While I was looking for a cute chicken video yesterday, I got side-tracked into watching cute duckling videos. It doesn’t take much to distract me with ducklings! Chicks are sweet, but ducklings make me hurt inside, they’re so adorable. Seriously, ducks are the things I love most in this world.
So on to the videos!
I miss being followed by ducklings….
I miss watching them play in a tub of water. When they get overexcited, they jump out of the tub and go racing around in circles, splattering water everywhere! So funny!
I miss watching them play with my dog. Her best friend was a tan & white Indian Runner duck….
Most of all, I miss just holding them and watching them trust me enough to fall asleep in my hand.
In case you can’t tell, once the chickens are grown up and settled in, we’re also getting ducks. Ducks are the greatest slug control a garden could ever have! I can’t find a video to illustrate it, but my duck Bastien used to take walks with me in my garden. He’d stroll beside me like the old friend he was, chatting away about the plants and the slugs. Occasionally, his wife would get jealous of his attention to me, and call him back to her. He’d wait until she was distracted, then sneak away to finish our garden inspection tour.
After a massive amount of indecision over wire (who knew it came in so many different types!) we bought wire and materials for the foundation.
Trenches, where the soon-to-be-buried wire will keep rats and other critters from digging into the coop.
Nearly everyone I mention the future chickens to has one thing to say: “I want to buy your eggs!” Seriously, it’s becoming pretty well known how horrible store-bought eggs are (even so called “free-range” or “organic” eggs. Usually all that means is that instead of the laying hens being penned in wire cages the size of a sheet of paper, they’re given “free-range” in a barn. Packed together so tightly that they can hardly move, much less find any grass or bugs to eat. Cannibalism and deaths are rampant. Today’s “frankenstein chicken” is genetically bred so that it grows up from chick to hen so quickly that its bones can’t keep up. These chickens often can’t stand without the serious risk of snapping their bones. It’s wrong, and really sad. No wonder there’s no taste comparison between those eggs and eggs raised the right way.
Contrast that to this (and these are actually chickens rescued from a factory):
Here’s another of the breeds we are getting: the Easter Egger.
Here’s a chick (the Easter Egger is the one hamming it up for the camera!)
And, given their name, you might not be surprised to learn the color of their eggs. Yes, these hens do lay blue or green eggs!
I’m sick, so while I have a rambling essay on writing and the book I’m currently writing, I’m entirely too tired to type it up. I’ve had this thing for a week now, and this morning I thought: “Hey, I feel pretty energetic! I’m going to go out to the studio and sew!” Heh. I managed to sew for maybe half an hour before I was exhausted. My brother thinks we have the swine flu. He might be right. Heaven knows I’ve never had anything that doesn’t actually make me feelall that bad knock me out of business so badly and for so long. And it’s interesting that I got sick in summer, because I never, ever get sick in summer. Good thing I’ve still got two weeks to get my energy back before the Renfaire!!!
And on to the cool stuff….
I meant to post this earlier on my “All about Harry Potter” blog, but it slipped my mind, so here it is now. Wizard rock! Yea! How can you not love it just for the sheer dorky awesomeness (even when it’s bad) – and these guys are actually pretty good. I present to you the Ministry of Magic’s “Snape vs Snape”.
I adore Snape. He’s just plain written of awesome.
And “Simon’s Cat” has a new episode out! I don’t know who puts these out, but he sure has a handle on what makes cats tick.
Who doesn’t like penguins?
And here’s my latest music discovery. Amaranth, by Nightwish. Love the visuals – they put stories in my head.
I had a conversation with a friend about my favorite birds.
#1 Ducks. The way you feel when you see a human baby? That’s the way I feel when I see a duck. That makes me weird, I know, but I grew up handraising ducklings and taking walks in my garden with my Indian Runner, Sebastien, him heeling perfectly beside me, while we discussed the flowers and the work that needed to be done. He had a lot of very insightful things to say. If I’d understood Quack, I’d have picked up a lot of helpful tips.
#2 Crows. How can anyone not like crows? They’re so gothic and clever and interesting and opinionated – more like people than a few people I know.
#3 Seagulls. And here’s where my friend stopped believing I was telling the truth. He simply couldn’t believe that anyone would choose seagulls over something like, say, a meadowlark.
So partly for George, here’s a list of why:
1) Seagulls are art on the wing. It fills me with pure wild happiness to watch them soaring and balancing on the wind, their long and delicate wings tipped to catch the blue of the sky. No other bird flies with such grace. I could watch them for hours – and I have.
2) Songbirds may have prettier songs, but the cry of a seagull is melancholy given voice. It tears into me and sends shivers through me. I count the seagull’s call as one of my favorite sounds – and not just measured against other birds’ songs, but against the world itself.
3) Seagulls have such personality. Sit and throw french fries to a group of them, and after twenty minutes you’ll be able to tell each bird apart just by its personality. Some are bullies, some shy, but even the shyest has a brashness, a bold belief that, yes, he is a marvelous bird, and deserving of respect. We humans could learn from that.
Seagulls are a glory in this world, and people who think of them merely as “garbage birds” miss out on seeing so much. People are conditioned, I think, to love songbirds, admire eagles, respect owls, and be charmed by chickadees and hummingbirds, but none of those birds are any more marvelous than a seagull. It’s just that seagulls are so common that we overlook them, the way we overlook the reflection of mud puddles, and the magic of every ‘commonly’ exquisite thing. That’s a great pity, and our great loss.
For myself, I never fail to look up in parking lots and parks, beside the water, and over the asphalt, seeking the glint of a soaring white wing, and listening for the shivering lonely cry.
If I could be any bird in the world for a single hour, I’d choose to be a seagull. They fly the way my soul flies.
Here’s my latest sculpt, a miniature steampunk feline. Cats, as you are probably aware, think it’s extremely unfair that those pesky (but tasty!) birds possess flight, and cats do not. This ingenious aviator has decided to take matters into his own paws and restore justice to the universe.
It comes as little surprise to me that, precisely as I predicted, Obama’s reaction to our crashing economy is to add another trillion+ in national debt by giving us another “stimulus package”. In fact, so eager is he to further sink our economy that he can’t even wait until he’s sworn in. How any sane person can believe these packages are a good idea is beyond me. It’s like giving a drowning person a brick – it gives him something to hold onto, but it sends him to the bottom that much faster. Click on the link below for real, genuine ideas to save the economy:
But until we get a president with a clue, I’ll take my check, and I’ll let Obama buy me a chicken coop. We’re designing it right now, and planning the breeds of chickens to buy through www.mypetchicken.com Besides the standard-sized egglayers, we’re getting a few Silkie Bantams. These chickens are an amazingly bizarre breed with a history – they were brought over from China by Marco Polo.
And they are so cute. I think they look like miniature gryphons.
Real eggs, as opposed to those sickly and tasteless store-bought imitations, bug and slug control, free manure for my garden, and affectionate new pets that love to lap-sit and snuggle – you can’t deny that chickens are awesome.
So good luck to you, Mr. Obama. Thanks for the hen house, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens once everyone realizes you’re already begun breaking your campaign promises, before you’re even in office. That has to be some kind of record.
Change. Remember that word, Mr. Obama? Change means doing something different, not just to just keeping repeating the previous administration’s mistakes. At least in my back yard, though, the results of your “stimulus” will be crap that’s actually beneficial to my garden.
