I'll tell you from whence the Beekissed came....way back when I first joined my first forum it was on beekeeping because I was really researching getting bees~which I eventually obtained, but that's another story. I had to come up with a name that went along with the forum...seemed like the right thing to do. I had a line of lip balms that I made and sold along with soaps, sugar scrubs, etc., that had beeswax as the base and the lip balms were called Beekissed because I loved the double entandre of bee/be + kissed for a lip balm...even had a little bee on the label.
Well...in the interest of simplicity with a nod towards encroaching senility, I just kept the same screen name for every forum I joined thereafter so I wouldn't have to remember all these different log in names. When I joined here it sort of worked well with chicken beaks(beeks~beekeepers refer to themselves as "beeks", which I found amusing) as well, so Beekissed~though I would never kiss a chicken's beak~seemed like it worked here also.
If I sound like some of the farmers you know it's probably because I was raised roughin' it on a homestead, lived in a two room log cabin, no utilities, carried water from a spring and fed/watered livestock before walking a mile out to the hard road to catch the bus for school(yes, it just happened to be uphill both ways...I live in WV, for heaven's sake!). I started helping to keep and butcher chickens at the age of 10(my sisters just "couldn't do it" and menfolk didn't do that where I lived) when we first moved on the land and helping skin/process deer from then also....we worked pretty much all the time to procure food for the family and lived out of the preserved food cellar all winter, so the luxury of keeping animals for pets just wasn't there.
After living like that through my formative years, you can imagine how little understanding I have of babying chickens and livestock around, with not eating them(of course you EAT them...if you don't eat them you go hungry!) and with worrying about every little aspect of their living outdoors~it's where they were born to live.
Could be why I sound like a man sometimes...I worked like a man from when I was a little girl and that hasn't changed much now that I'm an old girl.
This was the first cabin we built...in 3 wks time with chainsaws and axes for tools(no electricity there until I was well into my 20s). That's my mother. I had a hand on every log of both cabins we built...and pretty much of the firewood we had to burn. Cooked on a wood cookstove both winter and summer.
And here's the second log cabin built in the same way but in more time, years later after the land was all cleared and I was in my teens.
Now, after that totally obscure and probably unnecessary walk down memory lane, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming!
I enjoyed hearing that, and seeing the pictures. Thanks for sharing.