No, friends, I am not dead but with both shoulders out of commission with rotator cuff injuries, there were times I wished I were. Anyway, that and bad weather and sheer laziness explain why I haven't written for six weeks. Oh, and the fact that there was nothing to write about!
That all changed today. In my down time we acquired 10 baby chicks. These chicks need a lot of TLC and are thriving as you can see. However, yesterday we moved them from the breeding coop to the big coop. What happened to our 9 chickens that had been occupying said coop? Well...
Chicken food is expensive and in order to justify that expense, the chickens have to lay eggs. From 9 chickens we were getting 2 or 3 eggs a day. This went on for several months. Finally it was time to declare that we no longer had chickens as pets. Then I had to discover which chickens were still laying. Not easy but eventually I caught 3 actually sitting in the laying boxes, marked them with Naavah's finger paints and the rest were doomed to be fertilizer. Dan did the actual dispatching of the hens; I did the crying.
But we moved on, sort of. After 3 weeks of chick sitting, I was ready to move them into the big coop. This meant displacing our 3 remaining hens to the small coop. Not as bad as it sounds since the weather is nice and our fowl range free all day anyway. So we made the swap - we chased chickens, blocked hen attacks and nurtured the hell out of the little ones.
Today I cleaned out the old coop (what a fun job; 3 weeks of chicken poo, etc.) and was trudging back into the garage for yet another trash bag when I spied the cat trap that Dan had stored in the other bay of the garage. Lo and behold, we had trapped a possum. And not just any possum but one who had left its weight in poo and wee all around and under the cage. Now I figure the genetic possum pool has just risen by several points because this one had obviously been born without any brain whatsoever. It must have snuck into the garage while I was cleaning the coop and darted into a cage that didn't even have any food to entice it. What a loser! Or was I the loser?
Anyway, I now had to finish the chicken coops and then dispatch the possum and clean the garage. And now I am going to have the world's longest, hottest shower. Drought be damned. I deserve it.
