to replace it--like most parents, I think, we have a mini office supply store here at home.

When I first saw the lender binder, I thought, 'Oh, how cute.  Little purple hearts!'

Then I looked closer...

...to see that some enterprising soul had carved the words, 'DIE SCHOOL' into the cover.  CARVED.  That's some seriously deep convictions of your personal beliefs, right there.

I love this thing.

Now that I've switched out her stuff to the new binder I'll have to return it to the teacher with some kind of appropriately smart-ass note, though.  This is just too good to pass up.

Ahh, high school.