The Chicken or the

The other week my phone dinged and it was a notification from my Google photos, one of those "remember this day?" pictures.  It successfully brought tears brimming in my eyes.  It was the day that our first hens started laying after their winter break.  Man, I miss having chickens.  I mean, I REALLY miss it.  Solution? We should get chickens again! 

The first time we got laying hens as local egg farm was downsizing, they were gladly giving away hens gratis.  It was lucky and those ladies served us well until they got served up for coyote snacks. 

 This time around we're back inside city limits which means technically we should limit our flock to 5 hens. We'll see.  I have heard such magical things about Silkies.  The teddy bear of the chicken kingdom.  A great pet and layer and lawn ornament.  With advertising like that, how could I not want in?!  Problem is, I was finding it really hard to get Silkies economically.  Sure the hatchery websites say they're $3.77 but then add the small order fee and shipping and handling and you're looking at a pretty penny for just a couple birds! 

I decided to do it the long way this time and hatch out chicks at home.

I got an incubator from Amazon.com and bought some eggs from a small farm in Louisiana, a mix of Silkies, Easter Eggers, White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds.  I'm not a huge fan of Rhode Island Reds, I find them pretty ornery, so I was glad when the egg box arrived and the seller had only sent one RIR egg. 

I ordered the eggs on a Friday and they arrived the following Thursday.  I was puttering around in the garage with the door open and the letter carrier called me over.  He had a mail tote labeled "Live Animals".  Cautiously, he lifted the lid and shielded his face. Then he peered inside, to see a Priority mail box covered in "Live Animals" stickers.  He handed it to me gingerly and told me he didn't want to put "them" in the package slot of our community mail box.  I thanked him and giggled as I went inside.  I let the eggs rest outside of their wrapping on the kitchen counter for six hours and then placed them inside the incubator set at a cozy 37.5 C.  
*side note: there is some really interesting stuff out there about incubation temperature and the effect on chicken sex.  REALLY INTERESTING!

While I wait the prerequisite 21 days for our little peepers to pip into existence I thought I should prepare their eventual home.  I perused Craigslist, nah,

Ringing in the New Year Right

When we moved to Reno in 2010 we had a 5 year plan. 

 Live, love, grow in Reno and then come home to the PNW. 

 In 2016 we realized we had overstayed our plan in Reno and we desperately wanted to move our family back to the Evergreen State. In August after we completed the legal adoption of our two sons, my husband started applying for jobs in the Seattle area.  We were three months pregnant, expecting our third son and fifth child in the middle of January.  The months went by and he got a couple of nibbles, a phone interview, but nothing solid.  Then in February two days after our son was born the call came that would signal and turning tide. A biomedical research company north of Seattle was interested in him for multiple positions.  Two weeks later they flew him up for an in person interview and a few days after he came home he received a formal offer.  We wanted as little down time between jobs as possible. He gave his current employer his two weeks notice and told his new boss he could start in three weeks. Those three weeks flew by.  We got a real estate agent and started packing up non-essentials.  The week before he left we got a curveball thrown our way.  Our adopted sons have a younger sibling, a two year old girl, and she needed a forever home.  The week my husband started his new job in Washington was the week that she started living with us full time.  From the end of April to the middle of June I was a single parent to six kids, 3 months, 2 years, 4 years, 6 years, 8 years, and 10 years old.  Me and the kids worked to sell the house and the livestock from our homestead.  We had a herd of Oberhasli dairy goats in milk, a flock of 35+ chickens and a trio of Guinea Hogs. We found homes for all our animals and a buyer for the house.  I got temporary legal custody over our future daughter #3.  Five days after the kids got out of school for the summer, we got out of Reno for good. My husband had been house hunting in the Northwest and ten days after the sale of our Reno house we were getting the keys to our new digs North of Seattle. The rest of the summer is a blur of signing the kids up for school, unpacking boxes, re-carpeting bedrooms, an emergency re-model of the kids bathroom, 4th of July, filing for permanent full-time custody, getting the new house re-sided, birthdays, establishing care with new doctors, and I'm sure I'm forgetting more.  

2016 and 2017 were about moving forward.

 Just keep moving. 

 If we stopped to really think about all the plates we had in the air we might have crumbled under the weight of reality.  After living months on top of months of just nose to the grindstone, get it done and move on, it has been hard to slow down and settle.  We are in a new city, with a blossoming family, in a new home, the kids are at a new school, we found a new church.  Its all been a lot to process.

I find myself thinking back to Junk Farm and what joy I found in that project.  Urban farming was something to delight in.  I like the bustle of city neighborhoods.  The challenge of small spaces.  I felt like part of something bigger.  I never felt alone. 

It's time to settle. 

At least for a little while. 

And what better way to do that than with a garden?  

Time for some light reading.


 

   

Resolution Time

Another year has passed, time to dust off the old blog.  A lot has changed in my life since the last time I sat down to write.  Life has done a good job of keeping me busy.  But with the New Year comes the opportunity for setting goals. 

Resolution #1: I would like to write a post once a month.

I find that I enjoy my life more when I have to opportunity to sit down and write out my experiences.  Maybe its like counting my blessings.  I was never great at that, personally, it was anxiety inducing, like, hmm, what am I forgetting?! When you think about it we are pretty darn blessed.  I was also never good at journaling, I get into my head as a narrator and wonder what my "voice" should sound like. Where is this storyline going? This time I'm going to give myself a break. Does it have to be perfect? NO! Does it have to be coherent? Not even! It just has to be mine.  Me putting my words down in an effort to make sense of what is going on in my goings on.  What will I write about?  WHATEVER I WANT! 

Resolution #2: I would like to read more.

I tried watching the first season of Black Mirror and was so thoroughly shaken that I had to call my husband.  As soon as he came home I made him watch the two episodes that I had watched, while I curled  in a ball in the corner peeking from between asking is it over? He made it through the episodes without any crisis or soul shattering anxiety for the future. But me, I still refuse to watch more of the show. I rarely refer to myself as sensitive but in regards to the digestion of media, that's exactly what I am.  Ideas and emotions seep into the open pores of my being and I become shellshocked from news articles and TV shows.  What's the solution? Well I don't know if there is one. But I can think of a resolution! Read more. That means reading more fiction AND nonfiction. Going to the library. Taking moments of solace in the sweet close air between stacks of books.  Listening to the calm that all those pages absorb.  And learning.  Keeping my vocabulary skills sharp. Feeding my mind with more than BuzzFeed articles and melodramas. Practicing the art of mono-tasking.  Devoting all of my attention to one thing.  Giving my imagination space to stretch, walk, run, maybe do some tumbling. Reading has always been one of my all time favorite activities. And yet it is one of the first things I sacrifice on a daily basis in favor of making school lunches, doing laundry, yadda yadda, fill in the blank with menial mom duty.  NO MORE! I want to take back more beloved literature.  Here's to a new year of page-turning thrills and invigoration!

Resolution #3: I would like to research the heck out of projects before diving in.

One of the biggest lies I have ever told myself is that I "learn by doing".  It's not a complete falsehood.  But I think there has to be a better way that doing something wrong first to learn how to do it right.  This year I'm going to try to break that habit.  Let Resolution #2 inform me before tackling new projects.  The most fun, I have found, is in the planning stage of a project.  I love envisioning and sketching what could be.  The actualization is okay too.  But while the idea is still just a scribble on a piece of graph paper the possibilities are endless. Nothing too big or small, nothing too extravagant or too picky.  I want to feed that itch.  I want to design and research and sketch and research and doodle and research and throw it out to start over.

Cheers, cue the bullhorn, HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2018!