Come on, you know you want to...celebrate!

Happy Celebrate Friday! Last week I was celebrating my birthday, and those celebrations went into this week too.  My dad was in town this past weekend, and my mom and two aunts came to town also and stayed at my house until this past Wednesday.  It was sad to see them go. :(

So what am I celebrating today? Today I am celebrating...the small things.  That's the point isn't it? When life gets hard, sometimes it's necessary to remember it isn't as bad as it seems.  I have a roof over my head, my car gets me where I need to go, I have a good job, and I'm not alone.  Those are all worth celebrating.  Plus spring is almost here.  I'm already daydreaming about the flowers I'll be planting, the vegetable garden that will be growing, and the new chicks we'll be buying to add to our chicken coop.

See, life's not so bad after all. :)

Your turn.  What are you celebrating? And don't forget you can still join the party.  Add yourself to the blog hop or read what others are celebrating.  Enjoy!

Just Like A Scene From A Horror Movie

After a crazy busy weekend, I finally had time to sit down with a movie and relax last night.  My husband left earlier in the day to be a volunteer faculty member at church camp for the week, so I was home alone with my two dogs.  Neither of them bark often.  Sometimes when a stranger pulls into the driveway, they bark, but only if they think I don't know anybody is there.  And sometimes they bark at animals.  Chip is the only one that likes to bark at nothing.

Anyway, last night I was on the couch watching my movie when Tucker began barking in the front living room.  Wondering who in the world would be coming to my house at such an hour and keeping the lights off, I got up and went to the front room.  A brief glance out the window assured me nobody was there.  But since I had no idea what else Tucker would be barking at, I went to the dining room and snuck a peek out that window.  Still nothing.  Then I went to the kitchen.  A peek out that window revealed nothing out of the ordinary.  But then, just as I was about to turn away, a sound came from behind me.  I turned, and the pantry door was opening.  So I did the only logical thing.  I flipped the light switch and yanked the door open.  Nobody was there, of course.

I never did figure out what Tucker was barking at.  But if I had to guess, I'd say he probably saw the thieving creature that helped itself to a free meal by chowing down on seven of my chickens the night before.  I know it came back last night because this morning my tomato plants were dug up.  I may need to stand sentry with the .22 tonight.

Hope everyone else had a nice, uneventful weekend. :)

This Isn't Winter

A few weeks ago I posted about my "Winter Nightmare."  That ice storm hit exactly a year ago this week, but it's hard to believe.  I'm not sure how the rest of the country is doing.  Here in Illinois, though, I can tell you it's more like spring outside.  We've had a mostly sunny, highs in the 50's week.  Where did winter go? Last year we were abandoning our home for a few days; now I'd like to open the windows to let the fresh air in.  My boss even let me leave work an hour early one day so I could enjoy the rest of the day! I took advantage of it, too.  I walked Tucker and Chip, and then I cleaned up some areas in our yard that I never got to this past fall.  The poor chickens were smoldering so I had to open the windows on the chicken coop.  Poor things.  The heat lamp we use to keep them warm in the winter was unneccessary.

But I'm not complaining.  I'm just hoping we don't get hit hard any time soon. 

Raising Chickens~Part II

**Continued from yesterday's post**

Thanks for coming back! Now, where was I? Oh yes...

Late in the year, we decided it was time to build a new home for the remaining hens.  They barely fit inside the box they were sleeping in and would need more adequate shelter for the winter months.  My husband and his brother got to work building a new coop.  My other brother-in-law also helped, and between me and the three of them, we got the coop moved from the garage to our back yard.  Then we moved the hens out of Motel 6 and into the Hilton.  During the winter, we had no problems with the chickens.  I didn't particularly enjoy being outside at 6:30 in the morning when it was ten degrees out, or checking on them at night, but the hens had to be fed and watered.  The hens stayed nice and cozy...until Spring came.

One of the hens became sick.  She could get herself out of the coop but then had to prop herself up against any convenient item she was able to find.  She couldn't even bend down.  Her sides began to swell at an alarming rate, and after a few days, we decided to end her suffering since she couldn't eat, drink, or hold herself up.  Not quite two weeks later, I had let the chickens out of the coop so they could run around the yard, get their fill of grass and bugs, and take some dirt baths.  When I went to put them away, I noticed my one remaining white chicken sitting by my house.  Now, when it starts to get late and they're ready for bed, I can usually pick them up without them fussing.  I was able to do this with the white hen and assumed she was ready to sleep.  However, as I carried her, I noticed another hen a few feet in front of the coop.  She was dead.  My first thought was the chicken that had been sick passed on a disease to my other hens.  I set the white hen down and began looking for the other hens.  Within minutes, my poor white hen was on her side, flapping her wings sporadically.  She gave out a couple cries and was then quiet, and still.  A quick inspection confirmed that she, too, was dead.  The next morning, another had died, and I had no idea what to do.  My husband called a friend of ours who raises chickens and the cause of death was discovered: GNATS! They were really thick around our house and the chicken coop.  Our friend informed us that chickens can go into shock and die if they are bit too many times by gnats and that gnats can clog the orifices on the chickens.  Who knew? I didn't! Learning this helped me to understand why my hens were suddenly hiding under my shed when I let them out- they were trying to get away from the tiny buggers! A fourth chicken soon went missing, and I still believe she crawled off and died somewhere.  Our chicken count was now dwindled down to five.

A very large raccoon more recently devoured one of the hens before I got them put away one evening which left us with four hens.  About a week ago, another hen went missing and I assumed she was also eaten.  Imagine my surprise when my husband called the day before yesterday to let me know he found the dead hen by the opening to our crawlspace.  How she got there, I don't know.  She could have jumped in, but none of the chickens have ever done so.  And the hole was barely a foot deep so she should have been able to jump out or fly out.  Perhaps the heat was too much for her, though. 

Alas, we are now down to three hens.  Egg production and sales have skidded to a halt, which isn't a big deal.  I feel bad, though.  I didn't cause the death of this hen, but I feel responsible.  I remember my husband and I standing not twenty feet away, discussing her disappearance that evening.  She was probably still alive in that hole, but I never thought to look for her there.

My husband is ready to buy more chickens, but I'm not because most of the responsibility is mine.  It's been an adventure, that's for sure.  I've been scratched multiple times; I even have a few scars.  And one chicken almost pecked my eye out.  In its defense, I don't think it was trying to.  I had a hair hanging in front of my face and I think the chicken wanted it.  Good thing I closed my eye soon enough.  The chicken got a piece of skin off my eyelid instead of the hair or my eye.

That's it for now.  We're down to three chickens and there will be more stories to share later on.  And next year, I'm sure we'll buy more.  But not twenty-five.

Raising Chickens~Part I

I never dreamed I would become a chicken farmer, but last year I became one quite unexpectedly.  My mother-in-law purchased twenty-five chicks for my niece.  Unfortunately, my mother-in-law's plan for the small fuzz balls fell through when she found out she would not be able to keep them where she had intended.  So she made a phone call ~ to my husband.  Shortly after, we became chicken farmers.
Raising chickens has been a learning experience.  When we first got them, we could see one of them was sick.  I found it the next morning, dead.  Another one looked similar, and it, too, died later that evening.  This brought the number to twenty-three.  Being inexperienced, we couldn't tell how many males and how many females we had.  But we had red ones, black ones, speckled ones, and some white ones.  The whites were my favorite, and I quickly named one Sunburst due to the yellow spot on the top of its head.  They grew quickly, and as they did, I gradually introduced them to my dog Tucker.  Even though Tucker is not an aggressive dog, I had no way of knowing whether or not he would see the chickens as a special "treat."  I wasn't taking any chances.  And it was cute watching one of the white ones walk on his back; they got along just fine. 

Of course it didn't take long for the twenty-three chicks to outgrow their cage.  My niece's father built a chicken coop for us to put in our back yard.  The box part was just big enough for the chickens to have room to sleep, and the run (i.e. cage part) gave them room to, well, run.  By this time, we knew about half of the chickens were roosters and half were hens.  One speckled rooster seemed to be deformed (I learned later the "deformity" was just a characteristic of the breed) and he was the most aggressive.  He would puff his feathers out and run at me as if he was set to attack, but then he always backed off when I stomped my foot at him.  He was, after all, a chicken.

Egg production began to soar.  On average, we had about nine dozen eggs in our fridge every day.  We sold them to friends and to people at church.  The sales paid for the chicken feed and put a few extra dollars in our pocket, which was always nice. 

We soon lost two more chickens when our neighbor's dog got loose and took advantage of the free meal our yard roaming chickens provided.  One of the ill fated hens was a white one.  I was very upset about that, even though by this time I could no longer tell which white chicken was Sunburst.  Another month or so went by before my husband and I decided we needed to do something.  The roosters were...abusing the hens.  Many of them had their feathers ripped from their backs.  Some even had raw/bloody spots.  Though we had originally intended on eating the roosters, they were too old by this point.  Once a chicken becomes more than a few months old, the meat is very tough.  So we got ride of the meanest roosters.  Eventually my husband gave the remaining roosters to a guy he worked with which put our chicken count at ten.  Ten was much more manageable.  And my husband didn't miss being woken up at 5:30 in the morning by the roosters crowing.

**In an effort to keep this from becoming too long, I will post more tomorrow.**