Edited to add: This made me cackle when Fred emailed me the link earlier. If you watch it, make sure your sound is on!
Fred’s got a webcam pointed at the eggs, which have begun to hatch. At the moment, one has hatched and wanders into camera view every now and again. Hopefully the others will start hatching soon!
Announcement: The Crooked Acres house tour some of you have been asking about will be up (on its own page) Monday. I’ve taken the pictures and resized them, now I have to put them in order and write captions. I think there are close to 100 pictures, and I think there are more outside pictures than inside!
Anyway, I promise. Unless there’s some sort of catastrophe this weekend, I’ll be linking that on Monday and if I don’t, then I forgot and someone remind me, eh?
When I go out to collect eggs, usually around midmorning (and toss some cracked corn to the chickens), there’s occasionally a chicken sitting in a nesting box. Sometimes they’ve already laid an egg and are just resting from the effort (or so I assume) and sometimes they haven’t yet laid their egg. Most of them just look at me when I reach under them to grab their egg, but there’s this one Rhode Island Red who takes serious offense to my attempts to retrieve her egg. She scares me a little, with the noises that she makes, because I don’t like to be pecked by the damn chickens.
The other day, I happened to have the camera with me, so I made a movie. Enjoy the obnoxiousness. (The movie probably would have been a little less herky-jerky if one hand hadn’t been holding the bottom of my shirt out to hold the eggs I’d collected. I forgot to take the egg basket out with me, of course.)
Note to Fred: I NEED a Flip Video!
The second shirt makes you look like one of the sentry guards on Gomer Pyle USMC. And as for that picture; it seems to me that it was seen on an older one of your sites some time ago.
I’ll have to Google around to find a sentry guard picture to see what that looks like – or maybe I don’t want to know!
I’ve never used that picture before and it’s not really “older” since it was taken on August 24th, but it’s entirely possible there was a similar picture (with a too-tight button-up shirt) in the past. I took a quick look through the pictures on my hard drive and didn’t see anything similar, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that I didn’t save it on my hard drive.
Snort! Am I the only one who thinks you (in the last pic) and Zoe have exactly the same expressions on your faces? LOVE IT!
Well, now that you mention it….
(I have no idea why that picture came out in black and white!)
My cat Bubba has to get a steroid shot too. He licks the base of his tail until it’s a HUGE raw spot. Then he gets all moody and starts trying to have sex with his sissy, Missy Mamas. I tell you…being a cat parent is hard!
I am imagining a cat with a raw spot at the base of his tail, twitching his tail and deciding that the ONLY thing that will make him feel better is if he gets it on with his sister, and the mental image is making me laaaaaaaugh.
I thought you were going to say you bought that fugly painting! I was glad to hear you thought it was ugly too.
Oh, no way on earth I’d buy that thing. I just kept going back and looking at it because I was so amazed that someone painted it, and that the antique store thinks they’ll sell it (and they probably will!), and that someone might buy it. If it was ugly in an interesting way or a funny way, I might consider it, but no. That thing is just ugly in an ugly way.
The Silkie will grow up to be seriously beautiful if it looks like the one on your link. It also says it has black flesh! Do you think that combination will result in a long and happy life at Crooked Acres? When I’m eating chicken breasts I wouldn’t be too enthused with black meat.
Actually, the Silkie wasn’t really bought to be a meat chicken. Silkies tend to be small, and we figured that the Silkie, along with the Rock Star and the Featherheads, will most likely have a long and happy life. They’re so small that they’re not really worth eating (also, the black flesh of the Silkie would be off-putting, to say the least) and we didn’t think they’d be much on the providing-eggs front (though the Featherheads are laying pretty regularly, tiny white eggs about half the size any of the other girls lay), so we consider them entertainment.
They’re very entertaining, especially when the Featherheads’ feathers grow to cover their eyes (we try to trim them back regularly) and they can’t see anything. When that happens, and then we go out with treats for them (and you KNOW the damn chickens get a treat at least once a day!) and the rest of the chickens are squawking excitedly, the Featherheads have this particular “WHAT TREAT? I DON’T SEE ANY TREAT IS THERE TREATS PLEASE GOD HELP ME I DON’T SEE ANY TREAT” shriek that goes through your brain like a spike.
Do you still use your Roomba? You haven’t mentioned it for a while and I was just wondering since you talk about vacuuming – just not specifically with the Roomba. I bought one at the beginning of summer and love it, now I need a robot to do my laundry and cooking.
I use my Roomba regularly, at least three times a week. I tend to use it mostly in the kitchen, laundry room, and dining room, though I run it occasionally in the bedrooms because it’s particularly good at cleaning under the beds so I don’t have to. The batteries in the virtual walls died in the past few days, and I started the Roomba in the kitchen and went to run errands. When I got home, I found that it had run rogue – since there were no virtual walls to stop it – went into the laundry room for a few minutes, did a spin around the dining room and then went down the hallway and perhaps into the front room for a while before coming to a stop in the guest bedroom.
I do love the hell out of my Roomba. It doesn’t do a spotless job, but it certainly keeps the mess in the kitchen to a manageable level so I don’t have to vacuum every day of the week!
While I can and do wholeheartedly agree with “never enough small glass bowls,” I AM curious as to whether or not there’s ever “enough chickens.” IS there such a thing on Crooked Acres?
Honestly, I don’t know. I feel like we might be getting to that point, especially with the 20 eggs that are due to hatch in the next few days. Fred has told me twice in the past week that in his mind the perfect amount of chickens to get us through a year would be 100, but I’ll be damned if I can remember his reasoning. He counted chickens last week and came up with 47, so… I guess we’re halfway to our goal?
Seriously, if we get too many more chickens I’m thinking we might want to just give up and fence in the back forty for them so they’ll have enough room!
**Once I was at a museum and my husband asked if we could do something (I can’t even remember what) and I responded, “Okey Dokey Pokey!” A woman spun around and strongly expressed her disgust that I said that, and to a grown man! It still makes me smile to think that I could make someone soooo affronted!**
What happened next?! What did you do?!!
Yeah, Leslie. What did you do?
Hey Robyn. Just wondering if you were planning on watching True Blood on HBO? I started reading the Sookie Stackhouse series b/c of you and I loved it! I’m so excited for the show! And Anna Paquin looks just like the Sookie I had pictured in my head…weird.
Not only did I watch the first episode, Fred was even willing to watch it with me! He loves vampires. I liked it a lot, and though I didn’t think Anna Paquin looked like Sookie to me before I watched the show, I’ve since changed my mind and I think she looks just like Sookie. Funny how that happens, isn’t it? I also didn’t think – from seeing the commercials for the show – that the guy playing Bill was all that hot.
I’ve changed my mind about that, too.
Fred didn’t like the show nearly as much as I did – he would like some violent deaths, please – but since the first episode ended on a good cliffhanger, he’s willing to keep watching it.
On the whole bitey cat issue (most of them seem to do it) I heard a theory once that our petting them can cause static electricity, like when you brush your hair in the winter and it stands on end and that even though we can’t feel the electricity cats can because they are more sensitive and they are biting us because they’re getting little shocks and want it to stop. I have pet my cat during the poor excuse for winter we have here in Florida, in bed at night and sparks fly off her fur which freaks her out. It could be that or it could be that cats are just bossy and like everything on their own terms.
I think that “Cats are bossy and like everything on their own terms” pretty much covers, well, EVERYTHING when it comes to cats!
Your new pigs are so much cleaner and pinker than the last two. Is it because they’re new, or because they’re girly-pigs, or some other reason I can’t think of? I guess maybe this is a question for Fred.
I’ve noticed that they aren’t getting as dirty as the boy pigs did. I thought that maybe it was because it wasn’t as hot, but it’s been pretty hot over the last few days, and the girls do go into the wallow to cool off (though they don’t hang out in the wallow; they just get in, get wet, get out), but they don’t roll around in the mud. The boys used to get absolutely caked with mud, and the girls really don’t. Maybe they’re girly-girls and just don’t like to get super messy!
Did you know that spiders have six to eight eyes? That’s four to six more than are showing up on your scary spider! I KNOW! Creeps me out just thinking about it.
The day comes that I come face-to-face with a spider and see six to eight glowing eyes glaring at me is probably the day Fred finds me face-down on the lawn, dead of a heart attack. I don’t like to think of spiders having that many eyes. WHY do they need so many eyes? NO ONE needs six to eight eyes, that’s just a crime against nature!
Season 3 [of The L Word] was a rough one for me, and the fourth season is really, really boring so far. (I hate Jenny so much. I want to beat her.) I just downloaded the fifth season, but am taking a break from the show mid-season 4 because…ugh. (I had to take a break after the third season too.) So I’m watching “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” which…whoa. Why are 16-year-olds having sex? Am I baffled by this because I’m not an American?
I think, unfortunately, that a lot of American 16 year-olds are having sex these days. I don’t know that they’re having as much sex in real life as they’re having on TV (or perhaps I’m just an optimist), but they’re definitely having sex.
I’m sure that if they increased the amount of abstinence-only sex education available to teens, premarital sex would stop, like, immediately. Ahem.
(If I might quote the brilliant Donna Martin regarding teaching your children about safe sex, “If you build a pool, and you know your kids are going to swim, you can build all the fences you want. But if you know they’re going to jump in the pool, don’t you think you should teach your kids how to swim?” Donna Martin? Totally graduated!)
Okay, I got a bit off the subject, I guess. This “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” show: should I be watching it?
I’m going to pimp out your comments and request people click and go to my site. Partly for the two tributes I’ve done but even more so to click on the link at the end of my 2nd post to go to the page that will have the link to Project 2,996. And check out the other tributes.
Maybe some of you will be willing to do your own tribute. There’s still so many names out there that need doing.
My monkeys are going to the pet store today. ::Sob::
“You mean someone’s going to adopt me and take me home and spoil me rotten? SUCKERS!”
Kara will be staying here until the huge number of kittens have (hopefully) moved on through and been adopted. I’ll be curious to see if not having the kittens around will make her spend more time downstairs, because most of the time she and the babies have been hanging out upstairs with the occasional foray downstairs to look around.
Local readers, if you’re in the market for a cat or dog, PetSm@rt on Univ3rsity Drive is having an Adoptathon all weekend. Zoe and Kaylee will be there for that (and then staying on if they’re not adopted, since they’ll be in a permanent cage) (but hopefully they’ll be adopted this weekend!!!), and other local shelters will, I believe, have animals available as well.
Here’s a short movie starring Kaylee and Zoe (with Kara in the background). They think the brush is made for biting, not brushing.
Previously
2007: Human eggs, scrambled, taste just a bit too humany, if you ask me.
2006: I sense I’m being royally fucking screwed over by the goddamn advantage-taking photographer. Who’s probably lighting his cigars with $100 bills as he drives around in his limo.
2005: Ants ain’t fuckin’ welcome here, if you hadn’t guessed.
2004: No entry.
2003: What above the Bumsen is up with that?
2002: It’s the front yard or bust, baby.
2001: That’s pretty much how we all felt.
2000: That’s the price of getting old, my friends.