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.

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!

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

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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.

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

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One of the three roosters. Looks delish, huh?

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

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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.

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Eating and scratching…

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

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Some videos below.

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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.

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…

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.