Maybe We Should Have Gone With Pat

I became a chicken lady this year. We have had chickens for several years but they were not MY chickens. My daughter had some and we enjoyed the eggs and my father in law had some that my daughter’s chickens shared a pen with. Early this year one of the two areas our primary egg chickens were in was decimated by a mysterious predator that took out almost all of the population. When the time came to order to chicks to try to replenish the weakened flock my husband asked if I would like to get some of my own. Of course who would want plain brown or white eggs when you could have blue ones?! So my request was for Ameracuna chicks and the order was placed. A few weeks later a chirping box arrived with lots of little fluff balls in it and I was officially converted to a crazy chicken lady!

I don’t remember what the original count was but I had 8 or 9 Ameracunas and there were about 25 Rhode Island and New Hampshire reds. The breeder also sends one “mystery” chick with the order. This is where Roulette comes in.

Named for a roulette wheel because we just didn’t know exactly what we would be getting, male or female, as well as breed. (Looking back now at all the ambiguity with Roulette, I can’t help but be reminded of the old Saturday Night Live skit about Pat.)  As the chicks grew and developed, the mystery one became more and more evident. Once my 6 surviving Ameracunas were big enough, we moved them and Roulette to the Manor my husband had so kindly had constructed for me while they were in the grow-out pen.

Roulette is the bossy one on top of the water container. 

Little Roulette was still a mystery, not just in breed but also in gender. Developing a commanding demeanor and a “fluffy butt”; bossy like a cockrel but filling out like a pullet, it was even more challenging. Finally we decided we would have to wait for a crow or an egg to make the call.

Ultimately, the decision was made to relocate Roulette to another pen when it and the Ameracuna cockrel became more and more aggressive to each other. I still was not convinced of the gender. After a couple of days in the temporary enclosure with another pullet chick, Roulette seemed to be adjusting well.

As I was leaving for work one morning, I stopped to check in and was saluted with a strangled but definite crow. I guess we have a cockrel. Now that he has been separated for a little over a week he is already filling out to be a huge and gorgeous rooster. I still have no definite determination on breed although Wyandotte seems most likely, or some mixture.

I wonder when the next order for chicks are going in. He will need some pullets and hens to protect now. I think I need to look over that catalog. Should I get some Buff Orphingtons or some Copper Marans? Oh decisions, decisions! Nah, I’ll just get both. 

Happiness is...

Growing up I had a Snoopy book that had a mustard yellow cover and was full of things to be happy about. Now I can’t tell you the first one except a simple line like the one above with an open ending. As a child I didn’t glean much from that, but now as an adult I see the brilliance of these three dots.

We are given a multitude of things to find happiness in every day, from the moment we glare at the clock and mumble under our breath about leaving the comfort of our warm bed to the frustration of unfinished work at the end of a long day, opportunities for happiness can appear in every aspect of our life. You can be happy in the moment of enjoying that warm bed and the opportunities this new day brings. A feeling of accomplishment in what has been done can give us happiness.

We have lots of opportunities to find happiness in our simple everyday activities. It is our choice to be happy in those moments and embrace them. For me happiness is often things in their simplest state, the most elemental things in life. It is not about money, position, things. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness didn’t have anything to do with the car you drive or the label on your clothes. What do your three dots contain?

Sometimes happiness is a warm blanket or a wet nose attached to a wagging tail. Maybe it is the joy of having friends you can trust… Even when they move that football. Use that open ending to find all those things we take for granted in our daily lives and find the happiness in them.  It’s a great day to be happy Charlie Brown! 

I Don’t Need a Dog

This is Ragnar, our furbaby (although my family thinks I focus a little more on the baby than the fur.) 

We didn’t set out to get a dog. Given the area we live in, a dog might not be the best addition to the livestock.  The chickens might not survive some breeds (previous experience) and smaller dogs might not survive the pasture. (At the time we had a donkey as well and he DID NOT like anything with four legs that was not him.) I had a conversation with a customer at work who was trying to rehome a cute little poodle. She really was cute but I’m not a poodle kind of girl. When I explained our circumstances she fully agreed that this was not the dog for us but we should still have one. Of course I reassured her that a dog of any kind was not in our future, just because... 

Literally, the next morning, I hear a sound like someone loudly “hooting” in our yard. We live very close to an industrial building with people and trucks coming in at 5 or 6 in the morning so this isn’t to be unexpected… Other than the proximity to our yard.   Now at this point of the morning, I am trying to get some sleep… and this “hooting” has woken me up. I’m not an angry person when I am woken up (but my husband tells a story of me slapping him when he once tried to wake me. Personally I don’t believe it but…) Anyway, I calmly walk to the door and open it prepared to inform whomever has deemed it necessary to make such a ruckus at that hour that they need to go home and rethink their life. Well, there was no one there, in fact the industrial yard was still dark, but sitting on the top step at our front door was a shivering, wet puppy making the most awful, pitiful sound. I ran and got an old towel and scooped him up, carried him to where my husband was getting ready to go to work and said something to the effect of “You are not going to believe what I found on the front step.”

The rest is history. Spoiled by me or not, for the record, I am not the one who fed him a hamburger for lunch that first day. Just saying…

But that hamburger patty smells so good.

God sends us what we need when we need it if we know how to see it. This little dog has fit so perfectly into our family and tendencies that we jokingly say he was created just for us. The last couple of years have been tough but dogs offer us comfort, support and unconditional love in response to somehow knowing when we hurt, when we are sick, when things are stressed, sometimes before we even see it ourselves. So yes, I may have thought we didn’t need a dog but I think someone else thought otherwise.

I wonder if he has had his treat yet tonight…

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

Today is November 1^st and according to the rest of my writing family (my daughter specifically) it is the first day of Nano Rhymo (or at least that is what I think she calls it). This apparently has something to do with challenging yourself to having a set number of words to write in a book each day with the goal of being finished with it at the end of the month and ready for editing… That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. I’m not really a writer. (Wait! I have a blog! Does that mean I am a writer???) I guess that’s where the practicing comes in.

My life has been a series of attempts to be more involved, more organized, more focused, more anything really… As a form of a mid-life crisis I have realized that no real growth can happen without a certain amount of risk. I am an ISFJ. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Meyers-Briggs but that makes me a homebody. Really, I am happiest in my safe little bubble not letting most people know what my truest inner thoughts are. This is WAY outside my safe little bubble! I might express a true opinion that might offend someone… A huge part of my thought process is to measure my opinions against others so I don’t offend anyone… In other words I don’t share controversial opinions.

There is a phrase about everyone’s possession of opinions and I think it is a pretty accurate assessment in some cases. So I won’t be sharing anything controversial here. Just awesome adventures with the family, cool things that happen on the farm, other credited ideas I think are neat, possibly some home made products in the future, but for now… Just me finding a way to step out into my own personal twilight zone.

Hey K! Does just over 300 words for today get me started?