Friday at home

I have a four-day weekend, and it's fabulous. So far I've done something, and something else. Whatever those things were, they gave me a nice glow of accomplishment. The weather is hot, with a good breeze to keep the skeeters off. We have Mexican pineapple pop and vanilla ice cream. Life is good.

We've been working on a job list for the hired man, a nice young fellow who is a friend of someone in the garden club. I want him to take the tall ladder and tack up some plastic over the exposed insulation in the entryway. So I go to the gym to gather materials. Roll of visqueen, check. Staple gun is harder. We have six or 10 of the things, and boxes and boxes of various sizes and shapes of staples. We have so many because I collect tools because I lose tools and because I like tools. (If you have a dozen hammers, you can probably find one when you need it even if the idiot who last used it didn't put it away.) I buy them at estate and yard sales because cheapness is wired into my genes, and because hippies never buy anything new (it's just wrong).

The red staple gun, our top machine for probably 20 years, has thrown a spring and we can't find the spring. OK. The hammer stapler died during the reroofing of the barn. Can't find even the carcass. There's a big silver one that looks good. It's an Arrow, though, and I don't see any Arrow staples. Plus I can't figure out how to put the staples in. If you've ever had a staple gun, you know how it is. There is no standardization among staplers. Some of them have floppy levers on the bottom, some have swiveling panels at the front, and some have to be opened with a hammer and are then very hard to close. I turn the thing around in my hands, poking at protuberances and twisting panels.

C. appears while I am trying to pick the Arrow open, so I pass it to her. She's clever at this and very patient, hardly ever resorting to the hammer. I go to pull more staplers from the top drawer, and – crap, the drawer is jammed. Opens maybe half an inch. Jiggling the drawer does not help. I'm reaching for the pry bar when C. intervenes. “You'll just make it worse,” she says. It's true – first I'll make it worse, then I'll break it. Works for me. She pokes various items in the drawer, trying to knock the jammy bit loose. It's hopeless. The handle of a stapler is jammed up against the drawer frame. I convince her to work on opening up the Bostitch so I can make the jammed drawer worse, then break it, while she is distracted. Works like a charm.

That lever pops the bottom on this Wards stapler.

We have a few boxes of Bostitch ammo.

The Arrow has a hatch in the back.

The nose opens on the Bostitch.

We end up with two working staplers with ammo. The others go into a pink drawer on a tool shelf. Hippies never throw anything away.

Gnarly old model with knob.

Store clerks used to staple bags closed with these.

The coolest thing in the stapler drawer is this glazier's model, which fires a little galvanized diamond into a window frame, holding the glass in tight.

The glazier's point shoots out the front of this gadget.

Looks like you load the points under this bar. 

Well, that was interesting (for me). Later in the day we got two new alpacas.

My copilot is an ass

So I've been very pleased with Earl lately. Why not? He's my buddy; he's handsome and loyal, and he likes car rides. Plus I think he thinks I'm smart and funny. And no doubt he admires me for my excellent thumbs. Today I caught him sneaking out of the hen house with an egg in his mouth. Honeymoon over.

Reminds me of an old Kids in the Hall skit, The Day I Connected with My Dog. Guy sitting on the couch, dog sitting on the couch, both watching sports on TV. Guy looks over at dog, dog looks at guy – the music swells, they stare into each other's eyes… and the dog belches. Connection over.

I'm not speaking to Earl. I look at him sadly and shake my head and he is ashamed. I hope he is sufficiently ashamed to stay the hell out of my eggs. Nobody, not even the copilot, messes with my hen fruit. Great speckled ass.

So C. and I treated the two buggy gold hens again tonight after work. Chicki-pedis for the pair of them.  I think we've killed all the leg mites, so now we're working on getting all the dead old lumpy scales off their legs and helping shiny new ones to grow in. The mites are just nasty - the chicken's feet get all crusty and stiff, and eventually their toes can lose circulation and fall off. Just gross. And a chicken that can't walk or perch doesn't live long.

We've given up rubbing on castor oil (not greasy or stinky enough) and now use a multipurpose farm goop that reeks of sulfur. I hold the bird on its back in back in my lap with her feet sticking up, and C. washes and dries her feet, scrubbing gently with a toothbrush. And we slather on the goop.

Skeeter, left, and Kvetch.

While we do the bigger hen with the black tail, the little one with the grey tail yells at us. I think we'll call her Kvetch. The big one is Skeeter, because as she is lying there upside down having her legs worked on, she gobbles up all the mosquitos buzzing around me. (I always forget to use bug spray, and they find me delicious.) She'll snatch them right off my arm. She is a rock star among chickens. I wonder if she likes to ride in the car.

Here's Skeeter, a fine bird. This photo dates from her first day here, and you can see how bad her feet are.
They're looking much better now (top pic).

Earl is my copilot

And he's had a good few days. Thursday we bumbled into a stranger's birthday party, and while he didn't get ice cream and cheesecake (I did), he got to hang out with a half-dozen new dog-friends and was admired and patted by new people-friends. Saturday he went to an estate sale and made friends while I rummaged for treasures in a rusty garage. We had Zip's ice cream cones after. His was in a cup, and he was so pleased to remove and inhale the strange crispy cone and find… more ice cream! Ice cream is probably the best thing ever, we agreed.

These events were preceded and followed by one of his favorite things – riding in the car. Earl digs the car. Weekday mornings he hops in and sits while the car warms up, then goes back inside when I leave for work. He waits in the car when I drive a few hundred feet to the barn to feed Dovey and the little chicks. Sometimes C. will come along and claim the passenger seat, sending Earl to the back, and he manages to be polite about it. He's a good boy. Doesn't he have an excellent rubbery nose?

We caught Pants the goat and C. combed the cashmere off him today. He's been leaving tufts of it around the pasture and on the chicken-yard door, the brat. (Yes, C's hair is purple. It matches her hideous muumuu, which I believe I bought for her. The other day I asked her opinion of some new-to-me Hawai'ian shirts I'd bought, and she laughed. "You're asking someone with purple hair?") Pants was alternately calm and hysterical, and managed to eat a quart of grain, leap onto a picnic table and pee on the muumuu before we were done. Now we are tired.

End-of-April update

Well, Bambi the sheep is settling in. She likes the pasture. The other big animals tolerate her, and hope that we'll give them all grain because she is so pretty. Sometimes we do.

Walking Bambi to the barn. She thought the halter was totally bogus.

Em, Richard and Liam came up the other day. It was awesome.

I've been potting up tomatoes like crazy for the Garden Expo sale. I visited Barbara, who starts hundreds of plants every year, and bought a few of her sauce tomato seedlings and some of the cups she uses for plant sales. It's genius - she melts drainage holes with a wood-burning tool and the cups fit 12 to a bin. The pots are maybe on the small side for big tomatoes, but you can't beat them for portability. That's Barbara's white duct tape on there for labels.

Dovey's chicks are growing. She's not really pissed off - it's just the big black eyebrows that make her look crabby. Below, Graham says, "Wahoo!" He says that a lot.

And we have wisteria blooming. Always wanted wisteria, but never felt worthy. It was a crappy-looking thing laying flat on the ground when we moved in. The goats "pruned" it repeatedly (and it's supposed to be poisonous). It's sprawled on the ground at the east corner of the building, and it's blooming beautifully. We're planning a rustic pergola.

Oh, my aching road trip

We have a lovely new sheep. That's Bambi (and Beth, who is kindly keeping Bambi from climbing on my head and trying to drive the station wagon right off Sherman Pass).

Bambi has her mouth shut in this photo. I'm not sure how KC captured such a rare moment, as Bambi bellowed a whiney "nyeaaaa" every 9 seconds all the way home. I counted it off... one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two… as if calculating the distance of a lightning strike. It was a very long two-and-a-half hours.

I'll tell you more about it later. 

In praise of simplicity

C. found Dovey's nest moved a few feet, and a bunch of broken eggs in the old spot. She figured a cat or raccoon had gotten in, and she closed the place off tight. We'd just have to make daily trips with food and water. Meantime, I'm planning ways to move Dovey, nest and eggs over into the main chicken house where we can protect her. We have to do it carefully, or she'll desert the eggs, though. (I'm always messing with these poor animals, trying to save everybody or make their lives more efficient, and driving them nuts. I should leave well enough alone, but can't. It's instinctive. I'm a meddler.)

So this morning C. discovers five chicks in the nest (hence the broken eggshells). Sorry, cats and raccoons, for suspecting you. And Dovey is still trying to hatch out some of the 19 (!) remaining eggs.

I'm so damn proud. Ridiculous, I know. I didn't spend 30 days humped up in the musty old shed, keeping two dozen eggs warm with my butt. New life; it's such a simple thing. But it makes me happy.

The swallows are zipping around, buzzing us in greeting, and darting after skeeters and flies. I know – what the hell else would swallows do in the spring? But it makes me happy.

So it's spring and the chickens are awesome and I'm hobbling around grinning like a fool.

Today was a three-egg day, the first we've had in ages. Check these out:

That's the white hen's egg on the left, call it a medium; the little black hen's in the center, and my favorite new hen Ping's egg at right. Ping is the tiny gold one. These three eggs make me happy.

What is it about country life that is so satisfying? Maybe all the fresh air has made me stupid, but I do find pleasure in the simplest things. I was raking up old hay in the barn, and it smelled all farmy. That's a happy smell. What the hell was I doing living in town for the last 27 years?

In other business, C. planted beets and spinach.

I took some scrambled eggs and spinach over to Dovey for my first look at the chicks. And now there are six!

Here's our boy

He's settling in nicely at home. Is that a cute baby, or what?