Baby It’s FRIGID Outside!

Goodness gracious sakes alive! It’s arctic out there this morning!

 

I stepped outside briefly to take the trash and recycling bins to the road (less than fifty feet away) wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, and froze half to death.

 

Minutes later, I had to keep dashing in and out to take hot water to the goats  and chickens (their water trough was frozen solid) and to throw them hay and grain, instead of staying out the whole time (all of three minutes). My fingers got so cold I had to dip them in the hot water before pouring it into the trough after turning the chickens loose from their shed. (I lock them in at night so raccoons can’t get in and murder them.)

 

I’m glad this cold snap isn’t scheduled to last much longer. Yesterday when it was windy almost a thousand people lost power in Tacoma, and I was worrying about them all, thinking how quickly it would get cold in this house without electricity. We do have a back-up wood stove in case we ever lose power, thankfully. I hope others do, too…

 

In Other News…

 

The rooster in the six-chick bunch I bought in September has been trying out his cock a doodle do the past few days for the first time.  He’s pretty funny. It takes protracted practice to get good at it, apparently…

 

So far the rooster is remaining a gentleman and not offering to attack anybody, so as long as that continues to be the case, he can stay. I had to dispatch last year’s rooster chick because he became an attack rooster–anyone who came into our back yard  would get spurred. Can’t have that; no mean critters!

 

I hate killing critters, so I always hope the chicks we get are girls, but there are no guarantees. The last two batches have had males (one in each batch) in them. Gender identification isn’t 100% in chicks.

 

The bad news is that, if I let nature takes its course and the hens mate with the rooster and raise chicks, probably half of them will be males, which will leave me the task of culling and dispatching them. I guess we can eat them (we never eat our hens–they provide eggs for us for years, so they’re allowed to retire after their egg-laying days are over) if I end up having to dispatch them.  (Yuk! It would be very hard to eat a chicken we’ve raised, since they become pets!)

 

Oh, the woes of a barnyard… but critters are well worth the work, the cold, the heat, and the heartache that goes along with having them.  They’re great fun to observe, and they’re all useful–which is why we got them in the first place. The goats eat the blackberries and other growing, creeping flora and the hens give us lots of free-roaming, farm fresh eggs. (There is NO comparison to store-bought eggs from intensively-raised, factory-farmed hens. None!)

 

That reminds me of a couple of funny stories. Lisa told me there was a lady in eastern Washington (farm country, where you’d think people would know better) who told her she would  never buy eggs from farmers. When asked why, she was indignant, as if she’d just been asked the stupidest question ever!  “Because they come out of chickens’ butts!” she exclaimed.

 

I’m completely amazed that Lisa managed to keep her jaw from dropping… I don’t know where she thinks store-bought eggs come from but, based on her answer, I’m guessing she thinks store-bought eggs are manufactured in a kitchen somewhere from ingredients they have on hand…

 

When Lisa asked a gentleman from eastern Washington if the water froze at his place, he shook his head no and said, “It was only twenty degrees outside.”  (???)   Really?   Last I heard, water freezes at 32 degrees, so twenty degrees is significantly under its freezing point…

 

You just can’t make this stuff up! It sounds too dopey to be true.  Someone should put these anecdotes into a screenplay. They would have fit right into City Slickers, probably!