Chasing Sunsets

It was even prettier than this, however, why is it a tree is always in the way of the best sunset photo ever? Or a house? Or a hill? We missed the best part by about 5 minutes, but it was still beautiful.

There is copious amounts of chicken poop in this post.... sorry!

You will see chicken poop.
Sorry.
It's what I do.

Well, it's what the chickens do. I just .... Oh you know what I meant!!

{A pretend antique chicken}

We have a chicken mystery that needs to be solved. It's puzzling, to say the least, and I haven't quite figured out, who the culprit is.

There is one... ONE... white egg layer.
It's puzzling!
It's a calamity!
It's a drama!
It's... it's... well, it's a white egg.

{forgive the poop... I warned you!}

We're getting around 7-8 eggs a day now. Most of those are little eggs - they'll get larger in time. Of course we have the 2 older gals, Thelma and Louise, and lots of younger Barred Rocks (those are the black and white ones). However, Louise lays light brown (barred rock) and Thelma (Rhode Island Red) lays darker brown eggs.

So who could a white one belong to?

And then I started to suspect someone:

LWC a/k/a Little White Chicken.

LWC was one of the chickens that my sister brought to me. She's .. well.. little.. and white. Well mostly white. Because she is smaller and an outcast, she gets forced to roost under the roost. Stupid move, since you get pooped on all night long.

I mean, it kinda made sense. She's gaining a bit of weight, her comb and waddle are getting bigger, and more red.... and she doesn't look like anyone else.


Let's ponder this while Thelma sings us a song.

It was purdy wasn't it?
It's her "egg song". When I hear this clucking from around 3 miles away, I know there'll be a light brown and highly misshapen egg soon.

Everyone else steers clear of the outdoors. They want NOTHING to do with what's going on behind closed coop doors.

Anyway, so back to LWC.

LWC and I were trying to bond today. Actually LWC was trapped in the coop with me, and I happened to have my camera. This gave me some time to ponder white eggs and singlar white chickens.

Then I got to thinking...

What if... What if LWC, was even more different. What if.. LWC...

wasn't the egg layer after all? What if... What if ...

What if LWC WAS A ROOSTER!!???

I know!!!!!1!!

I said that too.
Big comb.
Long waddle.
Fiesty attitude.

Uh-oh.

I think this deserves a little more research. Who's going in with me? It involves chicken poop - but only on your shoes. Kinda. Ignore the chicken that pooped down the side of my favorite white shirt the other day. That only happens 27% of the time!!

Anyone?
Hello?

Sooo... my husband made me sleep on the couch the other night

and I wasn't very happy about it either.

I was up late, working on an album. I've decided it's OK to be a night owl, as I seem to get a lot of work done from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. I thought maybe if I slept in a little longer, I could extend my work hours.

So around 2:30, I head off to bed, only to find the door locked.

Not one of those interior doors that you can just stick a nail in the hole either, one with an actual key. Only I don't have the key, in fact, I never have had the key.

Now the common folk would just beat on the door and cause a ruckus. However, I did not for two reasons. First off, I'm fairly confident that my husband had PTSD at one point in his life, and I try not to push it when he's asleep. Second, he's unpleasant when you wake him up.

Really.
A lot.

So I figured I'd wait it out on the couch, since really, he always has to get up and potty at some point at night and checks to see if I'm in bed when he does. (now you're thinking about my husband going potty aren't you? I'm sorry!)

Bad news tho... he NEVER GOT UP to go Potty!!!

6:15 rolls around and it's time for him to get ready for work. He comes straight out the door apologizing for being a jackhole and not realizing he'd locked the door.

I was grumpy.
Seriously do you blame me?

A cat slept on my feet all night, my back was out of place and the brand new couch is much more comfortable to sit on than sleep on. Oh, and he had my damn pillow.

When I got up later, stumbled into the kitchen I found this letter:

It's hard to stay mad when he apologizes profusely. However it is easier to stay mad because my back is still out of place.

I think I might be able to finagle a back rub out of this deal yet!

The games that chickens play

We have kind of an odd hobby. A pasttime if you will....

Chicken watching.

Yeah I know.. we're sad, lonely, boring people. It's ok, I'd rather spend my beer money on chicken feed. I'm cool like that.

So every once in a while, we gather up the lawn chairs, sit out in the yard and just watch the chickens "interact". There's a whole world going on in front of you, a social hierarchy of dominate over submissive. Of strong versus the weak. Of the hungry versus the more hungry. More hungry usually ALWAYS wins. But here's the deal, chickens are ALWAYS HUNGRY. How many skinny chickens have you seen in your life.. really?

We have found that they love the bread game. This is the game where we bring them bread, and they eat it.

Exciting isn't it?

Actually, it's more like, "OmGGGGG.. you have breeeeead!! Please can I have some pleasepleasepleasePLEASE!" Then we throw them out in bits and watch the mayhem. Ever feed a little bit of food to the koi in the pond at the zoo? Well, those koi have nothing on these chickens. Bread=Godiva chocolates to chickens.


It goes something like this:

"Ohhh.. whatcha got there? That looks interesting. Might I get a little closer?"

"POW!"

"Chicken got ya bread... cluckcluckcluckcluckcluck"


Lather Rinse Repeat.
900 times.


How do my chickens not way 67 pound each?
Delicious 67 pounds. mmmm.

Royal Empress Trees - an Update

I seem to get several people that still follow along with my royal empress tree section of my blog. I had someone post tonight that they'd like an update, and ironically, I took photos just a couple days ago to do just that.

But first, I'll catch everyone else up. Royal Empress Trees are claimed to be fast growers that will grow "up to 20 feet the first year". We live in a place that doesn't have many trees, and not many LARGE trees, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

Because I was having a hard time finding real life photos on the internet, I decided to start a section of my blog. If you want to see the tree's progress, click here, or click on any "royal empress" label on any tree post.

Back in April, it was just a stick in the ground, so I did as they said and wacked it off right to the ground. Shortly, some little buds starting showing up. That was mid-april or so. In Mid-May, the tree looked like this:

12" in about a month. This was also around the time that the second of 3 trees total randomly died. You'll remember that the 3rd tree never came back after winter.

No idea what happened to the second tree. Just one day the leaves turned brown and it died. My best guess is too much water since our spring was VERY wet again this year.


A couple days ago, I went back out and took these photos:

You can't really tell, but this tree is about as tall as me, and I am 5'4". Around early August it really started to shoot up. Most of it was done over one week.

Here you can really see how large the leaves get. They are 3-4 hands across in width.

I don't know for sure if it will get any larger, but I will say I wish it would have grown more. This might be partly my own fault as they say when it grows, you need to break off all buds but one. I thought I had done that, but it was pretty good sized before I realized there were two. I didn't see it because the leaves are so big!

I did use a fertilizer stake on it at the beginning of the season.

This is the second full season I've had with experience with it, and I really was hoping for "more".

On a scale of 1-10 - 1 being a failure and 10 being better than they said, I will give it a solid 5. It's cool, it does grow fast, but so far it looks like a sunflower with no flower... not really a tree. It is supposed to be flowering, and the pics they show online look very much like a tree and not a "plant". I'm willing to give it time to see what happens yet.

Ironically, I've finally decided how I want my someday garage to sit on the property... I'm excited and hoping that construction will start next summer. *however* There's one sacrifice that'll have to be made.

Yep.. this tree.
Sigh.