The Old Folks Home

[ronott1]

Found a pecked chick in the brooders at my favorite feed store yesterday. They are very attentive but had been very busy. She is an Ideal 236. Ideal hatchery version of Leghorn cross super white egg layer. I took her to the front and got asked to take her. They really don't have the means to treat and separate her. Soooo now I have a very LOUD single chick that doesn't really fit my program. I have 5 wk old barnevelders in the outside baby pen and marans hatching in 4 days. It will have to work itself out because this old softly will keep her.

Put a mirror in with her. They think they have company that way.

 

[Arielle]

I'm sorry Bunnylady, no offense, but I gotta share my pictures of my babies that I just got from Wisher last night! 9 Easter Eggers and 6 Black Orpingtons! My first ever chickens!

AWWWWWWWWWW

 

[Dragonfly216]

oooohh ahhhh. nice fluffsters

you are welcome to come on over, we will find room.

Thank you! And.........

Hooray! Field trip permission slip had been signed!

 

[Wisher1000]

Yay! Chick pics! Thanks for posting Dragonfly, keep us updated on their progress.

 

[IttyBiddyRedHen]

Why do I have an all of the sudden craving for chocolate bunnies

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Your garden sounds great Oz. Sounds like you're experimenting a little.
I wish I had help in the garden. Oh wait, I do. For the first time in decades I have a helper. My apprentice started last week. He's coming again tomorrow. We probably won't get much digging done, It's dropping into the teens tonight.
Thursday he turned all the compost beds, we changed soil and planted new chicken pasture in one of the runs, cleaned out the asparagus, strawberry and herb beds and prepped a new potato bed. That's the most I can remember getting done in one day in a long time.
My yard and gardens, may look presentable again this year. It's been a long time since I could say that.

==========================

My daughter has been texting me all morning. She's in Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh city) for 2 days. She went to the war remnants museum and the reunification palace and going to the cu chi tunnels tomorrow.
She said the museum was pretty one sided, as expected. She said the agent orange displays, tanks, planes and helicopters were interesting and that Saigon is a very cool city.


Apparently she's planning on celebrating St. Patrick's day there. She posted - "MUST FIND IRISH FRIENDS BY MONDAY - Flo, Rob, where you at?"

I can't believe that by the most unimaginable stroke of good fortune I ended up in Germany doing military intelligence (I know, oxymoron) instead of Vietnam in infantry after being drafted in 1972.
I was in Ft. Polk Louisiana for infantry AIT with orders for Vietnam. There were about 500 soldiers in an auditorium for orientation. While we listened to all the instructions, several other soldiers walked around looking at everyone's records. When they were done, they called out 6 names. I was one of the 6. When they took us to a side room they told us the war was about to be de-escalated and they were going to need more clerks in the future. They also told us the we 6 had the highest test scores and we had the option to become clerk typists instead of infantry. But since our orders were for infantry, we could complete them if we wanted to go to Vietnam.
I said, "you've got yourself a new clerk."

ETA
The training was intense. They taught me to use a pencil, an eraser, a rubber stamp, a stapler and on very rare occasions, a pen. There wasn't a lot of typing but I already knew how to type.
Basically there was no training. They just put each of us to work in the Basic Training records wing of the AG building. Each clerk was responsible for all the records of all the soldiers in a basic training company, which at the time was about 200. It was like working a regular office job except for the OD green suit. About half of the people in the office were civilians. While working there I had no regular duty like KP or guard duty. We did occasionally have to do prisoner guard where we were given a loaded M16, taken by bus to prison and escorted a prisoner to either the hospital or payroll.
While there, we had about an inch or less of a very wet snow. Something that was meaningless for a northerner. The civilians were terrified. They asked all the soldiers if we knew how to drive in snow. Each of a was assigned a civilian to drive home in their car, return to base and drive back in the morning to pick them up. Really one of the strangest tasks I've ever had.
The offices shut down for the Christmas/New Years holidays and since I had just pulled prisoner guard, I knew no one would be looking for me for about 10 days. I typed and singned my own leave papers and went home for the holidays.
Little did I know that orders were being cut for me at the same time to be transferred to Germany. When I got back from my self appointed vacation, someone asked what I was doing there? They had heard I was headed to Germany. I searched the offices high and low and found a stack of my transfer orders in a trash can. I was supposed to be in Fort Bragg North Carolina in 4 days. It took me 2 days running, taking taxis, and busses between North Fort and South Fort clearing out of all the offices. You can't leave until you have verified you have no library books out, nothing from the recreation centers, clear medical, dental, payroll - about 20 things all together.
Having gone into OJT instead of infantry, none of my records made it to where they were supposed to be. They found my medical records under a spare tire in the back of a van. Dental records didn't exist. They gave me a manila folder with a generic layout of a human dental map. All blank.
I went back home for 1 day before going overseas. I went home once for 2 weeks during the next 2 years.
I realize I was a bit dishonest but, as a draftee, from my perspective they had kidnapped me.

I saved my last month of leave to travel. I was planning on taking a military hop to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and planned to hitchhike and take busses. I wanted to see Mt. Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria.
The fighting between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus cancelled all flights over the Mediterranean so I went to Italy instead and started near the alps and worked my way all through to Naples.

When I got out of the Army, the paperwork from that last month never caught up with me and the 10 days that I stole the first Christmas weren't on record either so I got paid for 40 days leave that they didn't know I took.

 

[ozexpat]

@ChickenCanoe I am glad your help has arrived. The day I first "outsourced" some heavy labor was a revelation. I have no doubt the garden will look great.

Its fun experimenting to see what grows and the bugs that come to destroy it.

We are trying to keep it 100% organic.

 

[Bunnylady]

I gotta share my pictures of my babies that I just got from Wisher last night! 9 Easter Eggers and 6 Black Orpingtons! My first ever chickens!

Don't you love the chipmunk stripes and bushy little beards on the EE's?

Uh, oh. Looks like my fuzz filter isn't working. Better call "technical support" stat!

 

[CanuckBock]

OMG! You are so right! If I decide to watch a little extra tv or crochet a little longer than our usual head to bed time, Zeta will sit and stare me down, then she will pace from the livng room to the bed room and huff and puff like nobody's business! She won't go to bed with out me. She is my velcro dog for sure!

My Farmy type Gran got herself a big ol' white poodle she called "Toby." When it was bedtime, that dog would nag her, go up and down the stairs to the bedroom, stand at the top of the stairs and give her l00ks of "Well? You stay up and all you are going to do is REGRET it! BEDTIME already!"

Pets fill a home with love...fill a person with a reason to hurry on home to put another log in the stove for the puppers...dogs SO desire our companionship (well sure they want something outta the relationship but we ALL gotta EAT and keep the home fires burning, eh?).

When we go to the grocery and come home with the new provisions...dogs think we are the BEST HUNTERS ever.

"Lookit what they bagged in one excursion!!!? Chose the right cave to co-habit!"​

​

CAVE DOGS - Fixs and Foamy in one of the "igloos" strategically placed around...for warm paw waiting when I am doing chores.​

When society stops keeping "pets," then I might panic that the human race has lost ALL its compassion and empathy for other living beings. I would gladly live under a bridge if the only alternative was to be dogless.

When it went up for sale, my job was 10.5 hours a day, 6 days a week. I couldn't afford it and another place to live which I would have needed since the farm was 100 miles from my job, much too far to commute, so I had to let it go. It was 100 acres, about half pasture and half forest. It had a year round stream through it, several 3 season streams, several springs and a 3 acre pond stocked with a big variety of fish.

AGH...you know, it sounds SO delish...not just "a river runs thru it" but three streams, springs, with a big ol' PONDaloosa ...Icrumba!

One thing about NOT buying a historic farm stead...sometimes the placement of things can be not where you want them. If you have to do any renos or upgrades...we have mostly found that building from scratch is faster and more economical. We tore the badly designed woodshed down last spring, salvaged what we were able and that in itself took up a fair amount of energy and TIME...resources used up before we could even BEGIN the new building... Sometimes bare land is a bargain...sometimes land with amenities you are not overly attached to is better than inheriting the responsibility to "keep the quaintness and historic relevance" alive. The few run down buildings we had when we bought, we refurbished right away. Laugh, the garage had half a new roof on it...the side you could see--the off side had shingles so curled, bats could fly thru...the pump house was painted on the three sides you could view from the house, and three year's of Xmas trees were tossed into the remnants of an ancient garden plot--I also found the three poor living tree stumps that were harvested.... After we got the outbuildings sorted out, the new ones we built were a lot more fun, wide open to ideas of what WE wanted them to be. We flooded in 2005 (Father's Day flood of the century!), three feet of water perculated UP outta the ground after a snowy winter, rainy spring, and a succession of five days of six inches of rain each day. Every single building was higher than the flood waters...made us feel really good about our sense of planning...reality was we simply had crap house luck and something was looking out for our wellbeings!

All I figure sometimes is that things line up for a reason; good/ bad, we can't predict the future. You coulda taken on the fam farm, done the big commute (know lots here that think nothing of living in Edmonton and driving to Calgary for a movie in the evening...distance of 280 K or 174 miles) and over the YEARS gotten so fatigued you crashed when you shoulda zagged. Ended up permanently injured so you could not keep the place or simply just dead. Just never know but I do feel twinge of "what if" because there is "no place like home...."

NO matter, can't cry over the spilt milk now. Rick always says, "happiness is right behind your eyes!" so all you can do is just keep up the pursuit of running willy nilly insanely giddy after happiness.

I know what kind of "intervention" I'd get around here . . . pics of chickies, suggestions for types of incubators, plans for coops, offers of hatching eggs.. . .

Well if you were not slightly weakened and wobbly at the knees at the sight of fuzz butts...well we would be overly envious of your stellar SELF-control. Of which, I have zero resistance to.

Make alot of us feel bad about ourselves if you could resist them peeps. By being slightly weak, we all welcome you as a wise but slightly feeble OLD FOLK person! Lots of practise knowing yourself and your vices. Old people are mostly different than the whippersnappers because we KNOW when to fold them and walk (or is that stagger?) away with dignity...

Fools rush in, where wise old folks fear to tread.​

Speaking of fools...

Rick comes home, I am out stacking birch splits, me and the dogs. I go in to see how his day was and he tells me he found me "two more pieces of firewood." "Hmm, nice, just what I want, more firewood! Such a shortage."

So I ask him, "Is it wet or dry." He says, "Dry! They are still in the back of the truck and I need to get them out." "OK Honey..." Course I forget after doing evening chores, making lunch, dinner, dog dins, shoveling food into my gob. I go out one last time to shut up a run door on the Duece Coop because one of the hens didn't want to go in quite when I was there. Trudge inside and Rick says, "Did you remember the two pieces of firewood in the truck?" <<Curses>> "No dear!" (little over killed on FIREWOOD). So on goes the shoes, forget the coat, I might do the funky chicken trying to line my arms up with the sleeves...so me and the Fix go out to the truck. May as well be a million miles away but it is not! Just me being old, reTIRED, and crusty.

Dark by now...I peer into the pickup box and look..."What the ???" At first the one piece looks like a road kill lump of a bird carcass or? Did he find an injured Prairie Chicken that he thought I might save? Told you I was tired...I blink a few times and look in the dim (nitwit) light (we have a ton of flashlights, eh?) and realize, "OK, it is safe to reach in and pull them out."

This is what mah Hero had brought home for me yesterday.

​

Pretty cute. It's WOOD but never gonna be burnt in a fire!

He's brought me home rocks (many rocks...so many if I ever lose a few marbles, I can replenish with roundy rocks right here at home--no FEAR!). I have been gifted with petrified wood (even a huge stump--no idea how he wrangled that on home...but when your man commands the moon and the stars...what's a little tiff with gravity?), brought home rocks that look like cheese, round hunks of granite...ones that sparkle in the sunshine...

SPARKLIES, SHINY, CHROMY...​

​

I go rock hounding every chance I get...love quarries for pretty things lots of people simply over look, like ROCKS. There ARE those of us who are easily amused...I know!

This one is pinky and has a rather "wheat" like pattern...​

I'm a real sucker for heart shapes...so easy to find these in rocks.


​

Our fire pit is surrounded by silly widdle rockies I've picked or been given. Funny, there are alot of "underground" ROCK people. Don't go around announcing they like rocks, but if someone steps up and admits to the inkling, they are on board too.

​

Around the Mandarin Building, I've displayed quite a few interesting rocks. Uh Hummmmm....that's me meditating in my ZEN garden...more like napping!!

​

​

What I liked about this find (in the quarry where we hauled home the gravel for the parking building base), looks to me like an EGG with the shell coming off--so I collected up all the pieces and it would make a fine puzzle for putting back together...yeh yeh. I know, leave me to my dementia...taken a lot of years to get like this...or maybe one too many falls on ice in the bird yard...rattled me mind to mushy mush?

Quote:
So this time Rick brought me wood, gnarly wood. I figure without too much hesitation and energy...I can fashion me a bowling ball and a Bronze Age mace...a club.

There we be...me and my hunting pack of dawgs, my bowling ball and mace...yeh, we'll be a force to contend with...thank heavens there are three perimeter fences in place here. Those fences we have installed, it is not like many believe, to keep things OUT...more to keep things IN. Rick has threatened to get really old and wander about scaring the neighbourhood from the comforts of his sanctuary. Never EVER ponder why the push the first year here was to plant shelterbelts...plenty of caragana, spruce, lilac...have them grow up big, thick and tall to shield the views inside, spare the innocents of the passers-by!

OH MY EYES...it BURNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
​

Doggone & Chicken UP!

Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada

 

[Dragonfly216]

 [/quote]
Don't you love the chipmunk stripes and bushy little beards on the EE's?
















Uh, oh. Looks like my fuzz filter isn't working. Better call "technical support" stat!
[/quote]

Oh man, I was just taking about how they look like cute little chipmunks! And I saw the parents, the little beard is funny! I'm really excited about my multi colored eggs!