Birthday to Birthday

Today is my sister’s birthday (Happy birthday, Andrea!), a week and a half ago it was Luke’s birthday, and eleven days before that was my birthday.  We’ve got a lot of birthdays happening around here.

So now that I’ve had about three weeks to think about it, how about we talk about my birthday?  It was awesome.  Luke’s birthday was on a Saturday, which should have been perfect, except that everyone we knew was either on vacation, or had other plans that night.  So sad.  My birthday was the opposite.  It started with my favorite monthly appointment which is breakfast with my favorite bunch of loud-talky girlfriends at Ruben’s in West Hartford.  The waitress heard that it was my birthday and brought me a cupcake on the house.  After breakfast I headed to Prossage on the 22nd floor of the Marriott in Downtown Hartford for an amazing birthday massage.   What a beautiful place, I highly recommend it.  Especially for the post-massage view.

After my appointment, I was welcomed and encouraged to bring my swimsuit and enjoy the pool and hot tub.  You don’t know how disappointed I was that I couldn’t spend the rest of my day here, but don’t feel bad for me.  I had to leave my rooftop paradise to head home to my honey who had presents waiting and then whisked me out for lunch and a margarita.  It was the perfect sunny day so after lunch we came home to lay on the hammock where I read the book I’m currently obsessed with and he took a little snooze.  After relaxing and doing a little mild gardening, we took off for a sushi dinner.  What more could a girl ask for?  It was a perfect day.

The following weekend we had another blissful day visiting our friends at their boat in Stonington.  The sun was out, the winds were calm, and I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day.  This picture, above, is Molly on the dock just moments before she mistook the algae in the water for a patch of grass that she could step onto and went for her first saltwater plunge.  This, below, would be the after.  Whoops!

Our sunny Stonington day kicked off a week off from work for both Luke and me.  The weather took a turn for the worse so we spent much of the time in the basement organizing the shop and other boring things.  We did manage to mess up the yard a whole lot by digging trenches so the chicken coop could have water and power and I can finally have water out at the vegetable garden.

We spent a good part of the day watching the chickens fall in and figure out how to get out of the trench.  Good times.  Just a side note here, Luke dug these trenches BY HAND.  With a pick axe.  Like an olde timey prisoner.  He’s crazy and I love him for that.  So to reward him for his back-breaking hard work, I made him take me out in the boat.  We had a gorgeous day of warm, sunny weather so we headed to quiet little Gardner Lake in Salem.  Man alive, was it beautiful.

We were practically alone on the lake.  I drove the boat around for bit while Luke fished, then he switched over to the trolling motor and I made myself a comfy spot to lay and continue reading my book.  It was heaven.  But that fishing was only practice for the next day when Luke went fluke fishing with our Stonington boat friends.  Now here is where I would include a photo of the beautiful day or the 68 pounds of fluke they caught and sold, but since that trip was boys-only and for some unknown reason no one thought to take any photos—FOR PROOF THAT THEY ACTUALLY CAUGHT ANYTHING—I present you with fishing boats at dusk, which I took that evening when I came to pick him up.

The four of us took the boat to the dockside restaurant around the corner—that was a fun, new experience of pretending to be a fancy boat-going person—and then we went back to our friends’ camp for a bonfire, some birthday cake…

…and some Sky Lanterns because the next day was Luke’s birthday!  (I’m still not sure how I feel about the Sky Lanterns.  They’re unquestionably beautiful and allegedly safe, but my painfully practical side keeps wondering about sending a paper bag with a lit candle loose in the wide open.)

We sent off two birthday lanterns and headed home after a wonderful day and a relaxing week of time off.  Luke’s birthday was mostly low-key because, as I mentioned, everyone and their grandma was out of town or busy, so there aren’t any photos, but a relaxing day was had by all.  So that’s it!  Birthday to birthday: it was a great couple of weeks!

ATTACK!

Last Monday I got home after dark and closed up the ladies, as usual.  I counted them, made sure they were all there, and locked them in for the night.  The next morning when I let them out, they greeted me and hopped out of the coop like they do every morning, but I noticed that one black and white hen was missing some feathers by her tail.  No biggie.  That happens; they molt, they peck them out, it’s nothing to worry about.  Then as I turned to walk back to the house, I saw Molly sniffing a giant pile of black and white feathers.  Uh-oh.

I went over to the hen with the bald spot and pulled back her other feathers to reveal the nastiest giant slash across her back. Crap. As Luke described it, the gash looks like someone carved a slice across a roast chicken.  It was serious but she didn’t seem to care.  She was the first hen out of the house that morning (and every morning). She’s still chatty and busy, scratching and foraging around.  The other hens don’t bother her; nothing seems to have changed.  I decided to wait it out.  The local vet does treat chickens, but I wanted to see if nature would take care of itself.

A week later, the injured hen is still acting normal, laying eggs, taking dust baths, and squawking at me each morning when I let her out.  Her gash has started to heal and her feathers are growing back in frizzy little tufts.  I started to wonder what attacked her in the first place.  My thought is that it had to be a bird of some sort because if it was a fox, or something on foot, it would have just followed her back into the coop after the attack.  We do have an abundance of hawks and even saw an eagle here a few years back, so I figured it had to be an overconfident little hawk.

Well, I was half right.

Sunday evening I was in the kitchen when I heard a whole bunch of flapping and scrambling and squawking from the yard.   I looked out to see a gigantic hawk gliding through the yard about six feet off the ground.  It landed in a tree in the back yard (no chicken in its claws, thank goodness) and all of the hens frantically scattered.  I spent the next half hour trying to round everyone up.  A few ran to the coop, others ran to nearby bushes and trees, or under the deck.  I managed to coax the injured hen out from under the deck and lure a couple of others out of the bushes, but most everyone had to be carried back to the coop, they were so scared.  All ten were accounted for and no one was injured. Phew! Close call.

We’re starting to get back to normal again, except now the ladies prefer to take dust baths under the back deck, and they follow me around even closer than before. I must be their new sign of safety. They stick so close to me now, it’s hard to walk across the yard without tripping.  I’m also afraid that this hawk has now learned that our yard is the place for easy chicken pickings, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Here and There

From the rose garden at Elizabeth Park. I forgot to tell you about that trip last month.

It’s time for me to tie up some loose ends, isn’t it?  You’ve been wondering about things, I know you have.  Here’s a quick list of updates:

Operation: Chick (Phase 1)
Status: FAIL

Sadly, none of the eggs that Mama Hen was sitting on actually hatched. Nature, being what it is—which, frankly, is heartbreaking—most of the eggs were broken over the course of the month she sat on them, either by accident with Mama Hen moving around a lot, or as a survival-of-the-fittest measure by some of the other hens. My guess is that one hen, in particular, was breaking the eggs when Mama would take her occasional, frantic breaks to run around the yard and get some sun and a quick dust bath.  She was often seen squawking and squabbling with Mama, which leads me to believe she was the egg-breaker.  We had one particularly devastating broken egg incident when I found a fully-developed chick in a broken egg, just days from when he would have hatched. So sad. But! We are going to try again. Dedicated hen that she is, Mama is still sitting on the unfertilized eggs each day, so we have a plan to give her a new clutch of fertilized eggs and her very own private nursery in the form of a portable dog kennel, where she can sit on her eggs in peace without the other dummies sitting on her and laying their eggs in her nest.  Operation: Chick (Phase 2) might start this weekend if we can find the time to drive out and pick up more fertilized eggs.  Stay tuned!

Image via Pinterest

Pinterest

After several months of trying to figure out what the heck Pinterest was and why one would use it, I decided to join (for free) and try it out.  I have to say that I love it a lot.  Think of it as a place to save your bookmarked pages and ideas in one, beautiful, visual place.  For example I keep one “board” of things I want to make and one of things I want to eat.  Pinterest lets me refer back and see a photo of what it was that I wanted to make (or eat) and remember why I was excited about it in the first place.  Even better, if you have friends or know bloggers who are on Pinterest or have great ideas that you love to keep track of, you can follow them on Pinterest and see what they’re “pinning” on a daily basis.  This has given me many, many great ideas for crafts and for me, I feel more inspired looking at photos than link titles in my bookmarks folder.  Check it out, it’s addictive and it’s free to join.  You can either request an invitation, or let me know and I can send you an invitation.

Image via Pinterest

Summer Vacations

Luke and I took off for a long weekend at the Cape over the 4th of July. I’ll have more to tell you about that trip as soon as I upload all of my pictures, but I can tell you right now that it was wonderful.  Luke’s work schedule has been so crazy that I really haven’t seen him for a span of more than one day in about two months.  He’s been working crazy hours and Saturday nights and it’s really just, plain sucked.  This trip was three straight nights of getting away, no work, no house obligations, just relaxing and having fun with friends.  And I miss it so much.  So does Luke, who worked twelve hours last night.  At the end of the month we have another vacation planned for the Lakehouse in Maine.  Nothing but fishing and relaxing and reading and we can’t wait.  Then after that trip, I’m leaving for another part of Maine for a getaway with my mom, my sister, and her boys.  That should be fun!  I’ve been stocking up on my summer reading books and have, at last count, 14 books to enjoy.

Image via Pinterest

My Recent Addiction

Is there such a thing as compulsive nail-painting disorder? I may have it. Luke’s previously-mentioned crazy schedule leaves me with a lot of free time on my hands and browsing around Pinterest gives me so many great ideas for different nail treatments I want to try.  First I fell in love with this neutral look, then this awesome matte/shiny black manicure caught my eye.  Right now my nails look like this, but this feather manicure (above) is coming next. Or maybe I’ll try out one of these marbled looks, or maybe this blue/gold one… It’s an obsession, I tell you.

OK, I think that just about sums up what you’ve missed and what’s been going on.  As soon as I stop painting my nails for five minutes, I’ll upload my Cape Cod pictures and tell you all about that trip, I promise.

Incubating

We’ve started a new experiment over in yonder chicken coop.  We’ve adopted some fertile eggs and are trying to hatch them. It’s a chick-speriment!

A couple of weeks ago, one of our hens started to go broody.  In chicken speak, this means that she doesn’t leave the nest all day, and has a steadfast resolve to do nothing but sit on her (and everyone else’s) eggs in an effort to incubate them and hatch her chicks.  Unfortunately for her, this will not happen, as we do not have the required rooster.  I tried to explain the birds and the bees of chicken reproduction to her, but she persists in sitting on every egg in the nest and refuses to leave her post, even to eat.

I watched a documentary recently called The Natural History of the Chicken (which you really need to watch) and one of the stories on the DVD was told by a man whose own hen desperately wanted to hatch chicks and who risked her life to save the chicks she eventually did have.  It was a heartbreaking story and my poor broody hen makes my heart break in the same way.  Each night I have to lift her off the warm eggs so I can collect them and she purrs and coos so sadly, it just kills me.

We talked about our options.  We could leave her alone, assuming she will eventually shake off this phase. We could send her to a friend’s farm to live with a rooster or borrow a friend’s rooster for a bit so she could lay some fertilized eggs of her own, but chances are that the rooster would establish his dominance with our hen by beating her up a bit first, which doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do.  Our last thought was to take some eggs from our friends chickens and give them to her to sit on.  Our friends have a flock of Rhode Island Reds and a gorgeous rooster, which means that they have fertilized eggs, but none of their hens are interested in sitting on them. This seemed like the perfect answer. We would adopt some eggs for her.

Sunday morning we drove out to pick up our eggs, or “potential chicks” as I was referring to them, and placed them under the wanna-be mama hen that afternoon.  We marked each egg with a black “X” so we’d know which was which, and we slid them into the nest.  She settled in on them and was happy as could be.  Now, if all goes well, in about three weeks, we might just see some fluffy, little chicks running about.  Keep your fingers crossed that our little chick-speriment is successful!

Stuff and Things

I’d say it was about time to get rid of those St. Paddy’s Day photos, right?  But really I have nothing coherent to say, so how about I just list off some things I have been enjoying lately?  Sort of a highlight reel of other potential candidates for What I Love.

Planting Chickens in the Garden – oh, just kidding. You knew I had to mention the chickens at some point.  I mean, it’s been at least two posts since I talked about them.  This, here, is a typical weekend scene.  The ladies all get to free-range on the weekends when we’re home all day and they’re particularly fond of taking dust baths around the Zebra grass in my garden bed.  They crack me up.

OK, now let’s get serious…

Nice Things Now – a new website from the always lovely Leah of A Girl and a Boy fame.  From the website’s About page, Nice Things Now “…is a place to find inspiration and share ideas on simple ways to make the world a nicer place.”  And that it is.  Lovely, quick posts, beautiful photos, and simple stories to lift your heart.

The Most Awesome Headphones Ever – after hula hooping with my iPod Vetrapped to my upper arm and with my earbud cord tucked into my bra for far too long, I finally bought a set of wireless, Bluetooth headphones, and let me tell you, they are the best things ever.  For less than $35, the Motorola S305 Bluetooth Stereo Headset has changed my life. Seriously.  As you may know, I live in the ssshhhhhhh! home of a third shift-working spouse where I do everything in my power to keep quiet at night while he sleeps. Now, I can put on my headphones, turn on some music or listen to podcasts on my iPod, and walk around the house without cords.  They’re comfy, they stay on securely while I run on the treadmill, and I can skip tracks with the easy control buttons on the headset.  And as an unexpected bonus: they have an amazing range. I usually leave my iPod on the kitchen counter, and I can walk all over the house, even halfway to the chicken coop without losing the signal. These things rock.

Spilled Milk - speaking of podcasts, it seems that everyone I know has never heard of, or at least never listened to a podcast.  I find this sad.  There are so many wonderful ones out there and most of them are free!  One that I have been enjoying a whole lot lately is Spilled Milk featuring Molly Wizenberg (of Orangette) and Matthew Amster-Burton.  As they say, “Spilled Milk is the show where we cook something, eat it all, and you can’t have any.”  It’s a show about cooking and more importantly, about eating.  Matthew and Molly are hilarious, it’s obvious that they love what they’re doing, and their enthusiasm is contagious.  I challenge you to listen and not laugh.

Not Martha - a wonderful website I have lurked about without commenting on for far too long.  Megan is funny and creative and talented and I swear, everyday I either bookmark a link she’s mentioned, or add something to my Amazon Wishlist from her posts and suggestions.  She’s brilliant!  I mean, check out this cake! And these dahlia brooches (I have to make one of these).  Last week she linked to this post from The Ugly Green Chair about online eyeglass shopping which led me to buy two pairs of glasses from Goggles4U.  Today I bookmarked a tutorial she mentioned last week about making yoga pants from an old t-shirt.  This woman is my crafty, clever, fancy-baking, online hero and I’d like to believe that if I lived in Seattle, too, we could be friends.

Great things, am I right?  So tell me, what have you been loving lately?

Chickens!

Don’t worry, I won’t be changing this to a chicken blog, I promise, but, look! I got more chickens.

I saw an ad on Criagslist a few weeks ago for Welsummer and Cucko Maran hens for sale and I couldn’t resist.

The reddish ladies are the Welsummers and the black and white girls are the Cuckos.  They all lay dark brown, speckled eggs, and the Welsummers are beautiful, but very chatty.

For those of you keeping count, that makes ten hens, meaning that at prime egg-laying season in the spring, we’ll be getting 10 eggs a day.  Omelet, anyone?

I Love My Chickens

Seriously. I knew I would like having chickens–I mean, who doesn’t love fresh eggs–but I never expected to actually like the chickens as individuals. I loved watching them in the yard (back when we could actually see the yard before the winter-that-aims-to-bury-us showed up).  I love feeding them and talking to them.  They all have surprisingly different personalities and I love them all.

Did I mention that we lost two chickens on Christmas?  Of course I didn’t because I didn’t talk to you at all during December.  Well Christmas day we went to visit family and asked a neighbor to close up the coop when it got dark.  He told us peeked into the darkness, thought he saw about four of them, closed up the coop and left.  It’s hard to count them at night, they tend to roost all smooshed up together so I didn’t think anything of it and waited until the next morning to check on them.  Long story short: feathers everywhere, two chickens gone, four chickens left terrified and a visit to the yard a week or so later by a big coyote who we assume was the culprit who ate the missing ladies.

We had planned on not naming the chickens because we expected that something like this would happen, except that I actually did name one by accident.  When I picked up the chicks at 12-weeks old, a man led me to a giant cage filled with about 100 chicks and told me to choose the ones I wanted.  I tried to be selective, but really I only took home the ones I could catch, plus one little white one who walked right up to me in the cage and stood there cocking her head at me.  As the chicks grew older, I realized that in the chick grab bag, I managed to get five Ameraucanas and one Faverole.  The little white one was the Faverole and my nephews named her Peep.  Peep was, of course my favorite, because she was so different and so bold.  She acted like the rooster of the flock, always in the lead, warning the others of danger, and I think that’s probably what caused her to be taken by the coyote on Christmas.

Poor Peep, I really miss her.  The other four chickens that were left really missed her, too, because they suddenly had no leader and didn’t know what to do.  They wouldn’t leave the coop, they were terrified and they weren’t eating.  I mentioned to a friend that I was looking for a couple of older hens to adopt so the four scaredy-chickens would have authority figures again and she hooked me up with a friend who kindly donated two Barred Rocks, which are the gorgeous black and white speckled chickens I’ve always wanted.  He said that one was about two years old and the other was just over one year.  They weren’t in the bast situation when I got them and the older of the two looked a bit dehydrated and old, we call her “the older one” and sometimes “granny”.  The younger one, who we call “the younger one” (clever, right?) immediately took to being the leader of the new flock and the four youngsters (who we call “the orange ones,” “the scaredy one,” and “the other dark-headed one” – maybe it would be easier if I just named them) took it all in stride.  After just a couple of days together, the six of them were happily scratching around the pen and finally stopped jumping with fright when I walked into the coop.

We still weren’t getting any eggs from them but I had resigned myself to wait until March when the weather was warmer and the days were longer.  And then one morning I opened the coop and – SURPRISE!  A beautiful, brown egg sitting in the center of the coop, frozen solid.  The dummy.  There are two lovely next boxes available, but she chose to lay in the center of the floor.  I found one more egg on the floor and one outside in the pen before I decided on some modifications to the nesting area.  Now we’ve been getting about two eggs every other day in the nest box.  Hooray!  I don’t have to threaten them with the turkey frier anymore.

Now you’re probably wondering how I could possibly babble on for 700+ words about chickens, but let me just share one more thing.  As I mentioned, our original four chickens are all Ameraucanas and the two new ladies are Barred Rocks.  Barred Rocks lay big, brown eggs like you’d see in the grocery store, but the Ameraucanas are called “Easter Egg Chickens” because they lay blue and green eggs.  The first two (frozen) eggs I found in the coop were brown so I knew that it was one of the two new ladies, but the one I found in the pen was green and I did a little dance of joy when I found it because it means that the original four are laying!  Now we’re getting one brown and one green egg about every other day.  How cool is that?

Cooped Up

There are a million and one reasons that I haven’t updated in a long, long time, most having to do with me being too lazy, but I do have one good reason for being too busy to blog.  We were taking this:

Turning it into this:

And filling it with these:

That’s right, WE HAVE CHICKENS! It only took about ten years for me to wear Luke down enough so he’d agree to get them.  Someone else who lives here thinks they’re pretty exciting, too:

She lays under the coop and stares into the pen at them.  It’s very cute, if not slightly annoying.  She also circles the coop when they’re inside and tries to peek in the windows. She wants so desperately to play with them.

And by “them” I mean our six new baby girls.  They’re all about 13-weeks old now, a mix of breeds (Ameraucana and Orpington, from what I can tell), and they’re cute as could be.

They’re still babies so we’ve had to teach them to climb a ramp and go in the coop for the night (their other home had them in cages, not coops).  We’ll go out to put them in for the night and they’ll be sleeping in a little chicken heap outside.  It’s very sweet.  Teaching them to sleep on roosts will be next. About four weeks from now the real excitement begins – they should start laying eggs. I can’t wait.  I think I’m almost as excited as Molly.