OmegaMom

OmegaDotter bounced in the garage door, letting it slam shut behind her, kicked off her shoes, pulled off her jacket, tossed her book bag on the futon and was talking a mile a minute.

“Mom!  Mom, Joey’s family next door is moving out, and they want to sell the goat, can we buy the goat, please, please, I promise I’ll take care of it and it needs a home, puh-leeeeeze!”

Last fall, Joey’s family moved into the house next door.  We were delighted; the people who had lived there before had Mean Dogs that would chase me and the dotter as we walked back from the bus stop, that had invaded our other next door neighbor’s yard and chewed up one of their dogs, and would regularly raid our garbage can.  They also didn’t clean their yard at all, so it was totally overgrown and weedy—they didn’t even pick up the deck fencing that had fallen down onto the former lawn.  We were so glad to see that family go!  But Joey was a classmate of the dotter’s, he had brothers, they were a quiet(ish) family, and they cleaned up the property right away so it looked…decent…again.

And they bought a goat, Dottie.  The idea, I suppose, was that in time, as she grew, they could milk her.  The dotter was charmed.

At odd times during the winter, I’d be sitting in the dotter’s bedroom reading after we had done our bedtime routine, and hear her going “Maa-aah-aaah!  Maa-aah-aaaah!”  It would startle me until I remembered:  There’s a goat next door.  I’d worry vaguely about how she was doing in the cold, but other than that she didn’t impinge upon my life.

Until yesterday.

“No.  No goat!” I said.

“Moooom!  Puh-leeze!”

“NO GOAT.”  I said.

“Why not?!”

“Because I said so.”  Oh, what a great comeback!

She kept tossing various reasons why we should buy the goat, then reverted to calling me a meanyhead, and then her flighty attention got caught by something else and the subject was dropped.

We bought the first chickens after a bout of OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trying to wheedle me into a goat.  This came after years of OmegaDad trying to wheedle me into a llama.  No llamas, I said for years.  No goats! I reiterated when that particular flight of fancy caught their mutual attention.  But when they finally scaled back to something more reasonable—to wit, chickens—I finally said yes.

A goat, I know, would end up being Yet Another Responsibility.  Yet Another Animal to care for during those long, dark, icy cold winter days and nights.  Yet Another Reason to emerge from the warm house and go trudging across the snowpacked back yard.  Yet Another Expense in terms of food and shelter.  And, oh Kozmik All above use, Yet Another Reason for Vet Bills!

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter did not mention the goat to her father.  But I knew it would come soon, so at bedtime, when I had crawled into bed and snuggled up against OmegaDad in the dark, I muttered, “Are you awake?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Joey’s family is moving out and they want to sell their goat.  NO.”  I said.

There was a silence for a moment, then he turned to face me in the darkness.  “Wait a minute.  I’m confused.  If it’s ‘NO’, then why are you telling me about it?!”

“Because I know that the dotter will try the classic end run where she asks you because she knows you’ll say ‘Yes’.  And I’m saying ‘No’.”

“I thought you were telling me because you wanted the goat.”

“NO!  I don’t want the goat!”  O panic.  No, no, NO, that’s not what I meant!

“Oh.  Okay.”  He turned back over and snuggled up against me again.

Then, in the dark, he sharply turned his head back towards me, in a silent version of a comic, “Are you sure?!”

I snickered.

He did it again, as if to say, “Now, y’know, a goat would be cool!”  I snickered again and poked him in the back.  He did it one final time, and I whapped him gently on the head.  “Enough!  No goat!”

We fell asleep.

Goatless.  Thank heavens.

This past fall and winter, we had two hens die, so now that it is springtime, the husband’s thoughts lightly turned to—of course—new baby chicks.  So, this fine Easter weekend morning, OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trekked off to the local hatchery and brought back a Belgian Bearded d’Uccle Bantam (mille fleurs variety) and a Frizzle, both about two weeks old.  We now have Miss Frizzle:

And Millie:

They are happily ensconced in a heated plastic tub in the garage, and I am, of course, falling in love with them because they are so cute.

Yes, spring is rapidly springing here.  The snow has melted off the north side of our front yard.  Now, you’d expect it to melt off the south side first, but the south side of our yard is shaded by trees, so the north side gets freed up first.  In the back yard, the back two vegetable beds are now snow-free, and we have purchased black plastic to wrap the beds to heat them up and thaw the soil in preparation for planting.

In our rock garden at the foot of the kitchen stairs, one happy Leopard’s Bane is leafing out luxuriantly.  In the garden behind the house, the lilacs are budding their leaves. 

A mama moose and her calf have been wandering the neighborhood eating everything they can find that has sap running through it, so I am planning to cut up strips of Bounce to tie onto the lilac bushes (this is rumored to keep moose away).

The trees have pussy willows bursting out at the tops.

Today it unofficially hit 50F here in Suburban Alaska.

Spring!

I’m very tired.

I’ve spent the day putting small amounts of medicated water into the beak of a very very sick chicken, who wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking.

And now I have to wrap up a dead chicken and figure out what to do with her.

Then I have to figure out how to let the dotter know that yet another of our pets has died.

Somewhere in there, I want to go to bed and sleep for days.

Chickens may be dumb clucks, but they have personalities and character.  Sarafina was a very sweet bird.

…Goes one of our chickens.  She’s been coughing and pretty languid for a couple of days; when we checked the chickens this evening, she had a bloody nose.

Dr. Google didn’t help.  But after some digging, the only things I could find that produce a bloody nostril discharge in chickens were avian influenza (ack!) and a piece by the USDA that said “serious avian disease”.

I was meaning to respond to some comments made by new readers to my post Dear Diary, but that will have to wait.  (Thanks to TonguMom for the link!)  Time to go out into the 17 below zero Fahrenheit weather and haul a sick chicken back into the garage…

Our neighborhood is filled with dogs.  Big dogs.  Little dogs.  Dogs that go on walks with their humans.

On the whole, I find myself thinking of Kai less and less, though when the dotter brought home “Our Daily News” (in which the kids write a snippet, it gets compiled into a sheet, and the teacher copies the sheet and sends it home with the kids) where she had not one, but two snippets, about how our dog died…well.  That one made it suddenly come back again.

Anyway, I see the happy people walking their dogs and am wracked with jealousy.  “How come he still has his dog, when our dog died?!”

Totally irrational.  But it reminds me of how I felt in the throes of infertility:  “How come she gets to get pregnant, but I can’t?!”

The dotter’s friend A.’s mom is a veterinarian at a no-kill shelter.  The other day, she called to say they had a schnauzer that needed a home, and did we want him?

Right away, it was a gut-level, “NO!”  Too soon.  Still. 

Maybe next year it won’t be too soon.  In the meantime, there I am, jealous of people with their dogs.

Good lord.  Has it really been almost 2 weeks since I last posted?!  I apologize profusely.  Dunno why, but this year I have been in a total blogging doldrum; I come up with ideas for posts and then, like fog melting in the morning sunlight, they drift away, never to return.  Part of the problem, I think, is that Twitter posting has taken the place of my one-off blog posts, the quick-and-dirties that point to a news story or a very cool picture or what-have-you.  The other part is that I think my ability to think Deep Thoughts is atrophying.  This is not good.

But in the meantime…!

I have a new toy wending its way across the country to our doorstep.  I lamented a few weeks ago about trying to do any wildlife photography with our current point-and-shoot digicam, and said I wanted a STUDLY optical zoom.  So I hopped online and started researching.

This is what I ended up ordering:

It’s a Canon SX200 IS, with a 12x optical zoom!!!  Woot!  It is what is called a “prosumer” digital camera, halfway between a point-and-shoot and a digital SLR.  Judging by the reviews on Canon’s website, I will either love it or absolutely hate it.  There doesn’t seem to be an in-between.  What is most consistent is that everyone kvetches about the flash popping up whenever you turn on the camera–this is something I believe I can live with.  What is most amusing is that the people who love it say the low-light performance is awesome, while the people who hate it say the low-light performance is dreadful.  Hmm.  Our current camera’s low-light performance is utterly appalling, so this has to be better!

The Digital Camera Review called it “a solid, better-than-average performer in most respects”, and then went on to say it was a little bit “boring”.  That 12x zoom is not “boring” to me! 

It has automatic mode, but it also has manual control over the aperture and shutter speed, and supposedly can do ISO 1600.  I will be exploring that, to be sure.

Originally, I was supposed to get free shipping, but one of the drawbacks of living in Alaska is that many things that are available to folks Outside (e.g., “the Lower 48″) just aren’t available here.  Ground UPS service from Camera Kings is on that list.  So my carefully garnered rebate form is going to pay for 2nd day air.  On the one hand:  Humph.  On the other hand:  Kewl!

It should arrive Monday, I will start playing with it, and I will report further.

Onto other items:

First, Revere at EffectMeasure says you should get both the H1N1 vaccine and the seasonal flu; the rationale being that the H1N1 may slow down/fizzle out, leaving the normal seasonal flu to start doing its stuff in January and February.  So I am changing my mind on recommending only the H1N1 vaccine.

Secondly, I am finding myself missing Kai more than I thought.  In particular, whenever the urge comes upon me to go hiking (which it hasn’t much in the past few weeks due to illness and recuperation), I realize that we have been hiking together for 11 years…

Thirdly, the “not-flu” is the gift that keeps on giving.  OmegaDad is dealing with a “mild” case of pneumonia and finally seems to be doing better.  After a week’s worth of coping with a wonky stomach, I am now off my favorite Frappucinos–every time I drank one, it made me feel nauseated.

The dotter suddenly wants the computer so she can go play ToonTown, so I am off…

…because the dotter is sick with something flu-like.  The test came back negative for strep, negative for flu, but then the ped chatted up some other ped friends to discuss the sensitivity of the flu test, and given the dotter’s tendency to segue into she-should-go-to-the-hospital type pneumonia, the ped decided to treat it as if it were the flu.

Normally, I wouldn’t go hauling her off to the doctor right away after she got sick.  But given that there was a 10-year-old boy who died of H1N1 within a day after developing the fever up the road in Second Biggest City a few weeks ago, coupled with that aforementioned tendency to pneumonia, I figured it was time to be cautious.

The upshot is the doc prescribed Tamiflu.

(Don’t read the side effects for kids.  Just don’t.)  (I’m hoping we’re not any of the folks who get those side effects.)  (I mean, really, “may be at an increased risk of self injury and confusion shortly after taking TAMIFLU and should be closely monitored for signs of unusual behavior” just sort of raises the hair on my neck.  How creepy can you get?!?!)

The dotter has never done pills (really!), just liquid medicines and shots.   So when the doc asked, I said we should make it liquid…at which point it turns out there is no liquid form readily available, and there is just one local pharmacy that prepares the liquid form.

That pharmacy is, according to OmegaDad, The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  This is the result of him showing up at the pharmacy hours after we saw the doctor only to have them take half an hour to figure out that they didn’t have the faxed prescription, and more time thereafter to call up the doctor’s office.  OmegaDad was fuming when he got home, and said, in dire tones, that any further interactions were up to me, because he didn’t think he could keep from blowing his stack.

I call the doc’s office.  I offer to use pills, to introduce the dotter to the concept, so we can avoid dealing with this pharmacy.

The doc’s office calls back:  All the pharmacies in town don’t have the pills in the right strength, so we’re back to The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  But TWLCP can’t get the preparation done before they close. 

Oy!

It’s quite the distraction from the oh-OmegaDad-isn’t-going-to-step-on-Kai-on-his-way-to-bed feeling (Kai liked to sleep next to OD’s side of the bed).  The we-don’t-need-to-close-the-downstairs-bathroom-door feeling (Kai would eat the cat food otherwise).  The ongoing reminders.  Sigh.  Thank you all for your sympathetic comments; it has been quite helpful, actually.

In 1998, OmegaDad and I purchased our first house, in Hippy Dippy Enclave In The Woods, near Small Mountain University Town.  Our house had a fenced yard, and we said to each other, “Hey!  We’ve got a fenced yard now!  Now we can get ourselves a dog!”

Somewhere around Mother’s Day the next year, we were at PetSmart near GrannyJ’s house, and they were having an “adoption event”.  So we oohed and ahhed over the kitties, and poked our heads in at the dogs.  There was a puppy there, about six months old, who looked just plain kinda goofy.  He was cute.  His head tilted in that way puppies’ heads do.  We kept looking at him, and talking to each other, and looking at him…

And the next thing we knew, we had a dawg.

We named him Kayenta, Kai for short, because he was a rez rescue dog, a dog of uncertain heritage, one of a large number of unclaimed dogs and puppies that roam the Navajo Reservation, scions of working dogs that herd sheep on the mesas and plateaus.

We brought him home.  We took him out on hikes in the woods, through the Ponderosa pines.  We would stand at either end of a large meadow, and call, and he would run lolloping from one end of the meadow to the other, his tongue hanging out.  We took him to puppy training, and he learned to come when called (mostly), and to walk politely on the leash, and a few other things. 

He was a good dog, for us, but not a good dog for other people.  Our theory was that he had been beaten as a puppy, because if you moved just right, he would flinch, and he hated men.  Women he would tolerate, but men were Bad.  Except, of course, for OmegaDad.

He wouldn’t get into the garbage.  After the first few months, he learned that he did not get people food, and he was okay with that.  He did chew out the crotch of any pair of undies you left out accidentally, so we learned not to do that.  He didn’t beg the way many dogs did–he would just sit there erect, ears alert, and give you an “I am a Very Good Dog” look, one that said, “You know I’m a Good Dog, so you know I deserve a treat.  Don’t you?  Don’t you?”

He loved chew toys.  He would chew them down to frayed knots, and we would remove the knots when they got too smelly and icky, and give him a new rope toy.

When OmegaDotter came along, he didn’t really like her.  He never really liked her, and regularly growled and snapped at her…but he kept it within limits.  The good thing about her, he realized when she transitioned to real people food, was that she dropped food at the table, so she became tolerable.  Not one of his favorites, but definitely tolerable–enough so that she could hold the leash when we went hiking, enough so that she could lean on him (up to a certain point), and tug on him (up to a certain point).

When we moved to Alaska, he joined OmegaDad on the long drive up, getting to see bears and foxes and moose and other wild critters.  He put up with the Shoe Box and our cramped living there.  And when we moved into our new house, he delighted in the big back yard–though, since there was no fence, and we had a Mean Neighbor in the back who made singularly threatening noises the time or two Kai loped through the forest in our back into his yard.  The threatening noises included, at the end, something that sounded like “I’ll shoot him if he comes over here again!”, so poor Kai was thereafter confined to leash on his outings in the yard.

Last year, in May, Kai had a horrible bout of vomiting and bloody diarrhea that culminated in a large whitish chunk being upchucked.  We hauled him to the vet, who dissected the whitish chunk only to discover it was the knot of a rope chew toy.  We immediately threw out all the chew toys we had, and poor Kai was without them.

So we have no idea where he got the rope knot that got stuck in his gut this time.  It may have been while we were out hiking.  It may have been a piece of detritus from the previous owners.

The latest surgery didn’t work.  OmegaDad and I visited yesterday, and today.  When we visited today, poor Kai could barely walk when we tried to take him out for a pee.  When we returned inside, he slipped on the tile floor, and fell all splayed out, and didn’t get up.

The vet ran another blood test after we visited, and the results were bad.  His liver values–which were what prompted the third surgery, in hopes of finding a way to dump the bile that was accumulating–were going up again, instead of down.  The kidney numbers were surging.  When the vet put a catheter in to let him pee, nothing came out.  The end verdict:  renal failure.

So OmegaDad and I went back to the vet’s, and said goodbye to Kai.  We cuddled him, we petted him, we told him he wasn’t going to have to hurt anymore, and Dr. Shauna injected him with the two shots, and he was gone…just like that.  It was quiet, and peaceful, and we all cried, and then we came home to a house without a dawg.

For the past few years, OmegaDad has raved to me about “his” sandhill cranes showing up in the spring and fall, his special viewing place, ooh-ing and aahhh-ing about being able to go out during his (short) lunch hour, drive a few blocks, and eat his lunch while communing with nature, aka the cranes, and how pretty they were.

Today, he called me from work.  “I’ve got a very flat tire.”  Instantly, Super OmegaMom springs into action:  faster than a speeding bullet, she whizzes through the garage, grabs the battery-powered air pump, leaps into the car, and–

…waits for OmegaDotter, who had no school today, to collect all her worldly goods and chattels in preparation for an overnight with A., her best bud.

At which point, Super OmegaMom grabs the Halloween artwork done by OmegaDotter for donation to A.’s Halloween decorations, flips the back seats down, rolls out the bicycle, manhandles the bicycle up into the car, schleps the dotter and all her worldly goods and chattels off to A.’s house…

…and then goes to rescue OmegaDad.

As I delivered the air pump, I suggested we go visit the dawg at the hospital…

Oh!  Didn’t I mention this?!  One night home, and the dawg was once again throwing up everything, we couldn’t get any meds to stay down, we were worried yesterday morning, we called the vet, we took the dawg back to the vet’s, we got a call from the vet mid-day, we drove back to the vet’s office under a low, black cloud of gloom, anticipating that we were going to be told that he needed to be put down…Only to find out, once we were there, that the vets had made a mistake during the first surgery, and they wanted to do a third surgery to correct it.  The good news was that the dawg was not needing to be put down.  The further good news was that they were going to do the surgery for free.  The bad news was…well, three surgeries in a week is an awful lot, and the vet wasn’t sure that this would do the trick for our poor puppy.

But, anyway, the dawg is recuperating from his third surgery, and I suggested we go visit the dawg, which we did.  And then OmegaDad was hungry for lunch, so we grabbed a burger for him from DQ.  And while we were there, he said, “Let’s take a drive!”

“Turn right here.  Turn left here.  Drive straight here.  Turn here.  Slow down.  Slow down.  Just beyond those trees–can you see them?”

See them?!  Holy moly, there were some of the prettiest birds I’ve seen in a long time, and they were right by the road.  We could practically have reached out and touched them.  They had red crests on top of their heads, perched on long, graceful necks.  Their bodies were mottled brown and cream from one angle, an iridescent blue-ish from another angle.  They were just…beautiful.

And I didn’t have my camera.

After taking the husband back to work, I drove home (12 miles), grabbed the camera, and drove back (another 12 miles) just so I could get pictures of these beauties.

Of course, by the time I got there, they had moved much farther back into the field, away from the edge of the road.  This meant I had to zoom in with my point-and-shoot’s all-of-3x-optical-zoom.  Which meant that all I was getting was lousy pictures.  I got out of the car, moved into the greenery by the side of the road–

–and the birds very quietly and gracefully moved an equal distance further away from the road.  It wasn’t like they were scared, or really noticing at all; it was almost as if it were a force of nature, like gravity or magnetism, except repelling rather than attracting.  I move forward, they drift backward.

Bah.  The pic at the top of the post is the very best I could manage.  I ache to have better pictures of those birds.

Obviously, I need a new camera, one with more oompf.  None of this twiddly, pixellated digital zoom, thankyewverramuch.  I want some STUDLY OPTICAL ZOOM, dammit!  So this is my new quest:  cruising CraigsList for a nice used 10x digicam.  The dawg has eaten up a lot of our PFD check, but I think I can swing a 2nd-hand good digicam…Just so that next year I can get better pictures of these guys.

So, after two surgeries and many days recuperating, the dawg is back home again.  We had all been missing him something fierce–even the dotter, who the dawg doesn’t get along with, and who, therefore, doesn’t get along with the dawg.  So he’s back, he’s ensconced downstairs (no stair climbing for a while!), he smells extremely doggy (no doggy baths for a while!), and we have managed to get him to eat and keep down a tablespoon or two of freshly baked chicken and some rice.  Given that he’s hardly eaten in a week, this is monumental.

In the meantime, as soon as the autumnal equinox passed, our area of Alaska plunged directly from late fall into almost-winter.  Typically, the early winter snows creep downward on the mountainsides, first dusting the tops (”termination dust”), then moving on down bit by bit. 

Last week was vintage autumn:  clear, vibrant blue skies, the kind that you can lose yourself in forever, with the sun glittering in etched yellow along the edges of leaves.  We had some winds, and they loosened the fall leaves, which would shower down to the ground like a handful of golden coins tossed into the air.

Then came gray days and rain.

Then came the cold snap, along with more rain.  We had no snow hereabouts, but you could tell the mountains were getting it.  This morning, when the dotter went off to check her chickens, the back stairs were icy.  This afternoon, when we motored off to the vet’s to get the dawg, the sun was out and sparkling from every damp spot on the trees and the houses and the underbrush.

And surrounding the valley, the mountains were covered with snow, two-thirds of the way down.  Yesterday evening, I had caught a peek or two that showed that the snow came almost down to our level, but the sunshine today must have warmed things up enough to melt that snow back.

The mountains seem suddenly more immediate, more immense, more looming, when they are covered with snow; I don’t know why.

Right now, it’s a beautiful sight.  I actually can’t wait until our first snowfall down here.  Remind me of that in January and February, when I am bitching endlessly about the never-ending wintertime, eh?

We got to see the dawg at the vet’s office today; he was totally stoned on pain meds, but even so looked much better than he had yesterday morning.  So we loved on him and snuggled with him, and then left, with promises of being able to check him out tomorrow morning, and maybe take him home.

Mom is out of the hospital, yay!

And I?  Am worn out.  Just plain tuckered.

It has been a bad few days.

A few days ago, I noticed the dawg wasn’t eating much, or drinking much.  Then yesterday a.m., early, the dawg started barfing.  And barfing.  And barfing.  And soon, there was nothing to barf up…but he was thirsty.  And he couldn’t keep that down, either.  At which point, dawg-worrying became intense enough to have us call the vet.

The dawg doesn’t like vets, so we needed both OmegaDad and myself to be there to calm the pup down for an exam.  Then x-rays.  Then blood work.  Then shots (an anti-emetic and an acid suppressor).  Then instructions to wait until evening, then try him on water, then white rice & boiled chicken this a.m.

We walked out having spent $380.  Ack!

The dawg stopped barfing for a bit.  Then we tried him on water later that night, which he slurped right down.

And then promptly threw right up again.

All through the night, the same thing:  drink water, throw it up.

So we called the vet again this a.m., and the vet said it was time for the barium x-rays:  fill the dawg with a barium-spiked fluid and trace the movement to see where the blockage was.  So I schlepped the pup off to the vet again, and dropped him off, with an estimate of another $300.  Ack!

Two hours later, the vet calls, saying that the barium didn’t move more than an inch beyond the end of his tummy, and the only thing to do was exploratory surgery, and here’s the estimate:  $1000 to $2000.  ACK!  ACK, ACK, double ACK!

At which point, the qualms start.  Ooookay, we’re talking serious bucks here.  Ooookay; if it were the dotter, we wouldn’t be balking at the cost, but scrambling to find ways to cover it.  Ooookay; there are people in the U.S. who need that money to get health care.  Ooookay; a dawg is worth it/a dawg is not worth it.  Oookay; there are people who would think we were nuts to even think of paying for it.  Ooookay, there are people who would think we were cruel and horrible for even thinking of not paying for it.  Ooookay; we don’t have the extra bucks right now, but we will have them when our PFD check comes through in two weeks–and yeah, we wanted to buy some toys with the money, but isn’t Kai worth it?

Et cetera.

It was a very odd feeling.

The end result:  A “Care Credit” card, a credit card offered for paying for vet bills.  You can apply over the phone.  Oh, goody.  Just what we need…

So we signed and the dawg went in for surgery, OmegaDad and I went out to lunch, and then I went home.

To be confronted with a message on our phone from a friend of my mother’s saying “She’s ALL RIGHT, but your mother is in the hospital, just released from the ICU, and here’s the phone number…”

Oh, shit.

Two days of ongoing worry were suddenly replaced with frantic panic.

Talking to my mom, and then talking to her doctor, reassured me (currently).  Seems she went in for day-surgery for a blockage in her leg; all went well.  She stayed with her friend for the night, and in the night, her leg and foot started hurting.  She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t go out for her regular weekly breakfast with her buds, so she finally called the doc and asked is this was normal.  He immediately told her to hie herself off to the emergency room.  When she got there, the ER folk all panicked about her heart flutter and kept talking about how she needed a pacemaker right now.  Her doc finally got them straightened out on that (she has had the flutter for quite a while, and has a “strong heart” according to two cardiologists aside from the flutter), but she was admitted to ICU for observation and testing.  While she was there, some bloodwork came back indicating she might have internal bleeding, but everything else was okay; they moved her out of ICU into PCU (?!) and decided to keep her for another day or two.

The end result:  I have been on the phone now to fifty kazillion people for hours.  (I tried calling my Unka Bill in Australia, but when I got through, he couldn’t hear me, so I had to email him [Unka Bill, check your email!].)  Our finances are in a holding pattern.  I’m tired.  I want my mommy.  My mommy wants her camera and a laptop because she’s bored out of her gourd…

Oh, yeah, and mom’s friend says that she’s due to go back for roto-rootering of her other leg in 10 days…

Oh, yeah, and I finally talked to the vet’s nurse, who said that the surgery took longer than expected (that means more $$), they had to take out a piece of the dawg’s intestine, and there was a blockage which looked to be the knotted end of a rope chew toy.  At which point, I was amazed:  we haven’t given the dawg a rope chew toy for more than a year, when this incident happened.  The nurse scoffed.  She said it wasn’t possible.  Well, I can tell you that we removed the dawg’s chew toys that very afternoon, May 17, 2008, and haven’t given him one since, and he’s not allowed out unless we’re with him…sooo…where’d the chew toy come from if it hasn’t been sitting in his stomach since then???

Wah.

The chores proceed apace, which is making me happy.  OmegaDad discovered the Internet Bonanza of American Girl doll accoutrements, and the dotter is agog.  And eager to buy, buy, buy!  Which, of course, means money, money, money!  Which leads to chores.

Ahhhh.  So the dotter is sweeping, and vacuuming, and cleaning the catbox, and sorting laundry, and carrying laundry back upstairs and putting it away (I know I mentioned every single one of these things before, but it’s so damn nice to have it done, even if I do have to follow around and give pointers and make sure she does more than a seven-year-old’s slapdash job).

OmegaDad has been making bread.  He recently made two loaves of challah, one for us, one for our next-door neighbor, who just got married.  The late afternoon sunshine just made the warmth and goodness pop out in the picture.  Aren’t they purty?

Also enjoying the afternoon warmth was one of our cats, Wooly.  Piggy, the scaredy cat, rarely (if ever) ventures upstairs, but Wooly is everywhere.  Including on our laptop.  Which means that, after I took this picture, I spent five minutes closing obscure Windows windows and making sure he hadn’t accidentally switched screen resolutions, or turned on Armenian language, or shut off all the keyboard shortcuts.  For reference, this was what he looked like a few years ago, when he was only five or six weeks old.

Our new chickens are laying eggs now–yay!  So we get a wide variety of egg sizes.  The big one is from one of our older girls; the little one is from one of the new layers.  Our Silkies lay eggs only a bit bigger than the little one, but the new girls’ eggs will end up as big as the one on the left in a few months.

Another shot of Cinderella, posing:

She starts second grade tomorrow.  She’s been wandering the house shouting excitedly about school starting; that excitement will disappear very soon.  Right now, she’s upset that her second-grade teacher is male:  “A dude?!  I don’t want a dude for a teacher!!”  There is an implied “WTF?!” in there that she hasn’t taken to using.  Yet.  (I, of course, am quite aware that she tends to get ferocious crushes on young men who are coaches or counselors or teachers, so fully expect her to be [occasionally] sighing about Mr. Snows.  When she’s not complaining about the homework.)

Oh, yes, and in the midst of all the early/mid August stuff, I totally spaced out that OmegaMom, the blog, is now four years old.  Whoa.

Our (green)house is a very, very, very fine (green)house

So the greenhouse is complete, except for some trim work, as of today.  We happily lugged our two “baby” chickens into the greenhouse to provide a contained greeting spot for old hens and new chickens to get accustomed to each other, in preparation to migrating the new birds into the large coop.

I have to say, the greenhouse is awesome.  OmegaDad did a wonderful job.  It’s neat, tidy, sunny, light and warm inside, roomy, has lots of beams to hang plants from, and looks like it may provide a very nice spot to hang out on chilly days that have some sunshine.  Not that I’m thinking of lazing about there in the dead of winter, mind you.  But it’s really, really nice.

To refresh the memory, here’s what it looked like before:

And this is what it looks like now:

(Pay no attention to the detritus in the foreground of the second picture–there’s a pair of sawhorses with plywood making a work surface, which is covered with paint cans, tools, scrids and scrads of lumber and foam molding, and it provides a nice place to lean rakes, shovels, brooms, etc. while they’re in use.  The whole affair is due to be removed Very Soon Now.)

I am most satisfied.

The bunny…the bunny…oh, I love the bunny

The day after our baby duckling died (I am still sad about that), OmegaDotter went off to play with some neighborhood friends.  An hour later, one of the girls poked her head around the back of the house to ask if we, by any chance, had some carrots?  Why?  Well, see, there’s this bunny that we’re trying to catch…

So I provided some carrots, and figured they’d have a grand time unsuccessfully trying to attract one of the wild bunnies that hang out in the neighborhood (some of them are very interested in our veggie garden, but we have netting over it to deter moose, and it seems to deter the bunnies as well).

An hour later, three girls show up in our backyard lugging the world’s most enormous bunny.  OmegaDad and I take one look and know it’s someone’s pet bunny, but whose?  So we stash the bunny in our downstairs bathroom, animal refuge par excellence, I print up a bunny flier with a picture, and we send the girls out armed with fliers and tape to attach same to mailbox clusters around the neighborhood.

This is the bunny:

You can’t tell, but he’s HUGE.

A day later we get a call from Kelsey, who says she thinks it’s her bunny.  Since at that point I had no idea where the bunny was–A. and G. had taken it home, then A2 and her sister had taken it to their home–I asked her to call later when the dotter was home, so we could return the bunny.

A few hours later, she called and asked if we wanted the bunny.

So now we have a bunny.  His name is Copper.  He’s 7/8ths Belgian giant, 1/8 satin, three years old, and “frisky”, according to Kelsey’s dad.  “Frisky” means he’s not neutered, and thinks people’s legs are sexay female bunnies.

He, too, is moving into the greenhouse as soon as we get the (utterly gross yucky stinky peee-yew) bunny cage and shelter that we got from Kelsey’s family cleaned up.

Fame!

In my last post, I talked about Michael Jackson’s death and how I thought it was tragic.  Please understand, I am not trying to make him out to be any sort of hero.  To me, “tragic” does not necessarily correlate with “heroic”; I was thinking more on the lines of “tragic waste”.  I just think of a boy star who grew up surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him, and not having the maturity to realize that your friends are the people who will pull you up when you’re doing something stupid and say, “What on earth are you thinking, man?!”  There you are, young and rich and talented, and you’ve got people who call themselves “friends” who are not “friends”, but enablers, and they poison your mind against the ones who want you to stop and think for a few moments…to the point where all you have around you are the sleazebags, the sycophants, the wimps who *do* like you for yourself but aren’t strong enough to pull you back.  That is the tragedy to me, that someone with so much promise went off into La-La Land.

Oh, it’s not a new story; it’s so old it shows up in fables and folk tales and (no doubt) the Bible.  But it’s still a sad story, to me.

I’m leaving on a jet plane

The dotter and I board a plane very late this evening to head off to visit GrannyJ for a few weeks.  We leave poor OmegaDad behind to cope with introducing chickens to each other, figuring out how to make a bunny hutch out of the plywood and lumber we have left over, and being left alllll alooooone.  Right now, I’m in that state of semi-frantic obsessive list-checking.  Alas, some things on the list were destined to not get done.

I’ll try to post some entries, but am not sure how often.  The first week coincides with a visit from my bro and his family, so you’re more likely to see stuff after the end of the week.

We now have a wild duckling in the garage.  It’s name is Rhubarb, Ruby for short.

I arrived home late from the morning trip to Big City, having dumped the girls at China Camp, dealt with Miss Emily telling me about coping with OmegaDotter and others who were…shall we say, enthusiastic, with the kung-fu instructor, to the point of being annoying.  “Enthusiastic” means climbing all over him, swooning on him, teasing him, following him–you name it; Miss Emily did not have to tell me in any detail, because I immediately knew what it was like.  OmegaDotter still has a lousy sense of other people’s personal space, and when she likes her instructors, she hangs on them.  Literally.

Anyway.  OmegaDad had planned to take the day off to attack painting the interior of the greenhouse, so that we can put up the poly-plastic sheets that will let the sun shine in.  I fully expected to get home & find him off in the back yard, doing his thang.

Instead, when I drove up, there he was in front of the garage, with heaps and piles around him, and making strange faces at me through the window of the car, gesturing for me to get out ASAP.

I thought he had decided to remove the last of the detritus from behind one side of the villa complex.  I was vexed, because I thought the plan had been for him to wait to do this until Sunday.  I was all prepared to grump at him as I emerged from the vehicle.

At which point, he informed me he needed help, and did I notice that all the various boxes, pieces of wood, etc. were making a makeshift corral around the rhubarb plant?  (Um, no.  But now that he mentioned it…)

“Oh, by the way, there’s a baby duck in the rhubarb plant.”

…

I knew, immediately, what this meant.  This meant that we were now the proud owners of a duckling.

As soon as we could get it out of the rhubarb plant.

For those who think this is an easy matter, let me remind you of the effects of 20 hours of sunlight and 4 hours of twilight upon vegetation.  This is not your ordinary rhubarb plant; there is no such thing in the state of Alaska.  This is a monster plant, a jungle unto itself, with leaves the size of an HDTV, rearing up taller than the dotter and almost as tall as me.

ONE rhubarb plant.

Anyway, I stood guard outside the OK Corral while OmegaDad rummaged in the rhubarb jungle for the duckling.

The tale was that he had heard the dawg going nuts while he was in the shower.  He emerged to hear all the neighbor dogs going nuts out front.  He peered out the living room window to see what the ruckus was (usually a moose).  He saw Bad Dawg, from next door, pestering something on the ground while an adult duck fluttered and squawked and attacked it.  He went bounding out the front door, snapping out a loud and firm, “LEAVE IT!”  Bad Dawg retreated, and lo and behold, a duckling rocketed up our driveway and into the rhubarb forest by the corner of the house.  So he quickly began making the OK Corral out of whatever he could lay his hands on from the garage, and waited for me to come home.

So we could capture the duckling.  Which was supposed to be about so big (hold your hands two handwidths apart).  Which turned out, when OmegaDad captured it, to be practically newborn with its egg tooth still on, and about the size of the palm of my hand.

Newborn wild ducklings, let me tell you, are quite jumpy.  As in, at a day old, they can escape from Chicken Prison in the garage, and we find ourselves searching through the garage for small, dark hiding places.  Chicken Prison has now been turned from a minimum strength leisure spa into Mad Max maximum security as a result. 

Here’s a lousy picture–she won’t hold still for pictures at all.

In lieu of anything substantive, here is a pic of Adelaide:

And one of Serafina:

They are just too damned cute.  Sara is an escape artist and we have had to modify the garage coop to contain her:  she flies!  She’s not even five inches long, and she flies!

Back to taxes.

The daffodils OmegaDad purchased for me last week are still going strong; this is what they looked like the day after he got them:

OmegaDotter made my birthday cake all by herself, with coaching from OmegaDad.  It was my favorite from my childhood, an orange cake with Solo apricot pie filling in between the layers (OmegaDad searched all over for that stuff, and finally located it, and informed me that this was a once-in-a-great-while cake because the one can of Solo pie filling cost about $5.00) and a lemon buttercream frosting.  Yum.  Yes, the picture is blurry; all the pics OmegaDad took that day were blurry except the one where my eyes look sunken like I’m strung out on heroin or something.

You note the red dress above?  OmegaDotter wore it twice.  She wore the purple stripe dress below to school on Tuesday and Friday, and all day on Saturday and Sunday, and I had to promise (pinkie promise, up, down, left, right) that it would be cleaned this very night and ready to be worn again tomorrow.  Note how old she looks in this pic.  Doesn’t she look like she’s 11 or 12?  It’s scary.

The Easter basket.  Last night, OmegaDotter informed me, in a surreptitious whisper as we were doing our bedtime ritual, “Mommy!  I think Daddy does the Easter Bunny footprints!”  I responded with an aghast, “NO!“, and she assured me that it must be so.  She did not, however, add two plus two to get “OmegaDad is the Easter Bunny”.  That will happen next year, I am sure.

The basket had, actually, very little candy.  OmegaDad has been carefully collecting small tchotchkes that cost about $1 each, such as an assortment of cute Easter-themed erasers, a set of mini-cookie cutters, a bead necklace set, a little bunny-shaped bottle of bubble-blowing stuff, plus a horsie and a set of spring/Easter themed chef wear, which the dotter is wearing below as she prepares to help daddy cook dinner.

Our new chicks have names now–the Australorp is named Adelaide (Addie for short), and the Buff Orpington is Serafina (Sara for short).  They are utterly adorable.

I really do have a serious post or two planned, which I’ve been noodling about in my head for a while, but today was a day of marathon laundry plus starting the taxes, so what you see is what you get.

This morning, OmegaDad and I girded up our loins (figuratively speaking), and hauled Angie back out to the chicken coop after weeks in the garage recuperating from her last experience of being returned to the coop, whereupon Some Unknown Monstrous Chicken took it upon herself to beat Angie into bloody bits of ground beef.  Fearing a reoccurrence of the same, OmegaDad and I spent an hour leaning on the walls of the chicken coop and snatching up Some Unknown Monstrous Chicken, who turned out to be Comet (the bitch).

I have decided that chickens are visible evidence of evolution, obviously having evolved from dinosaurs.  Carnivorous dinosaurs.  Velociraptor type dinosaurs.  Lean, mean, fighting machines.  That like blood.

(Cue zombie sound:  ::Blooooood::)

What was happening was a disruption of avian psychodynamics.  New hen in the coop (okay, okay, so she’s not “new”, but it’s been weeks, and she seemed new) means establishing a new pecking order.

In general, establishing the pecking order means that dominant bird pecks at lower-status bird, lower-status bird squawks, lowers herself in a submissive posture, and then runs like hell away from the pecking bird.  A quick flurry, and all is over and done with, no harm, no foul, especially no blood.

But Comet’s a chicken bitch.  And Angie’s stubborn. 

Within minutes of Angie being reintroduced to the coop, Comet had drawn blood on Angie’s feet.

Then comes the creepy part:  Comet and Winnie spent the next hour wandering around very carefully hunting down and eating every single speck of blood they could find.  With sinuous and sinister darting heads with beady eyes looking sidelong at Angie, calculating when she was looking away, so that more pecking could be done.

Okay, it was mostly Comet doing this action.  Winnie was alternately pecking at chicken feed, hunting down a few bloody spots of chicken fluff, and running away from Angie’s desultory I-have-more-status-then-you pecks.

Comet was out for blood.  Literally.  Comet was looking for a violent confrontation.  Comet was trying to provoke a violent confrontation.

And Angie wasn’t backing down.  She wasn’t fighting back, but she wasn’t backing down.  Comet would dart in and peck at her then fluff up and posture and threaten, and Angie would put her head down, but she wouldn’t assume the submissive pose (crouching down parallel to floor); her body and tail were still up.  This kind of reminded me of a kid stubbornly refusing to do chores and being sullen:  You can’t make me! read her body language.  Which, of course, drove Comet even more into a frenzy.

So we finally gave in and removed Comet from the coop.

Lo and behold, hours later, no bloody Angie, no bloody Winnie, two eggs laid. 

We will attempt reintroducing Comet to the coop in a few days.  If that doesn’t work, we’ll farm Comet out; we like Angie better (Comet is a bitch).

Other than that…The volcano blew big time on Saturday, dumping lots of ash on Homer (check out some of the pics!), southwards.  Saturday was a glorious, sunny day, and everything was melting, with lots of rivulets and streams of water pouring out from under slabs of packed snow.  I took the dawg for a walk and had a lovely time; I meant to do it today, as well, but then I got struck with either pleurisy or costochondroitis or (crossing my fingers and knocking on wood that it isn’t this one) pericarditis and spent the afternoon dreading every deep breath I took.  Bleah. 

In a few more days, I hit a birthday, a big one.

There is a bad side effect of naming your chickens with similar names.

OmegaDad and the dotter were going out to check the chickens and take a new bag of chicken feed out to Le Grand Coop; I sat down at the computer to listen to some Chinese pop singers on YouTube and read an intense description of freezing almost to death.  While I was sitting there, suddenly the dotter pops up at the window, thumping on it and yelling, “Come quick!  Daddy needs you!”

WTF?  Hunh.  Okay.  So I schlep out to the garage door, put on boots and jacket, whap the garage door opener, and start out, only to be confronted with a teary dotter and a somber OmegaDad.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Buffy’s dead!” the dotter cries.

The bad side effect I mentioned up above comes into play here:  I thought–given that Puff has been broody lately–that it was Puff who was dead.

OmegaDad hustled us into the house, where I promptly cuddled up with the sobbing (sobbing!) dotter on the futon in the family room.  While I was surprised and slightly upset, I wasn’t quite understanding why the dotter was in such tears; Puff, though quite cute, isn’t really the most lovable of chickens.  (Not bad, mind you, but not exactly an overwhelming personality.)

I was nonplussed and feeling guilty:  my very own OmegaDotter was collapsed in tears on my lap and I was feeling…well, surprised and slightly upset.  So I’m patting her and cuddling her and stroking her and saying I’m sorry, and feeling overwhelmed with the question of How To Deal With A Griefstricken Dotter.

OmegaDad returns and explains that it seems that the chicken appears to have been flying and flown into something and broken her neck.  I’m sitting there thinking it’s broody Puff who has died, and the last I knew (a) Puff can’t fly and (b) she’s broody, and broody hens don’t do anything approximating the amount of energy it takes to fly.  So, in addition to being nonplussed and surprised and slightly guilty, I’m now puzzled.

And the dotter is sobbing in my lap.  And then crawling over to OmegaDad to be snuggled and cry in his lap.  In my confusion, I mutter something about how I knew she was broody, and was he sure it was an accident and not broodiness that did her in?  In his confusion, he asks, “Broody?!  Buffy was broody?!”  And I’m still hearing “Puff”, and this orthagonal conversation continues until there’s a blinding light in my brain as the neurons finally connect, and the word “Buffy” connects with “beautiful apricot colored chicken who is a total sweetheart who loves to cuddle and likes to sit on top of OmegaDotter’s head” and Oh. My. Gawd.  Buffy’s dead!

At which point, I understood the dotter’s grief, because Buffy, fluffhead though she was, was the OmegaFamily’s absolute favorite of the chickens, and suddenly I wanted to start crying.

Obviously, we are not cut out to be farmers or pioneer types.

Anyway:  OmegaDotter was truly in distress for quite a while this evening.  And even after calming down, and all of us going out to dinner (whilst OmegaDad surreptitiously disposed of the corpse) and having fancy desserts and chardonnay for me and a Shirley Temple for the dotter, at the late, late hour of 10 p.m., when the dotter finally was put to bed, she needed to do our nightly Feeling Game ritual, and needed to talk about Buffy.

Sometimes being a parent just blindsides you…

• Ms. Vinegar Martinis asked me what kind of floofy drinks I like.  I admit a horrendous fondness for piña coladas, blended with ice, whipped cream on top, a maraschino cherry, and a little umbrella.  Another floofy drink I like–a hangover (har!) from when I was a wild-n-crazy young 20s-ish gal living in gay-town Chicago–is the Golden Cadillac.  Flavored margaritas, such as peach or mango, get a thumbs-up from me, as well.

  When we were living in Small Mountain University Town, on hot summer days, I would take the dotter off to the local outdoor swimming pool.  After an afternoon in the sun, we would stop at Baskin-Robbins.  One day, I noticed they had a flavor called Coco-Nutty.  Nom nom nom.  The next time we visited, I combined it with a scoop of lemon sherbert.  Nom nom nom, squared.  It was the ice-cream equivalent of the piña colada, and became my staple there.

• Noreen asked what the elementary school Sock Hop was like.  Let’s see…First off, the dotter’s elementary school has a new music teacher, Mr. L., who looks like he just got out of college from getting his music education degree.  He is, IMO, quite kewl; at the Christmas concert, for instance, he had forty fourth- and fifth-graders all playing in time and in tune on recorders.  Nothing too fancy, but it was quite an accomplishment.  Anyway, he seems to be the driving force for many newer musical adventures at the elementary school front.

  The Sock Hop featured all the lady school teachers in poodle skirts.  Oh, yes!  And a few of the girls.  My fave ’50s dress-up, though, was the stocky young man in the fourth (?) grade who had greased his hair, was wearing a muscle Tee, blue jeans, and a black leather jacket.

  When we arrived, the music blasting out was 80s rock-and-roll.  OmegaDad and I eyed each other dubiously; this was not sock hop material to us.  However, soon enough the DJ (Mr. L.) was rolling out fifties and sixties faves, requiring serious Twist and Swing action.

  There were hot dogs and chips, and a malt shop featuring root beer floats.  All in all, grand fun.

• Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa:  Shortly after we returned Buffy, our formerly broody hen, to Le Grand Coop, we had to remove Angie, our Brahma, due to the other hens pecking her legs bloody.  So Angie has been in our garage for a few weeks, recuperating.  Yesterday morning we returned her to the coop.

  I had thought the peckage was the result of Angie molting, and thought nothing of checking up on her.

  OmegaDad checks the chickens late at night, before bedtime.  I was reading in the dotter’s bedroom, finishing off Godel, Escher, Bach, when I heard OmegaDad muttering, “Shit!  Shit!” outside the room.  When I emerged a few minutes later, I found him downstairs in the office, on the computer.

  “So what was all the muttering about?” I asked.

  The sad tale came out:  He had forgotten that Angie had been returned to the coop, so had not checked during the day.  When he got out there, he discovered her beaten and bloody; the other hens had pecked out all her leg feathers again, and pulled out almost all the feathers at the base of her tail.  I went out to the garage to view our poor beat-up hen, and it was just gross; she looked like ground beef.  :-(  And I felt terrible, because I hadn’t thought anything of it, and felt like it was my fault she got beat up.  Anyway, Angie is back in the garage, recuperating again, and if we can’t figure out a way to get her back into the coop without the other hens savaging her again, we are going to have to find a new home for her.

• Unka Bill grumps about the PINKage of modern-day small girls.  I totally agree.  In fact, when the dotter was a wee one, she had very little–if any!–pink attire.  She wore cute little yellow outfits, and green outfits, and denim onesies, leggings in a variety of colors, cute little dresses in bright colors.  Alas, in the past two years, she has been quite firm in what she wants to wear.  The Borg has assimilated her.  All I can say is that most girls emerge from the PINK phase at some point in time…I hope the dotter goes Goth, or Emo, because she looks mighty fine in black.
• When the weather got cold, OmegaDad retreated from the ongoing construction around the north forty, and took to experimenting with baking.  We now have homemade bread on a regular basis, and homemade cakes, and (today) homemade brownies.  Our bank account has thrived as a result, but so has my weight.  I am eagerly awaiting the return of spring, not just for the sunshine and warmth, but so that OmegaDad will return to construction and stop feeding us luscious baked goods.  All the blue jeans I purchased early last fall, which were too big on me then, are now fitting quite snugly.  This is Not Good.

Later gators.

Broody hen lays eggs.
Alas, the concrete floor is hard
And cracked eggs result.

Sick, whiny dotter
Rejects medicine with pouts.
Mom is now grumpy.

After frigid weeks
The temp goes to plus fifteen.
O joy!  Spring is here!

Boots, chaps, hat, blue jeans:
The dotter rushes to dress.
Saddle Club is on!

Safeway Select food
Is quick and easy to cook.
But does it taste good??

Moans and groans and moans.
OmegaDad is still sick.
Mom is still grumpy.

Motrin is Da Bomb.
One quick dose calms many fevers.
Oh no!  We are out!

Cold moonlit dawg walk.
Two moose pose in yard next door.
Quick, dawg!  Back inside!

Every home should have a chicken in the garage, especially in these uncertain economic times.

Har.

Yes, we have a chicken in the garage.

A few weeks before Christmas, we noticed that Buffy, our Buff Orfington (yes, a highly original name for a Buff, I realize, but it fits if you use the pre-Buffy-The-Vampire stereotype, as she is a Dumb Cluck), was staying in the nest box a lot.  More than a lot, in fact:  she was pretty much camping out there.

OmegaDad, Keeper of The Chickens, became worried, and consulted Teh Google.

It seems that hens are wired to get “broody”.  A broody hen is a hen who is bound and determined–no matter what–to incubate a clutch of eggs.  First, they nest.  Then, they stay there.  They fluff up all their feathers to keep things nice and warm.  Some will pluck their chest feathers off to make the nest nice and fluffy and insulated, and to raise the humidity level underneath their bodies.

In a nice normal flock of chickens, you’ll have a rooster or two to do his studly duty and inseminate eggs; thus the broody hens can collect enough eggs, sit on them for about three weeks, and voila, baby chicks.  Once the chicks are hatched, the hen will be matronly, guide them to food and water, watch over them, and the broodiness subsides:  they’ve fulfilled their biological destiny.

Our girls, alas, do not have a handy randy rooster around.  Their eggs are doomed to never hatch.  Besides, the OmegaFamily keeps on top of things and does a nest sweep twice a day to collect eggs.

In this situation, the hen suffers from a type of infertility psychology:  They brood.  They hunker down.  They want chicks, dammit!  Everything about their bodies switches from producing eggs to hatching eggs, hormonally and physically.  A broody hen without eggs to incubate just keeps on keeping on, sitting on the nest, leaving once or twice a day to eat and get water and deposit a huge, dog-sized turd (really!) (and really stinky, too!).  They lose weight.  They start being susceptible to parasites on the chest and abdomen because of all the warmth and humidity.  They keep quiet and fluffy and start wasting away.  If you don’t Do Something, you will have a dead hen.

You may also have many hens in the same state, as it is commonly thought to be “contagious”.  My thinking on this issue is it’s probably related to the tendency of female humans to synchronize their menstrual cycles:  a broody hen is a hormonal mess; those hormones probably produce pheromones; those pheromones probably signal to other hens that Now Is A Good Time For Baby Chicks.

(Of course, I have absolutely no data to back this up, but when I came across the contagion idea, it just seemed to click.)

The best thing to do in this case is to “break” the broodiness, shock the bird out of the heat/humidity/nesting/hormonal cycle.  Some people apparently recommend dunking the bird in ice water.  My opinion:  ACK!  One person I read up on suggested putting ice cubes under the hen, as a gentler method.  OmegaDad’s thought was to move her out of the main coop, cool her down, and provide some tender loving care.

So OmegaDad hastily whipped up a temporary coop for the garage, and transferred our poor, brooding Buffy there.  The garage, though heated, is at about 50F.  The temporary coop doesn’t have a nesting box, so there was no place for Buffy to snuggle in and generate heat.

She had, by this time, definitely lost weight, and her comb was a pale grey-pink, as opposed to a nice bright pink-red; apparently all this attention to incubating leads the hens to totally ignore their own physiological processes and (if I read things correctly) shunt a lot of blood to the chest/abdomen area.  She was so weak that she wouldn’t stand up when we picked her up out of the nest, but just sort of trembled and sank back down into a squat on the coop floor.

The end result:  We have a chicken in the garage.  The temporary coop in the cooler area, away from the other hens, was apparently just what she needed.  She is now up and about, no tremors in the hind end, eating like a pig, drinking plenty of water, no more gargantu-poops, and her comb is turning bright pink again.  She is also being spoiled because it’s so cold I’m smoking in the garage, and feeding her red grapes now and then.

She is recuperated enough so that when I go out there, she burbles at me for the grapes, and she will jump up into the air to get one from my hand.  Then she squawks with irritation if I don’t give her more. 

So now we know:  If another of our birds gets broody, we’ll nip it in the bud much sooner.  It was just that this happened while I was heading out of town, and we were preparing for Christmas, etc.

First, as requested by some of my commenters, a picture of the oh-so-cute itty-bitty Silkie eggs:

Of course, you can’t really tell how itty-bitty and cute they are; it’s the two light ones up top, and they are about half (or less) the size of the others.  We’re getting about one Silkie egg a day, and still four of the other girls’ eggs daily.

This actually has something to do with my title.  We are, it seems, right on the cutting edge of popular culture.  Once again, we have dipped into the Ur, the Jungian gestalt of the United States, by having chickens.

There is a “Chicken Underground” in Madison, Wisconsin.  There are urban coop-ists in New York City.  The website BackyardChickens.com logs 6 million page views per month and has more than 18,000 members in its forums.

Whocoodanode?

Of course, this is not cheap.  One thinks of chickens as cheap and easy, but, alas, they are not.  One can compare our coops and the dotter’s egg money similarly to, say, the U.S. agriculture system.  The government subsidizes the infrastructure (OmegaMom and OmegaDad purchase and build the coop).  The government subsidizes the ongoing process (OmegaDad visits the local feed store once every month to buy chicken feed and fluff).  In return, the farmer (that would be OmegaDotter) takes care of the livestock (with help from the gummint–a constant reminder to go out and check the chickens twice daily), cleans the coops (with intense help from the gummint), sells the eggs to neighbors, the government (Chez OmegaMom) and government-sponsored entities (that would be people like OmegaDad’s coworkers, who trade frozen fresh-caught halibut or salmon for a few dozen eggs).  In the end, everyone is happy and well-fed.

Right?

Anyway, to get a glimpse of this new underworld of chicken lovers, read up on “The Craze for Urban Chickens“.  I’m sure that it will be spreading even further, as people decide that keeping chickens and growing gardens helps in this dismal economy.

In the meantime, OmegaMom and OmegaDad can rest assured that, once again, they have their fingers firmly on the pulse of America.

(ETA:  This is just too cool.  You click and drag the big box of bars over the stripes to the left.  Do it slowly.  What do you see?  I just had to share it as quickly as possible!)

Doesn’t that sound like something out of a first-grade reader?

Our silky girls, Fluff and Puff, have been subsisting in a substandard housing arrangement, to wit:  no nesting box.  They have had to deal with (o the horror!) a bunch of straw on the floor of le petit coop.  So OmegaDad finally got with the program, sanded the (previously built) nesting box, painted it white, and then set OmegaDotter loose upon it with pink and purple paint and the instructions “do whatever you want”.

“Do whatever you want” ended up including painting a big pink heart on the plastic drop cloth, then walking on the wet paint.  So OmegaDad–quick thinker, he–grabbed some of his hand condoms (disposable plastic gloves) and outfitted the girl with gloves on her feet and hands, then herded her into the house from the garage, up the stairs, and directly into the bathtub.

I got the pleasure of washing pink paint out of the dotter’s hair, which left an inordinate amount of pink paint flakes in the bathtub.  Ugh.

Anyway, this evening the paint had all dried, and dad and dotter forthwith took the new nesting box and placed it in with the silkies.  The idea being that at some point in time the silkies will actually consider laying eggs.  Word has it that silkies don’t do much egg laying; they’re too busy being pretty and fluffy for such shenanigans.  (This is The Kozmik All’s honest truth:  silkies were bred to be pets, sort of the Pomeranians or Shih-tzus of the chicken world.  They also, apparently, are “broody” and will happily hatch any eggs in their nests and raise the youngsters up.  Chicken fostering…)

The dotter with her newly decorated nesting box:

Nesting box in place, filled with straw, and being investigated:

The silkies at the feed container:

The dotter with three of the other chickens (Comet, Angie, and Buffy, l. to r.; Winnie was being shy, as usual):

We’re swimming in eggs.  We get four eggs per day.  The dotter happily collects them and takes a dozen over to the next door neighbors every so often, getting $2 per dozen.  So we don’t really need any eggs from the silkies; it just seems that they might need to lay some.  Some day.  Once in a while, when they’re feeling like it.

You will notice that the dotter is growing out her bangs; they now are almost long enough to be tucked behind her ears, but not long enough that the hair stays behind the ears for more than a few seconds.  There is, behind that head, a ponytail; the stuff on either side of her face was in that ponytail this morning, but, of course, out by the time she got off the schoolbus this afternoon…

Many years ago, when the dotter was three, she and OmegaDad went on a daddy-daughter date to Jackson’s Grill, a fairly nice restaurant back in Small Mountain University Town.  Of course, being “fairly nice” means it’s also “fairly slow”, and after they had ordered, and eaten all the bread and rolls, and were waiting for dinner, the dotter, being three, got antsy.  OmegaDad did this, that, and the other to try to keep her occupied, but she was still fretting, and still hungry.  In a moment of desperate inspiration, he grabbed a big linen napkin from the table, wrapped it around his hand and tied a knot, leaving the extra fabric standing straight up as ears, and said, “Hello…” in a nasal voice.

The dotter was entranced.

Thus was Sheepie born.

Think of Sheepie as a low-rent version of Lambchop.  If you don’t know who Lambchop was, I don’t want to know:  it means you’re way too young.  He has a very distinct personality.

Sheepie was just between the dotter and OmegaDad for quite a while, but then he started making an appearance now and then at the dinner table, and became quite the standby attraction during Eleven Minutes, the flexibly-timed daddy-daughter playtime between dinner and bedtime.  (Why is it “eleven minutes”, and not, say, a nice even number such as “ten”?  This is one of OmegaDad’s little quirks [just like Sheepie]; he doesn’t like “nice even numbers”, and insists on programming the microwave for 53 seconds, rather than 60 seconds.)

Nowadays, we find ourselves talking to Sheepie everywhere. 

Let me rephrase that:  I find myself talking to Sheepie everywhere.  My husband, of course, is Sheepie, but he converses with Sheepie also.  Sheepie will pop up to make silly commentary at odd moments, such as while we’re shopping, or when we’re at restaurants, or driving.

Sheepie has taken to making risque asides to me while playing with the dotter.  I can kiss OmegaDad, and Sheepie gets jealous.  I can kiss Sheepie, and he swoons gracefully onto the nearest flat surface, while OmegaDad rolls his eyes.

What can I say?  We’re weird.

Anyway, while OmegaDad was being prepped for his colonoscopy, he was flirting with the nurse, and somehow they got off on the subject of chickens.  Somewhere during the conversation, he managed to mention that he’s a relaxed kind of guy because he talks to chickens.  And everyone should talk to chickens; there would be a lot fewer wars and ugliness if everyone just took some time to talk to chickens.  The nurse took it all in stride.

That evening, Sheepie poked his head over my shoulder and started flirting with me while I was working on the computer.  Both OmegaDad and I had the same thought at the same instant:  Just imagine the nurse’s response if he told her he held conversations with his hand all the time?

She thought talking with chickens was weird enough.

Have I mentioned I love my husband?

Le Petit Coop, c’est fini!  Woot!  The silkies are in their new home; Fluff is out of the bathtub in the downstairs bathroom (yay!) and Puff is out of her jail cell in the garage.

We are regularly getting three eggs a day.

I am planning for OmegaDotter to fund our retirement with the proceeds from egg sales.

(Hah.  I just looked at the returns for my Fidelity 2020 investment fund, and it’s off 25% since the beginning of the year.  We’re gonna need those egg sales.)

Speaking of finances (dontcha love that segue?), the score is currently:  Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy.  The Dow Jones dropped 504 points.  Lynch America is going strong.  Reserve has frozen a money market fund for seven days (this has only happened once before).  AIG is currently begging the U.S. government for an $80 billion “bridge loan”; otherwise it will file for bankruptcy tomorrow, sayeth the press.  Just FYI, AIG is a trillion dollar business.  (Whoa, breaking news:  Wall Street Journal says AIG is going to get that loan and be put under government control…”The Federal Reserve is considering an $85 billion rescue for embattled American International Group that could leave the government in control of the firm, according to people familiar with the matter, though the structure of a deal remains unclear.”)  The Russian stock market was closed after it plunged 17% in a day.

Let’s look back on those days of yore, when the savings and loan crisis cost the U.S. $500 billion dollars.  Remember those?

Let’s talk about the Glass-Steagall Act.  This was enacted in 1933, established the FDIC, and forbade banks from providing investment services, in an attempt to keep banks from speculation that would drive them to bankruptcy.  Phil Gramm (currently a senior financial advisor for the McCain campaign) sponsored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1998, which fully repealed Glass-Steagall.  President Clinton signed it into law, so it was a non-partisan clusterfuck.  And now we have Lynch America, Lehman Brothers in bankruptcy, and a $1 trillion dollar company dangling by a thread.  Oh, well.

Some other chickens that have come home to roost are my various jeans purchases.

Alas, I must have measured incorrectly; all of them are too big.  The custom Lands End jeans fit the best, but they are still too big.  I am sufficiently pleased with the shape of the fit to try again, fiddling with the measurements and changing from a waist-high rise to a mid-rise pant.  We shall see.  The Gap jeans were way too big and I am returning them.  I think I will find a local seamstress and have the Nordstrom black jeans taken in.

I have truly been tied to the computer these past few days, watching the financial services sector go kablooie.  Things have been happening at an incredibly rapid pace.  I don’t know whether to be fascinated or appalled or both…

Let’s see…

Nobody would buy Lehman, so it’s on a bankruptcy watch.

Bank of America, after turning down Lehman, is in talks to buy Merrill Lynch (my favorite new name:  “Lynch America”).

AIG–the insurer of all those humongous multi-level mortgage bond marketing schemes–is “looking for capital“.

Somebody named Bob Brinker apparently said something like “get all your money out of Washington Mutual”.

(Update:  A good quick round-up of the weekend’s financial shakeups.)

All the big news sites are still talking about Ike (which, thank heavens, wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been).  The financial stuff is only a sidebar, and only one of those items is being discussed.

So tell me, who’s the economy wonk on McCain’s team and on Obama’s team?  Whoever it is had better be prepared for a long, hard ride…

SiteMeter moved to a new system.  My problems with it…hmmm…1) It won’t “remember” me as logged in; 2) every time I try to load the stats in the new system using IE7, I get an endless “Loading Reports…” screen (though it works in Firefox); 3) hitting the “Refresh Stats” button sends me back to the home page, no longer logged in.  I’ve already sent through one help ticket and am contemplating sending in another, so I go to the SiteMeter website I have open, hit “Refresh Stats” just to see if anything happens, and I get a “404 not found” error.  So I go back to the SiteMeter homepage, and what do I see?

Whoops!

Aw, man, it must suck to be on the SiteMeter development team right now…Just like it must suck to be in that high-level group of financiers that was called into a weekend-long emergency meeting by Paulson.

OmegaDad’s four-ganger box for the regular light timer, the heating lamp thermostat, the ventilation fan thermostat, and Something Else is too small.  (This is in the Junior Coop.)  He is irritated.

The good news?  The “Alaska Women Reject Palin” protest in Big City was apparently very well attended.

Back when the chicken project was still just a gleam in OmegaDad’s eyes, we had A Plan.  Part of this plan consisted of the dotter being the chicken keeper.  Ha.  I’m sure those of you with children are very well aware of what happened to that particular aspect of the plan.  The second part of the plan was that the dotter was going to collect eggs, and we got first crack (bahaha!  I “crack” myself up! [bahahaha!]) at the eggs, but she could sell the second dozen of every two dozen we got.

Now that the girls are cranking them out (hey, we got three eggs the other day!), the dotter has been hounding us to let her sell the eggs.  We have a reservation from a buddy with whom we went bowling yesterday…

(We interrupt this blog with an urgent public service announcement!  If you by any chance have wrenched your back one day, do not go bowling the next day!  Your back thanks you in advance.  We now return you to your regular blog reading…)

Ahem…Anyway, D.J., A.’s mom, would be more than willing to buy eggs from the dotter.  This is good.

We also planned to ask the neighbors.

The dotter wanted to give the neighbors a whirl this morning, so OmegaDad handed her the dozen eggs, pulled out the camera, told her what to say, and sent her on her way.

Looking at eggs:

Running up the hill:

A few minutes later, she came back.  There was one slight problem.

She had forgotten to tell them she was selling the eggs.

She gave them the eggs.

Which is, of course, all well and good; we like our neighbors, they like us, I’ve already handed them lettuce and carrots, and they’ve watched over the dotter a few times while we had to do things together (like drive into Big City for an endoscopy, say).  And I’m definitely planning to make arrangements with 17-year-old girl next door to babysit while we go off and do such wild-n-crazy things as, oh, maybe go to the symphony, or a movie, or some such silliness.

Anyway, the dotter was somewhat crestfallen.  I think a little role-playing is in order here.

In other chicken news, you will be–no doubt–surprised to hear that OmegaDad and I think we may be somewhat weird.  Why is this?

Well, you see, we now can tell whether a chicken has hit puberty, and it has nothing to do with laying eggs.

Before puberty, the chickens all had nice quiet sweet little voices.  If they were roused, they’d SQUACK once or twice, but most of the time, they queeped.

“Queep, queep, queep,” murmurs Winnie, our gold-laced Wyandotte.  And thus we know that Winnie has not reached puberty yet.

Because all the other girls (including our dainty silkies Fluff and Puff) now have raucous, riotous calls.

“Buck, buck, buck, bwaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!” hollers Angie.  And Comet.  And even fluff-brained Buffy, our “blonde” bird.  The calls are hoarse, insistent, pushy, and loud.  They still queep and do a fair amount of plain “Buck buck buck”ing, but every now and then, they start their rowdy “I’m a lean, mean, egg-laying machine!” calls.

Our dainty silkies don’t have the hoarse call.  They’re just loud.

(Did you know we still have a chicken in our downstairs bathtub?

Um.  Yes.  Hem.

That chicken is going into the Junior Coop tomorrow, come hell or high water.)

Anyway, Fluff has become quite attached to OmegaDad, who visits her with great regularity.  She has become so attached that when OmegaDad is so self-absorbed as to–Kozmik All forbid!–leave her, she starts screeching, demanding his immediate return.

We have another clue when the birds are pubescent.  If you go to pet their backs, they will…um…”assume the position”.  This entails something dismaying similar to a cat in heat, who when petted puts forequarters down and hindquarters up and begins to do some rather grotesque wiggling of the butt.  So:  The chickens.  When petted.  They crouch down.  They bring their wings up (and, I assume, out of the way), and waggle their legs and butt a bit.

I am constantly telling the girls that I Am Not A Rooster.

I don’t think it has sunk in.

Anyway, we know that Winnie is still a sweet, innocent damsel, who has never had a large calcareous orb emerge from her butt.

The Chicken Coop Deux is coming right along.  It seems that having one chicken coop construction project already under his belt, doing another is a mere bagatelle.  In other words, the first took four weeks (five weeks?); this one is taking two.  Or less.

This is the Junior Coop.  It’s for the silkies, Fluff and Puff, who are bantams, and small.  It’s also in the lower section of the outskirts of the shed–the former stables–and thus the roof is low.  With our excellent 20/20 hindsight, we know that we should have made one big coop and split a portion of it off; however, we’re stuck with the configuration we have.  So, we have Senior Coop (big and with high ceiling) and Junior Coop (small and with low ceiling).

Essentially, the Junior Coop would make someone a fine walk-in closet.  I admit to standing inside it today, the roof mere inches above my head, and thinking, Dayum.  Why can’t I have a closet like this?  See…I could put the closet bar over there, and the shelves over there, and…

Suffice it to say, even though my years of closet envy are behind me, and we now have closets galore, I still found myself wisting after this chicken space as my own.

Anyway.  Back to the topic at hand:  Doors.

Two chicken coops require two doors.

(Whoa.  I am tracking back to this paragraph:  Senior Coop has a closet.  The closet also has a door.  The two chicken coops required three doors.)

Our first door was a first two doors were “found” doors; in the Great Pile of Rotting Lumber And Scraps, there were two doors leftover from home renovations.  We figured it they would make a fine chicken coop doors.

Of course, putting a door in requires that arcane art known as “hanging the door”.  This is one of those sweet mysteries of construction life.  It’s like the construction version of computer networking:  a black art, known only to a few, and a source of general angst and unease amongst the common folk (like me and OmegaDad).  We had hung a few doors in the old house, after fixing up and painting the bathrooms to get it ready to sell.  The actual performance is mercifully lost in a misty haze; what I recall is that it required a great deal of snarking and snapping and–just perhaps–some cursing.  At each other, and at the universe in general.

Anyway, while we were hanging these chicken coop doors, inching them this way and that, using the hammer to get the hinges together, and swearing a cussing, a pattern began making itself known to my mind.

The great secret to hanging doors?  (In my experience, only!)  You can’t get the hinges together with the door closed.  The only way to get everything to fit right so you can get those damned hinge pins in is to do it when the door is opened.  And then it happens very quickly.

Voila.  My great secret revealed.

So when the time came to Do The Door for the Junior Coop, the first obstacle to overcome was that it was going to be…short.  Like, OmegaMom-height short.  That would be five-foot-two (eyes of blue) (has anybody seen my gaaaaaal?).  A hollow-core door was out of the question.  And we had used up all our assorted extra doors.  So we had to purchase a solid-core door ($50).  Then we had to measure it.  Then we had to cut it.  Then OmegaDad had to use his way-kewl brand-new Black And Decker door-hinge/doorknob cutting set to create mortised areas for the hinges and holes for the door knob kit.  All of which I helped with by sitting on the door on top of two sawhorses, to hold it steady.

And then came time to hang the door.  At which point, as we were putting the door in (after we had trimmed an additional 1/8″ off the bottom), I remembered my great revelation about door-hanging, which I shared with OmegaDad.  He scoffed.  We tried getting the hinges together with the door closed.  I shared my revelation with him once again.  He relented.  We opened the door and I held it up in line with the hinges.  He tapped here, he tapped there, the pins went in, and voila.

OmegaDad is busy putting trim up in the Junior Coop.  We plan to paint tomorrow.  We hope to have Fluff and Puff in their very own coop, and out of the claustrophobia-inducing makeshift coop-in-a-wading-pool and the bathtub quarantine in just a few days.

Or, rather, let’s talk chickens.

Chickens:  the psychodynamics of chicken flocks.

Chickens:  Why Comet lays more eggs than Angie, who lays more eggs than any of the other chickens, who don’t seem to be laying yet at all.

Chickens:  Why Comet is a bitch.

OmegaDad has a soft spot for Comet; he thinks she’s spunky.  We all think she’s smart.  I think she’s a bitch.  OmegaDad scoffs, saying that his sweet Comet could never be bitchy and it’s all in my imagination.

I guess Angie’s pecked-to-a-fare-thee-well-hind-feathers are all in my imagination, too.

But now…now, I have scientific proof that Comet is a bitch.  Because it just so happens that being a good egg-layer is often coupled with…ta-da!…being at the top of the pecking order.  In other words, being a bitch.

I swear I read it today at ScienceBlogs, but I can no longer find the reference.  However, David Sloan Wilson’s latest book, “Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives“, has a section that specifically talks about an experiment performed by William Muir, a poultry scientist.  Muir bred chickens two ways, looking for better egg-layers; in one method, he specifically bred using hens who were “productive” egg-layers, and in the other, he bred all the hens in “productive cages” (i.e., cages where the overall average egg-laying was good).  Lo and behold, after six generations…

There were only three hens, not nine, because the other six hens had been murdered. The three survivors had plucked each other during their incessant attacks and were now nearly featherless. Egg production plummeted during the course of the experiment, even though the most productive individuals had been selected each and every generation. What happened? The most productive individuals had achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of their cagemates. Bill [the poultry scientist] had selected the meanest hens in each cage and after six generations had produced a nation of psychopaths.

There you have it:  scientific proof that Comet, who lays an egg a day (really!) is a chicken psychopath.

Of course, Angie, who is laying an egg every five or six days, it seems, often comes across as second in the pecking order:  she pecks the others.  But, since she’s second, Comet reserves a special meanness just for her.

Comet also has become a pushy broad who pokes and pecks at everything, jumps up in my lap when I’m trying to feed Angie from my hand, and attacks my toes if I don’t have food for her.  This is Angie, who will snuggle up in my lap, settle down, and start “purring” (kind of a low, gurgling coo).

In other, less amusing, chicken news, one of our two beautiful silkies has a crossed beak.  This means she’s ending up smaller and lighter than her sister.  This means we finally decided to take her to the vet.  So I ended up having to box her up and spend 20 minutes clucking incessantly to a frantic hen who was dashing herself against the box sides whenever I had to stop or turn the car.  I took her to OmegaDad’s office so he could take her to her vet appointment; I had to be back at home to pick up the dotter at the bus stop, feed her a healthy snack, oversee the homework, and take her off to gymnastics.

When we returned, OmegaDad had Fluff quarantined in the downstairs bathtub (the cats and their accoutrements were kicked out and the door closed), in fear of Marek’s disease, a highly contagious viral cancer that strikes chickens when they are around four or five months old.  It seems that the vet was extremely concerned because Fluff suddenly can’t walk.

I’m hoping it’s because Fluff kept bashing against the box.  I have become too attached to the chickens, and find the egg laying to be somewhat of a treasure hunt…It would suck royally to have our little flock of very individualistic birds be laid waste by a virus.