Honor roll & other Lindsay updates

Lindsay made honor roll last trimester (GPA 3.5 – 3.9, she had a 3.667).  So she was presented with this certificate regarding honor roll.  By the end of the day she had it folded into a lotus flower.  It’s kinda cool how it worked out that you can still see the words “honor roll” on there.  Goofball.

Honor Roll Lotus Flower

In other Lindsay news, she’s doing great on the oboe and will be in Honor Band this month.  She will have 4 rehearsals between now and the end of the month,  with a concert on the 31st.  We finally found her some outside lessons for the oboe, she had her first one on Monday and she improved SO much in just 45 minutes!  It was awesome!

She also has been jumped up to a 9th grade Creative Writing class at the high school.  We were hoping to jump her to a regular English class but by the time it all finally came together, they figured she would be too far behind the rest of the class.  But the Creative Writing class will still challenge her, rather than bore her.  She will ride the bus with the high schoolers every other day and then catch a bus they offer back to the Middle School.  On the days that she doesn’t have the class, she will be a teacher assistant for the Middle School’s English teacher.  She will be getting high school credit for this class.

The algebra class that she is in will also give her high school credit if she gets a good enough grade in it and then she will be able to take geometry.  She’s pretty excited about that too.

She’s still doing her highland dancing.  She’s been working on a choreography to do at the summer competitions.  She’s putting something together to Flogging Molly’s Cruel Mistress.  It’s pretty fun to watch her come up with ideas and run them past her teacher.  It gives her a new interest in dancing.  We will be going to Seattle this weekend for a workshop (her crazy mom forgot to get her registered for the competition).  Well, mainly we’re going to see Emily, but Lindsay will be doing the workshop, too.

In Girl Scouts, we’re busy with the cookie thing and Lindsay is starting to work toward her Silver Award.  At this point she plans on teaching girls to crochet and then organize times to get together to crochet some chemo-caps.  I think the plan also includes taking up some donations of them made by other yarn-craft groups. 

Oh, and she still devours books constantly. 

That’s about it for Lindsay.

Arctic Blast 2009 & cold, pouting chickens

The chickens are not impressed with our storm.

From Baby Chicks

Due to snow & freezing conditions here, my work was closed on Monday and Friday last week. More storm hit on Saturday, it snowed all day long and turned to freezing rain during the night. I bought chains for my car that I’ve had since 96 and is about to turn over to 200k… never seemed to need them in CO.

Here’s a view of the snow piled on my patio table…

Apologies for it being so dark, but I was up early to take Lindsay to the airport so she could fly to CO. They cancelled the flight AFTER I had showered & dressed!

3 months, 12 days

Almost big enough for dinner! Because we actually live in a real neighborhood, we can’t keep the roosters that hatched.  Craigslist is full of roosters needing a home, so our guys will probably become dinner.  I think Cap’n Ron next door will do the deed for us in exchange for one of them.  It might be a little sad to think about for some people.  They are a really neat looking breed (silver duckwing phoenix) with really long tail-feathers as adult males.  And our little black one is turning out to look really fancy.  But they are starting to crow on occasion, and we just can’t tick off the neighbors like that!

Both of the white roosters.  The black rooster is hiding behind the brown hen.

From Baby Chicks

Still eating all the time. They get cracked corn in the morning and late afternoon. In between they eat pellets (and bugs when they can find them). If you watch in the top of the screen, you can see the duck chase after my dog! Only video on this page.

From Baby Chicks

This little rooster is super cool looking. And he moves A LOT – really hard to get a good picture.

From Baby Chicks

One of the three roosters. Looks delish, huh?

From Baby Chicks

Here’s that black rooster again and one of the hens.

From Baby Chicks

This is the other hen from the brood. Lindsay says this is the one that we called Grayling as a chick. It was our fave, she’s turned out really pretty.

From Baby Chicks

Fast forward to 3 months old!

Lots biggger and perching. About 3 months old here. The light ones are hens, the black one is a rooster.

From Baby Chicks

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From Baby Chicks

Chicks at 26 days

Just clucking and eating, clucking and eating…

From Baby Chicks

Eating and scratching…

From Baby Chicks

I love how they’ve gone speckly, but still have some of the stripe on their heads.

From Baby Chicks

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From Baby Chicks

Chicks at 15 days old

The chicks grew so fast.  Spazzy would make this really neat clicking sound and the babies all came running to see what she had found to eat.  They had so many bugs & great stuff all summer long.  They grew fast.

Some videos below.

From Baby Chicks

From Baby Chicks

From Baby Chicks

Little chickies day 4

Chicken-vision has never been better!  Those baby chicks are so stinkin’ cute!

Click here for a little slideshow of pics.

Spazzy sat outside the coop until all of them basically fell out of the top nest boxes and then out of the coop.  If they get too far she clucks away and they come running back to her.  She’ll peck the ground in one spot and they all come running to it to peck too.   When she’s worried about them she walks around with her wings spread out a bit and really close to the ground, like she’s a big vacuum and going to hoover them up! 

When it was bedtime, she went in the coop and settled into the spot where the duck usually sleeps since the babies can’t get to the nest boxes upstairs.  Lindsay put some bedding in the dog crate for the duck if she needed it (Spazzy did get angry when she came near the ducks earlier and made a huge racket chasing her all around the yard).  The duck was a little confused about having her spot usurped, but she eventually settled down in the middle of the coop next to her usual spot.

So, it was getting darker out and I heard the loudest, shrillest peeping from outside.  Two of the chicks figured out how to get up the ramp, but three of them couldn’t see their mom and were letting the whole world know about it.  Meanwhile, Spazzy is patiently sitting in the coop making her little “here I am” clucking sound.  After a while of this I worried about them alerting all the neighborhood carnivores, so I sat on the dog crate very still for a while and when one would come by I’d scoop it up and plop it in the coop until all three were there. 

So, here is some video of them this morning.  We love how some are so yellow with pale stripes and others have very distinct stripes.  One of the more pale one has a lot of grey in with the yellow feathers.

Peep, Peep, Peep!

Spazzy had the baby chicks.  They hatched exactly 3 weeks from when I picked them up. At some point during that time one egg went missing.  We’re not sure how.  Five of the remaining 6 eggs hatched over the course of the whole day.  Lindsay called around 10 in the morning on Monday to report that we had 1 and a half baby chicks hatched.  She ran inside to get her camera (which may have taken a little while to find) and got pictures of 3 hatched and another poking a hole in his shell.  Then she promised she’d leave them alone until 2.  But Spazzy had other plans and kept pecking Lindsay, so she had to wait until I got home.  But I waited until Opie got home so he could see them and we’d only bug Spazzy that one time that night.  By that time the other two were hatched.  There was one egg left. Mom said that if there was one left that night, it likely wouldn’t hatch.  I gave it one more day just to be sure.  But she was right, of course.

So here are the pictures from that first morning.  Lindsay is working on pirate names for them.  I’m not sure why.

And a little video…

Spazzy’s going to be a momma

Spazzy the (formerly) fat chicken went broody again.  I was hoping she’d snap out of it, but she’s very determined.  The folks made me feel kinda guilty about not just getting her some eggs to hatch.  My concern is the chicks getting thru the chain-link fence. There’s SO MUCH fence, it will take forever to get it chicken-wired up to keep the babies safe. 

Anywho, I went on a quest for fertilized eggs last weekend.  Tried the lady in the neighborhood w/ the rooster, she had no hens… odd.  She was getting some soon, tho.  Tried at the farmer’s market, but by the time I made that decision it was a little late in the day.  Left my number with some folks on craigslist who were selling either eggs for eating or chicks.  Got a nice response from a guy in Boring (yup, that’s an actual town).  So, last Monday after work I headed out there and he gave me 7 eggs.  I was really only wanting 2 or 3, but he said since I came out that way, I had to take them all.  That’s ok. Mom wants a flock anyway.  I may keep one or two of them.  They were kinda neat looking (the hens that were on his farm).  I can’t remember what kind he said they were.  Guess I’ll have to wait til they grow up to identify them.

Anyway, Spazzy is being a very diligent sitter.  We forc her out each day so she’ll eat, drink, poop, & file down her beak.  She usually gets in a good dust bath too.  My guess is that they should hatch sometime near the end of next week, around Aug 22?? Not entirely sure.

Bertie the Hairy Coo

My folks bought a farm in Yamhill, OR. Maybe more on that later.  But before they were even moved in they bought two cows (Patches & Scotty) & a calf belonging to Patches, named Taco.  Patches & Scotty each had a calf in the works as well.  Scotty had hers yesterday, her name is Bertie.  Scotty & Bertie are both Hairy Coos (Scottish Highland Cattle).