There's a Big World Out There People

My facebook friends, largely still without power from Tropical Storm Irene, have been posting cell phone pictures of the (admittedly lovely) Sunset this evening.

Late Breaking News: Sunset happens - Every.Blessed.Day. Right about sunset, in fact. Shut off your TV and go outside! Marvels await you, I promise. At the very least, you'll be less depressed than if you stay inside watching the evening news.

In other developments, Sunrise happens with alarming regularity as well. In my life, the alarming happens before Sunrise, courtesy of Mooney, my puppy. If he fails to go off by 4:30, Insomnia, my rooster, has his back. They should perform a duet at the Met, country-style. People would flock to see it. (flock, rooster, get it?) So when my bleary-eyed self stops stumbling and cursing and leaves the warm nest to feed the inmates who run the asylum, my reward is the Sunrise. It doesn't eliminate the pain entirely, but it helps. A lot. So do farm-fresh eggs, by the way. Don't get me wrong, coffee is still the elixir of life, but coffee doesn't occur until well after Sunrise.

Here's where I get all preachy on your ass. Experiencing Sunrise and Sunset regularly helps regulate both mood and sleep. I know so very many people who could do with a large dose of Sunrise and Sunset. I'm the happiest and healthiest I've ever been since I lost my mind I mean moved here. Last winter was the first one in forever that I didn't get winter blues. Because I was - gasp - outside every frigid miserable freezing snowing blizzarding icy sleeting damp gorgeous day.

Thus Endeth the Sermon. Go Forth and Get Out-Of-Doors.

***Gratuitous Sunset Picture Deliberately Omitted. Go See It For Yourself!***

Crying Uncle

Winter from hell, tornado (too close for comfort), earthquake, and now a hurricane? UNCLE!!!!

Preparations start tomorrow. Gathering anything in the yard that might take flight and stuffing it indoors - somewhere. Putting a new tarp on the two-stall barn roof. I was hoping this one would hold until I buy new metal roofing for it this fall, but last week's normal drenching proved otherwise. Leaky leaky. Cutting down two trees, both in poor health due to damaged trunks, that would undoubtedly land on the barn if the wind is bad enough. Hoping to temporarily relocate two ponies to the neighbors' sturdy barn for the duration, due to my unwillingness to cut down a big beautiful elm tree that could land on their housing. What I'm going to do with the chickens I don't know. Stuff them in the garage too I guess. I'll probably wind up chasing them around the rafters for days afterward. That'll be fun, I'm really looking forward to that. Groceries to buy, propane tank to fill, every water-holding container to be filled. Generator to start, since it hasn't been fired off for a while. Like, over a year awhile. Candles to find. I refuse to buy more, I have so damned many, it's just a matter of what box they're in. Hope I labeled it :) Batteries, of course. Stock up on dog food, horse grain, hay. Make the doggies wear their collars with their little name tags and my phone number - Just.In.Case. They hate collars. Oh well, I hate sobbing for lost dogs more.

I hope this all turns out to be unnecessary, but am inclined to assume the worst at this point. Stop the ride, I wanna get off!

Not Eggsactly What I Had In Mind...

Right now, at this very moment, there are no less than twenty-nine eggs in my refrigerator. There may be more, it's entirely possible that one or two may have rolled off behind the cheese or the lemonade (I stocked up on Newman's Own - on sale at Big Y this week). Note to self - buy egg cartons on next trip to the co-op I'm one person. My seven hens are laying anywhere from three to five eggs per day.

Send egg recipes immediately.

Until yesterday, I suspected that my Ameracauna (aka Easter Egger) hen was a dud, as I had only been getting brown eggs. Then yesterday, and again today, I got a lovely little light-blue egg! Yay! I think I would like a few more Ameracuanas. They are pretty and docile birds with the bonus of pretty eggs. I would also like a Welsummer, that lays eggs so dark brown they are almost chocolate-colored. How much fun would that be in your egg carton?

The Weight of the Weekend

Stacked 800lbs of hay. Ditto for 600lbs of shavings. Cleaned 20 stalls - each day. I don't want to know how many pounds of manure that is. 40lbs of dog kibble. 150lbs of horse grain. 100 of chicken feed. 50lbs of stall deodorizer, 50lbs of rock salt for the well water softener. 9 precious eggs from my newly laying hens - 1lb? Installed half the siding for the new hen coop, inventing some amazing new yoga contortions while wielding a sawz-all while I was at it. Lugged 20 water buckets - each day - at 40lbs apiece. Again, I don't want to do the math. Picked 6lbs of luscious blueberries. Ate that much too, I'm sure :)

But the twelve ounces of prime steak hot off the grill, accompanied by the 750ml bottle of wine that I just shared with a good friend, is what put me over the edge. Goodnight. Hope your weekend was a good as mine!

Males ARE the Weaker Sex

Meant to hit publish on this post days ago, so please humor me and just pretend it's last Friday and you are wilting in the heat wave...

Good news and bad news on the farm today. Day two of some serious heat, and I hurried home from the office, worried about the animals. I left the horses in their stalls this morning, with fans running and extra water buckets. Made sure the chickens would have shade all day, and plenty of water. Yet I came home to two of my four meat birds dead. The two roosters, noticeably bigger than the hens, just couldn't take the heat, so they opted out of the kitchen they were destined for.

I've been meaning to write a post about these birds, now eight weeks old. They were/are due to go to the processor tomorrow, having reached their harvest weight already. I am sorry for their sake that they succumbed to heat, and sorry for mine that I had to throw away two enormous roasting birds that would have provided me with enough meat for many meals. These are frankenbirds, no joke. They have spent the past eight weeks sitting in a circle around the feeder, gaining weight around the clock and only moving as far as the water fount. Very freaky, even when they do move they walk funny, heaving their whole body form side to side to shuffle their legs. I hated watching it, and hated it more when they didn't move. These birds on a factory farm would spend their entire lives in a space smaller than an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, so I guess they had it pretty good between my big brooder box and then the outdoor chicken tractor, moved to fresh grass every day, and always shaded from the sun. But it still really sucks to lose half of the first meat crop to come from this farm. Hopefully the remaining two hens make it through the next 24 hours of continued heat.

The good news is that my flock of hens have started laying eggs! I found the first batch of their teeny little pullet eggs today, there were 15 from 7 hens so they must've started a few days ago, a bit ahead of schedule. I can't eat these, I don't know how long they were out there for, but every day form now on I'll have my own fresh eggs! Such good girls :) They are lounging in the shade but still be-bopping around to the feeder, the water, the grass I cut daily and put in their coop for them. The heat does not seem to be adversely affecting them, thank goodness! I can't let them free-range yet due to our abundant fox population. Once I get a better perimeter fence in place they will have acres to roam, but for now we make due.

Pourdown

I just came in from feeding horses and chickens, but stood outside with my dogs for a few extra minutes in the downpour, and marveled at the perfect silhouette of the huge old elm tree in the fading dusk. Light like that isn't possible without the rain to suffuse the glow.

I should not be left unsupervised

...at any sort of livestock show. Yesterday morning it was the Boston Poultry Expo. I just went to look, I swear. I was hoping to find that someone there raised a particular breed of dual-purpose chicken that I am interested in acquiring, a hard-to-find breed called Blue Orpington. Buff Orpingtons are everywhere, and Black Orpingtons are fairly common as well. Blues, however, were nowhere to be found. My intent was merely to make a connection and acquire some chicks or mature birds at a later date. Seeing no Blue Orpingtons in the show cages, I wandered on outside to the parking lot where there were birds for sale. Still no Blue Orpies. But, sticking out like sore thumb was one lone blue bantam Aracuana chick in a cage of ducklings. Sooooo, long story short, I bought it. And because you can't raise a chick alone, I got four Cornish Giant chicks too. Little chick blue is henceforth to be known as "Storm", because I don't know, or care, whether it is male or female. The Cornish chicks are named Potato, Carrot, Onion, and Gravy; and are destined to become dinner.

Cornish Giants are a purely meat bird, and if allowed to keep growing past slaughter weight they quickly reach a point where their legs and hearts cannot support their bodies for a normal chicken life. So they are frankenbirds, not what I envisioned raising on this here piece of earth but they're my first try at raising my own meat, and I hope it will help to know that if they are not slaughtered, their quality of life would be horrible. That's my theory, anyway. I'll let you know if it works out that way three months hence.

Here are the little fluffballs, comfortably ensconced in the brooder box:

Tornadoes to Rainbows

In 24 hours, no less. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening hunkered down in my basement with my doggies, waiting for the world to be rearranged. Thankfully, me and mine were spared. Other towns just to my south were not so fortunate. Utter devastation. This isn't supposed to happen here. Sure, every year we get an EF-0 or EF-1 twister that blows the lawn furniture around, maybe peels some shingles off a few roofs, but nothing like this. This was no joke, and I'm glad I took it seriously. I did come up a few times, thinking it was over, but each time I did a new warning would be issued in minutes, the 2nd and 3rd wave storms following the same path as the first. Intense is not strong enough a description. I've heard surreal used a lot today, I've used ugly, usually capitalized - UGLY! It was that.

My neighbor, braver and/or more foolish than I, actually saw the tornado, in the distance, from his upstairs window. I saw enough warning signs in the sky and clouds as the thunder began to rumble that I closed the horses up tight in their shedrow and was not surprised to see the tornado warning as soon as I got back inside. I also saw, through the opaque basement windows, the light outside grow dim and take on that greenish-black color of a bad bruise. If I never see that tint again it will be too soon.

This was not my first tornado experience. Naturally, tornadoes are my one phobia. I dealt with this throughout my childhood by educating myself about them as much as possible. I probably should have become a meteorologist. So I already had a plan and knew just what to grab when the warning came up on my screen. Dogs, flashlight, cell phone; check, check, check. Grab 'em and go. I was anxious but not scared. I felt prepared. I am more freaked about it now than I was at the time. Probably because I have been looking at pictures all day, letting the what-if's run through my head.

This should be self-explanatory but obviously isn't...

To my regular readers; those of you who read this blog because you care about me (in a good way), and read my words in order to encourage me on my journey, I love you all (Movie - blogger ate your comment when it went down last week - sorry!). Please bear with me for a short while, the below paragraph is not intended for you.

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. If you don't like what I have to say, fuck off and stop coming back. This blog is where I express my opinions. My opinions are formed in the crucible of my personal experience. You factor negatively in that experience. This is your own doing. Your opinions and experiences are different. I don't care. If you can't comment here, it's because I don't want to hear from you. If you have something to say here, own it. If I think it has merit, I'll publish it, if it doesn't I will not. You are of course free to disagree with me. Do it elsewhere. Start your own blog. Rest assured I will never read it.

Really? You're even trashier than I thought.

Wondered why you'd been all over the blog again. Also wondered why the contact lenses that I ordered hadn't shown up. Turns out they were delivered two weeks ago. A brief hunt revealed the torn-open plastic bag they'd been dropped off in, tossed in the tall grass across the street. Happily, they'll be replaced at no charge. Apparently, pieces of shit like you do this all the time, the nice lady at the eye doctor's office was not in the least surprised. I guess if stealing contact lenses is the only way to pay for your dope, you've gotta do what you've gotta do, right? What a burnout loser you are. How many of those bandstand checks went right into your personal account? Methinks an audit is in order. Thanks for that friendly mailing with the other committee members' names. That's about to come in very handy! :)

Spring Has Hatched

Spring has sprung, in the form of oh-so-slightly milder temperatures - translation: above freezing for three days in a row, no less - and nights that have moderated enough that I don't have to run the hot water tap to prevent a frozen pipe. Sugar shacks all over the region (here's a good one the next town over) are starting to boil the sap of sugar maples (Acer saccharum) into pure New England deliciousness. The first green shoots of new grass are seen in the otherwise boggy mess of mud underfoot, and the magnolia and forsythia have buds that are swelling fast, promising to bloom as soon as April rolls around.

Another favorite milestone today - daylight savings time! I know most folks hate losing an hour of sleep, but in my case it means my puppy alarm clock, aka Mooney, permanently set for 4am standard time, now doesn't go off until 5! It's amazing what a difference that makes mentally. There are days when I must be up and about earlier than 5 to get where I need to go for work, here's hoping they are infrequent enough to keep him on this new, later hour.

In other news, spring is also being heralded by the peeping of eight chicks in a brooder (I'm calling it Henway Park, it's a blue monster of a rubbermaid bin) in my garage. All *should* grow up to be laying hens. I say should as there is always the possibility that the hatchery accidentally on purpose included a rooster. If that should be the case, his future depends on how docile he is. Docile = live long and prosper, not so much = the backyard version of the french revolution. Damn I hope they are all the girls they're supposed to be.

Here they are when I brought them home, at one week old:


And here they are one short week later, having doubled in size and already shedding their downy baby fluff and growing their adult plumage:


I cleaned the brooder out completely today and added a training roost. They're trying it out by ones and twos, wobbling all over the place, flapping their wings for balance. Funny stuff. Farm TV - season one, episode one.

These girls came home with me from a workshop at Cold Antler Farm in that lovely part of extreme eastern New York known as "Veryork". Jenna, the proprietor, writes a fabulous blog about her own journey to farmhood. She generously shared some of her hard-won knowledge with ten neophytes last weekend. She also generously gave me more chickens than had been promised, due to people who canceled or who were not ready to bring chicks home quite yet. So instead of one of each breed, I am now proudly owned by four Rhode Island Reds, two Buff Orpingtons (both heritage breeds), and two Ameracaunas, those wondrous layers of pre-colored easter eggs. They lay eggs in various shades of blue, green, or pink. Fascinating chicken fact - the color of a chicken's earlobes (who knew they had earlobes, right?) indicates what color eggs they will lay. Oh, the things I don't know but love to learn!

Into the deep freeze

I took time out of my day today to go join the Bay Colony Pomeranian Club at their monthly luncheon. Great group of very knowledgeable people. Having been intending to join for some time, it felt good to cross that off my to-do list, BUT I feel somewhat less prepared for tonight's extreme cold than I wanted to be. I did everything I planned to do to prepare, really, with the exception of filling up the car's gas tank; but since it is kept in the garage I hope that won't be a problem. I'll feel bad for the attendant when I stop at the full serve station in the morning though! Since I live in the middle of nowhere and it's Sunday night, both stations are already closed or I would go out now. I hate when I remember things like that just a few minutes too late. Like remembering the need to go to the post office or bank at precisely 12:02 on a Saturday. I do that constantly.

It's supposed to go down to -20 dF here tonight, with wind chills to -35. That's 20 with a negative. That's unholy cold. My horses have been given obscene amounts of hay, digesting it helps keep them warm, and they all have heated water buckets as well. I typically put them out in the corral when I leave for work in the morning, but tomorrow they will have to stay in, there is no windbreak in their paddock and frostbitten ears is the last thing I need to deal with. Makes stall cleaning harder but that's a small price to pay. The dogs are pretty sensible and do their outside business in record time when it's so cold, but their little paw pads can get frostbitten if they stay out too long.

Having enjoyed (not!) 48 hours without hot water earlier this week when the pipe under the house froze, the water will be running all night too. I did not enjoy my time in the crawlspace thawing it out, either. I can, and do, do without a lot, but hot water is a non-negotiable modern amenity, one of the wonders of the world, and balm for both the soul and the tired sore body after a day of farm work.

For everyone who wanted an update on Henry (formerly Kris Kringle formerly Crusty), he is, alive, well, and wreaking havoc at my sister's house. In a twist of fate even odder than the ones I mentioned in my original post about him, it turns out that at the same day and hour I was chasing Henry into the cow barn, my sister had to have her sweet cat Pumpkin put to sleep, completely unexpectedly. That felt a little to synchronous and serendipitous to ignore, so, having doubled his weight during two weeks at DarcC's all-you-can-eat buffet and a follow-up appointment with the vet, I handed him over along with all food, toys, and vet records he had already accumulated, with the admonishment that "there is no such thing as a free kitten." Henry is now comfortably ensconced in said sister's household, where he enjoyed climbing the xmas tree (until they took it down - early!), tormenting their sweet dog Buddy, and playing with my nephews. As soon as the antibiotics kicked in and Henry started perking up, he, smart kitty, realized precisely how good life and human attention could be! He is an absolute doll, and far too sweet to be the barn cat I thought he would be. Below are some pics of Henry in his new home. Here's what sister said when she sent the pics: "He is so cute!!!! He's a good boy, we all love him except when the boys are putting together legos, Henry loves legos too, and the boys get annoyed. But they love him too."





A far cry from the crusty, shivering, mucus-oozing bone-rack that huddled in a dog crate here for the first warm night of his life one short month ago.

Stay warm y'all!