OmegaMom

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.

Ah, the first day of first grade:

Much to my dismay, the picture is blurry, goodness only knows why.  Here’s the first day of kindergarden, as a contrast.

It was also her first day on the gymnastics team, three hours of which wore her out completely.

It was also the day of the first…

Eggs!  Yes, we now have hens that are laying!  Here’s the egg in the nesting box:

And here’s the dotter discovering the egg (okay, it’s a re-enactment, but, hey…):

And here’s the dotter showing mom the first eggs:

All in all, a very momentous day.

In the meantime, OmegaDad is sick and miserable.  We thought he had pulled a muscle over the weekend.  I hauled him into the doctor, and we decided to do a two-fer:  him for the pain, me for my horribly itchy, scratchy head, which I feared might be lice.  But according to the doc, it’s a staph infection.  Um.  This is good, right?  Rather than lice?  Anyway, OmegaDad got progressively worse over the course of the day, and when we returned from the gymnasium, he was running a fever of 102F.  Which does not sound like he pulled a muscle, after all.

Tap, tap, tap…

Pffffttt…Pfffftttt…

“Hello?” Tap, tap.  “Hello?  Anyone there?”

Yes, it’s OmegaMom, reporting after four days of silence.  Hi, there.  Yes, I’m alive.  Yes, OmegaGranny is alive.  My computer is being filled to the brim with OmegaGranny’s pictures, which I am supposed to burn to CD or DVD just before she leaves.

I fully expected to find at least one, maybe even two comments taking me to task for my vaccination post.  Nope.  What a disappointment!  That was supposed to be controversial, dammit.

Oh, well.

What have we been doing?

Let’s see:  Driving in to Big City at midnight to pick up OmegaGranny, arriving back home at 2 a.m.  A day spent recuperating and peering out at grey and gloom.  Two days wandering around the area in the sunshine.  (YES!  Sunshine!  TWO DAYS of it!) 

Two failed attempts to return OmegaGranny’s fancy-schmancy portable oxygen doohickey which she used on the airplane (the little franchise store was closed, even though the sign claimed it was open.) 

One failed written drivers’ license test, courtesy of yours truly.  Ahem.  Hey, look, I just didn’t read the manual, and had no idea what the basic speed limit on roads was if it wasn’t posted (55 MPH), got my solid and stripy lines mixed up in a passing zone question (I thought I was on the stripy side), and depend totally upon my insurance agent to tell me how much insurance we’re supposed to have.  Ah, well; we’ll try again on Monday.

And a visit to the veterinarian.

With a chicken.

Yes, I took one of our chickens to the vet.

This was at OmegaDad’s behest.

Winnie, our golden-laced Wyandotte, had cracked her beak, you see.  I figured it was like a fingernail; it would grow out and all would be well.

But OmegaDad wanted it checked out.

OmegaDad, many years ago, was concerned about the big black spot of rough skin on our 2-year-old butterscotch Teddy Bear hamster.  I told him, “Hmmm…It looks like cancer.  She is two years old.  There’s not much we can do if I’m right…”  So he took the hamster to the vet.  The vet looked at the hamster, poked, prodded, and said to OmegaDad, “Hmmm…It looks like cancer.  She is two years old.  There’s not much we can do if I’m right…”  Then he added, “But we could do a biopsy, if you really want to…”

OmegaDad did not get the biopsy done.  Our hamster lived happily for another six months, slowly going bald, and getting incredibly wrinkly skin.

Anyway, he wanted me to take Winnie to the vet.  I made sure we all returned early enough from our excursion that day that we had time to put her in a box and haul her off.  When I entered the vet’s office, a customer at the counter looked at me, and the box, and the dotter, and said, “Oh!  You must be the chicken!”

Yes, we were the chicken.  Apparently, our appointment was a great source of amusement for everyone.

Anyway, Doctor Sheila–a fine vet–came in, exclaimed at how beauteous Winnie was, and how tame, gently chucked her under the chin, peered at the beak, and called her “Sugar.”  (Doctor Sheila calls all our animals “Sugar”.)  Winnie, normally a high-strung bird, drank it all in.  The only evidence of chicken nerves was when Doc Sheila came at the beak with a trimmer, at which point I had to put Winnie into a chicken-hold.

I kept explaining that it was my husband’s idea to take the chicken to the vet.

Doc Sheila reassured me by telling me that she had done much more ridiculous pets than that…for instance, she had done surgery on both a goldfish (!) and a frog (!).

So Winnie’s beak has been trimmed, we have been reassured that she’s a splendid specimen of a bird and quite healthy, and I’ve been ferrying OmegaGranny and OmegaDotter hither, thither, and yon to various splendid scenery and tourist spots.  I now have some 300 posts in my BlogLines roster to wade through…