Outdoor Chickens

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

Ugh! Again with the chickens? Will she ever post ANYTHING else other than pictures of poultry?

I can hear you from here, and it’s ok. I would be sick of chicken posts too,  if I were you. Don’t worry – after this post, I swear to stop boring you with posts about the chickies until they start laying eggs. At that point, you can expect to see a picture of every single egg I find until the excitement wears off. Lucky for you, I have the attention span of a housefly.

Anywho…my Dad was kind enough to help me put up a fence for the chickens over the weekend. And by “help me”, I mean that he pretty much did the whole thing and I handed him tools. TA-DA! Look what we did:

It’s pretty much a four star hotel situation up in here.

They spent most of the day inside after they got scared by a barn swallow’s shadow. Is that normal? Are chickens really that…um…chicken? Dad mentioned that I might have ended up with a batch of “Indoor Chickens”. I thought that was a real thing for a half a second until he saw me considering this and cracked up. Thanks, Dad.

On Monday, when we all got home from work/school, we walked out back to check on them and were happy to see that they had made themselves right at home outside in the grass.

We’ve got ourselves some Outdoor Chickens.

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Chickies, Part II

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

We recently welcomed four more baby chicks to our home:

Look – this one has a beard!

These little guys (or girls. Hopefully girls) are Americuanas. My niece’s preschool class hatched them and we decided that we had room for four more. Since the weather around here has been so unpredictable (read: cold and crappy), they have taken up residence in the back room, where their older counterparts spent the first weeks of their life.

Speaking of the older chicks, I don’t think it’s really appropriate to call them “chicks” anymore:

I can totally see the argument for the whole “birds evolved from dinosaurs” thing. These creatures look especially raptor-like at dusk when you’re holding a pail of food and they cock their heads, getting ready to make their move.

They have adjusted quite well to their new living situation in the barn. It’s looking like we may get some nice weather this weekend, and we’re hoping to get the fence put up so the chickens can enjoy the sun during the day. If we ever get any, that is.

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Things That Have Happened To Me In The Last Week

Posted on May 1, 2012 by

1. I came home one evening to discover that carpenter ants had completely taken over the kitchen counter. I frantically began killing them with anything that was within my reach. Afterward, I contemplated Googling, “How to clean coffee maker after spraying with ant poison” and realized that I had perhaps gone a bit crazy with ant rage/heebie-jeebies.

- We didn’t eat in the kitchen that night.
- I haven’t used the coffee maker since.

2. I started digging up the sod in the side yard to make room for our garden. I thought this would be easier than using a roto-tiller. Bahahahah! WRONG! However, I’m hoping that all my hard work will pay off this summer when other suckers are still digging up clumps of grass that are trying to take back their place in the dirt.

3. Half of the little seedlings that were growing so well have keeled over and died after being transplanted. I understand now that little helpers should probably not help with this part of the gardening experience.

4. I read “The Hunger Games” in one weekend. I still haven’t decided if I think it’s “meh”.

5. I took two of my kids to the local Public Television station (where I used to work) so I could visit with old friends and they could spin the “Wheel of the Night” on night #8 of their annual action. My mom DVR’d their television debut at home and I hope to be able to use it as some kind of blackmail when they’re teenagers.

6. I came to terms with the fact that we are a “Eat Dinner at 7:00 or Later Every Night” family. No amount of planning or prep-work will change that.

7. My kids were introduced to an awesome little thing called “chores”. Laundry: you no longer own me!

8. I added more and more notes and ideas to my sketchbook – I hope to be able to share them with you soon!

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Baby Steps

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

I have always been the type of person who needs instant results. Patience is not a virtue of mine, and my parents will tell you that I have a hard time “sticking with things”. As a kid, this meant that after months of begging for a guitar for Christmas, I never picked it up again after I learned to play “Jingle Bells”. It also meant that the turtle, gerbils, hamsters and other various pets weren’t such good ideas. But to their credit, Mom and Dad didn’t say too much when I had one of my “big ideas”. They just let me go on and be excited about it for a little while. Well, if they did say anything, it was out of my earshot.

All this is a way for me to say that I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. I have a sketchbook full of ideas and notes, but little time to execute them. Every sketch seems like a brilliant idea until I think about how I will go about taking it to the next step. Then, it gets closed up into the darkness between the covers until the next time I’m brave enough to crack it open.

I’ve been talking with my kids about the importance of setting goals – small and large ones – and I think it may be time for me to practice what I preach. So, here for your viewing pleasure, is one of the small goals that was jotted down in the margins of my sketchbook – Make a calendar wallpaper for my iPhone:

I know it's not May yet, you guys.

Now, I’m sure you guys aren’t into magenta, orange and chickens as I am, but feel free to use this if you would like:

1. Click on the image.
2. Click to make sure you’re zoomed in all the way.
3. Right-click and save photo.
4. Send to your phone.
5. Save it on your phone and set as wallpaper.

If you’re not a big fan of oompa loompa chickens, you can easily make your own design:

1. Create a new document in Photoshop that is 640px x 960px.
2. Design your calendar/wallpaper.
3. Send to your phone.
4. Save it on your phone and set as wallpaper.

Happy wallpaper making ya crazies!

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Green Thumb: Take Three

Posted on April 23, 2012 by

For as much as I like to think I am a “maker”, there have always been two things that eluded me: sewing and gardening. I’ve decided that until I can find an exorcist for my sewing machine, it would be best to put it away for a little while. So, since it’s supposed to be spring, we decided to try our hand at gardening again this year.

My relationship with gardening can be summed up in one word: over-ambitious. I spend the cold winter days dreaming about fresh fruits and vegetables from my very own garden, scribbling down notes and making plans for rows and rows of produce while sitting by the fire. I buy little starter kits when spring fever hits in March and look at all the seed catalogs I can get my hands on.

After I jump in the gardening pool head-first, this is the exact sequence of events that happen:

1. Three quarters of my seedlings will be destroyed by cut-worms.

2. I plant more seedlings, because this happens every year, and I’m prepared for it.

3. I weed the garden religiously for a month, working on my tan.

4. The mosquitoes and deer flies take over in June and I lose interest in going outside without beekeeping equipment.

5. By the time I’m ready to brave the great outdoors, the beans have turned woody and the tomatoes have collapsed on top of themselves.

You may be thinking that this sounds incredibly wasteful, and you’d be right. Thats why this year, I’m going to give it an honest try – for real this time. We’ve started our seeds, and we’ve been counting down the days when we can transfer them to their new home outside.

Wish us luck…

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Moving Day

Posted on April 16, 2012 by

About a couple of weeks ago, I had to move the baby chicks from the back room to the office. I thought that this might be a good idea since after starting a fire in the wood stove one night during a cold snap, the chickens stuck their necks out as far as they could and started panting. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I went into this chicken thing half-cocked, but I was almost certain that panting was not normal chick behavior. So, into the office they went. This meant that I would now be sharing my “work” area with 11 peepers and a hamster (the hamster’s a story for another day).

Friday evening, I came home to an office floor covered in pine shavings and some agitated chickens – some of them with feathers missing. I wasn’t planning on moving them out to the barn until the weekend, but it was time for them to go. Besides, they’re currently going through an awkward teenage phase, and I was tired of their attitudes. And like most teenagers, it appears that they’re experimenting with a new “look”:

This one has decided to keep the fuzz until all of the feathers come in.

I gave the barn floor one last sweep, nailed a board over a couple of holes that were in the wall and then moved the chickes into their new home. At first, they stayed huddled together in a little ball, but after the kids brought in some worms that they had dug up from outside, they warmed up to their new place pretty quickly.

This is horribly embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t sleep well that night. I was worried that they would be too cold (I actually went out to the barn three times before I went to bed), and I was worried about this:

"No worries - I'll watch the chickens for you".

Now, we’ve enjoyed the company of your typical fox family in our area before, but we’ve never had any kind of vulnerable young poultry living outside before this spring. I can only imagine that chickens taste as delicious to foxes as they do to me, especially when they have babies to feed.

That's her baby in her mouth, not the neighbor's cat or anything.

So for now, we just hope that the barn is predator-proof and when we build the pen outside, we’ll do our best to make sure that is as well. I’m not against animals eating other animals or anything. I just want to make sure that the only creatures eating the chickens are the ones paying the feed bill.

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Words to Live By ~ 04.12.2012

Posted on April 13, 2012 by

I’ll be back this weekend with an update on the chickens and some artsy stuff, but for now, I have homemade ginger snaps fresh out of the oven that are calling my name.

Posted in Words to Live By | Leave a comment