I'm putting this here on the Atlas thread because it covers all the chickens in the barn and an additional subject. Funny, that lately, I've been catching myself calling Angus by Atlas's name. I miss that old boy, he was always a good one.
Bash may be gone when the sun comes up. He is the toughest old guy I've ever seen and the Brahma era will have come to a complete end. The only thing I could get him to eat in the last week was some sort of grass with wide blades-there are clumps here and there that still felt tender. I picked a cluster of it and tore it into small pieces and piled it in front of him. He ate that with more relish than I've seen him look at anything, even soldier fly larvae. He did begin drinking again, but yesterday, he vehemently refused water from a dropper. He's warm and safe and hearing the sounds in the coop and after the way he looked last night, I expect to bury him today. Gonna be a cold one and no one is going outside.
I had moved Bash into the hospital cage so he would be under his ceramic heat bulb in a more contained space. He didn't need all that room where he was and a higher vantage point would allow him to see into a couple of the other pens. But, it's his time.
I moved all the birds into different pens, more in keeping with the size of the group. Mace, Zara, Maddie and Jill moved into the newly cleaned out pen where Bash had been. Angus and his three moved into the 8x8 pen that used to belong to the Brahmas and later, Mace and the old BRs. And the Dirty Dozen who actually constitute an even dozen again after Julie's demise, are back in their 8x9 pen. The one they were in has to be cleaned out. So I've freed up a large pen now.
Amazon has done weird things with my books. When I published Irises in paperback two days ago, they put it up on a different product page from the e-book and listed it at a price a buck higher than I have it in my listing; it's Draft2Digital's recommended price, the aggregator where I published all of them, but I had lowered it before releasing it for publication, grrr. And when I went to the product page for my first book, the Roots, Rocks & Feathers memoir to see if they'd separated the e-book from the print-on-demand book for some reason, the paperback is completely missing. I escalated it to the higher ups, but still waiting for
Amazon to make my author page live so I can have an in with those folks and not just D2D. This is an
Amazon issue, I'm sure, but you can't sell a book that no one can find. The print version of RR&F is still on Barnes & Noble, though. Crazy stuff over the holidays and not many around to solve problems. I hope when I see the final version of Irises, that at least they didn't mess it up at the printer and fail to incorporate my last changes/corrections. At least the e-book is still available and the both versions of Irises is available, albeit listed separately from each other.
I don't enjoy this time of year because my life is interrupted by a huge change in routine and everyone is distracted, no business as usual unless
Amazon messing up
is business as usual. They make authors jump through hoops with all their rules, but when we want them to jump, no one's home, LOL. I'm sure it will be sorted out, but not likely before this entire holiday period is finally done. I'll be finished with the first draft of the second book in the series soon and after editing, send it to a couple of beta readers to get first impressions from a representative group of customers. Hopefully, it will be published in early spring, but I am not making any bets.
ADDING LATER: Bash was still alive when I went to the barn, but not by much. His eyes were open and his head was up, but he's ready to go. Even with zero muscle on his body, he looks so big in that cage. This is the hardest aspect of raising chickens, especially over an extended period of your life. So many come and go and my RIP list is very long, over 100 individuals and that doesn't even count the ones who went to live and die elsewhere. I remember most all of the names on the list, can picture them in my mind, but some made a massive impression on the both of us, like our Sebastian. All of you who have done this for any length of time understand. Non-chicken people would look at me as if I had two heads if I tried to say any of this in regular company.
