Not everything is sunshine and roses

Lest you get that impression from my absence here online that it is.  We've skirted a few disasters and have stumbled through life the past few weeks.

Work is just... well... there are alot of mixed feelings there and I'm just not sure about it. Frankly, if it was just about the money I think I could make more with the diaper thing if I was willing to do it full time. But the lag time between ordering and making money is pretty much a year so that's kinda out of the question. That and I swore I would NEVER EVER do another move with inventory from behemoth of a business again.

Not that I see a move in our immediate future. But you never can tell with us.  In fact at the rate we're acquiring farm animals and their accessories you'd swear we weren't ever going to move. As it is, the duck needs to move on to his new home now that he can walk. I should be listing him on Craigslist now. Instead I'm here. The problem with him being able to walk now is that he's going to be that much harder to catch, put in a box and give him away. With the broken leg and injured wing he wasn't going anywhere fast when we picked him up and brought him here.

Not that he could fly, even if he wanted to. He's the non flying kind of duck. Yeah. you read that right- does.not.fly. Although when I brought him home, I was thinking "well, when he's healed, he'll just fly off to some happy place with a lake or something" but once we did our  research on him, we know know that domestic Pekin ducks can't fly. They're too fat and been breed to be raised on farms, not in the wild. The reality is the duck is going because he's a boy and really not all that useful other than entertainment/ambiance and pooping on the patio.


And this duck is getting fatter by the day he's here. Because the boy loves bread and bread crusts and I have 3 kids who have gone on strike from eating said bread crusts.. so he eats them.  Usually out of someone's hand. Although not mine today since I tried to catch him yesterday- he hasn't forgiven me for that yet, apparently.

On the rest of the farm front area, we managed to hatch 2 chicks from the fertile eggs we got. Unfortunately our broody hen decided to die 1/2 way through the incubation period so we didn't get the hatch rate we were hoping for. Broody is when the hen decides she's going to sit on eggs to hatch them. Our hens usually could care less about their eggs once they announce to the world that they just laid one.

But of course running a brooder for only 2 chick isn't great use of our resources so we have 4 more under there now. I think we might have an illness here. 2 of them are supposed to be show chickens that Sonia can show for the 4H this year- if I can find out how to sign her up.

And because.. well.. just because...Kayla shares ALL our craziness with her teacher, we'd talked to Kayla's teacher about the eggs hatching thing and said "hey, wanna hatch them in your room?" and so they are. Potentially 25 of them. Quail that is. Of course I mixed up the hatch/incubation times so there's a chance that they'll hatch over the weekend and no one will see it happen (argh. figures)

So the grand total thus far is 5 laying hens, 12 quail, 6 chicks, 1 duck,  25 cooking eggs, 1 duck and a partridge in a pear tree. Humm.. actually I wonder where I can get a partridge and what you'd do with it.

Oh dear. I should not have googled that. They're like quail. I *could* raise them.  And that is how we end up with a petting zoo of feathered animals. I'm ready for things with fur. I think.

On the kid front, we had back to school night this week. I'm still not sure what back to school night is supposed to be, but it's an open house of sorts where the kids and their parents go into the student's room and see the artwork on the walls, etc. In Kayla's room the theme on their theme wall was eggs. As in hatching them. I'm holding my breath that the kids haven't asked for a detailed description from Kayla about the difference between fertile and non-fertile eggs but she's use those words alot in her trying to educate her class on the egg thing. I'm not sure she even understands it more than "you need a rooster to have baby chicks."

Joey's classroom has the over achieving teacher who had a clip board and check list for the student to review with their parents. And the room was decorated ALOT like hours of work. She had the kids bring in a change of clothes and shoes and stuffed them with crumpled paper and put them in their seats, too. I'm not sure where the paper came from because among the newspaper in "Joey's" pants was someone's mortgage paperwork. I'm guessing a paper recycling bin and part of me wanted to mail the paperwork back to the address listed and say "you really want this stuff out for others to see?" but then decided "heck, they recycled it, so can I" and just tossed it into our recycling bin.

Soina. Well. Sonia's bright. She tests well. IF she can concentrate on the test long enough to finish it. I forsee looming bigger issues and probably Ritalin in her future. She's testing off the charts, still, but she's dropping points. For the third quarter in a row, now, I think. He teacher is nice and been very patient with her, and he's been teaching a while so I'm hoping he's being so laid back about her "forgetting" her homework all the time and completing nothing in class is from his experience and not from his lack of wanting to try to tackle the elephant in the room. She's not disruptive, she just scribbles instead of writing answers until time runs out. I had been thinking she just didn't know the answers, so we'd been working on her math facts alot but in reality it's just that the squirrels in her head can't seem to stop long enough for her brain to communicate to her fingers that the answer to 5x5 is 25 and write the number 25 on the paper.

Of course her father and I have our own squirrel issues, so it's not like we don't know what's going on.

Speaking of squirrels, we are once again loosing the ground squirrel (which his bushy tail and all) war. Dang things dug up and ate my seed potatoes this year, ate through my basket with other seed potatoes in it and keep picking my strawberries. Larry has been out with the bb gun but it seems to do nothing to them and dreams of using something with a .22 caliber bullet on them. This of course is illegal here so we won't. But I'm kinda wondering how many cats I would need to liberate in the back woods to take care of the squirrel problem and at what rate would I need to replace them because the coyotes ate them? And would they put a big dent in the rabbits back there, because I kinda like the rabbits. And then I can't let the quail run free in the yard, either. Of course the last time I tried that he decided he liked the shed better, afterall. And the time a baby quail got loose he sat on the patio peeping til I found and caught him.  Oh, yeah. They can't fly, either. They take big jumps flapping their wings, but they are also flightless birds and I don't think they can get more than 3 feet off the ground.

Well, it's getting late here in crazy game bird land. Feel free to visit. We'll leave the light on for you and all.