Hello everyone!
I'm new here and new-ish (re-new?) at having chickens. We had plenty of them when I was younger - back when dinosaurs roamed the earth - because we were short on money and long on hunger. We had to grow it, raise it, catch it, or (Dad had to) hunt it in order to eat it.
Also, horrifying to many of you I'm sure, when I was in college I was a microbiology major and I worked in a research lab in which we used chickens in our experiments. Yes, to avoid anyone asking or really wanting to ask, we killed them as part of the procedure and, yes, it was done absolutely humanely and under extremely strict guidelines and protocol.
I think your OK, not easy to horrify us.
Anyway...
We recently moved from the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle to a town I like to call "Elk Sh**, Washington" but is more commonly known as Brinnon. It's about halfway between Shelton and Sequim on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula; the Hood Canal side. Yeah, from walking distance to everything I could possibly want to nearly 9 acres in the woods. Quite the change. "We" would be myself, my husband, our two dogs, and our cat.
I used to camp in Brinnon; beautiful area. Once I got lost on the highway and drove into Brinnon at about 60 mph, I realized where I was, as I saw the blue flashing lights from behind. The guy was very nice and just gave me directions straight out of town.
There are five chickens that are currently living in my pantry, much to my husband's horror. They are Millie, Lilly, Sasparilly, Dorothy, and Marietta; Silver Laced Wyandotte, Silver Cuckoo Marans, Canadian Chantecler Partridge, Splash Marans, and Easter Egger. My dad always named his chickens "Millie, Lilly, and Sasparilly" so that's for him. Dorothy is because she's a Splash Marans and 'Dot' is a nickname for Dorothy. Marietta is so named because she was huge compared to the other chicks and a well-known landmark in the city of Marietta, GA is a huge and vaguely chicken shaped structure at a Kentucky Fried Chicken that everyone uses as a landmark - everyone refers to it as "The Big Chicken."
I also have fulfilled a childhood dream - I have a duck! S-He is a 2 week old Rouen of as-yet-to-be-determined sex. I'm gambling that the duck is a female so I have named her the name I picked out for my fantasy duck when I was a kid - Jemima Puddleduck. That's the duck in the Peter Rabbit books. Oh, I had such plans for my pet duck when I was a kid. I was going to leash train it, take baths with it, let it sleep in my room... The latter being the most likely reason why I never had one. As an adult, I can't say that I have any plans to leash train Jemima Puddleduck and she certainly won't be sleeping in the bed as myself, my husband, and the two dogs are bodies enough, but I can't say with 100% certainty that I won't be taking her into the bath with me... At least once?
So. That's me. I'm a writer by profession so, clearly, I'm wordy. Can't tell the time in under a hundred words.
Cheers!
V.
