I'm pretty sure the turkeys are reaching sexual maturity. How do I know?
Well, the other day I went out to feed them, and Crooked Toe (the tom) was strutting all over the place, calling and puffing up and turning blue in the face. It was really quite hysterical: he'd make these quiet sounds, then sound off:
pew-pew-pew-BLLLLLLBBBLBLBLBLBLLLLL-pew-pew-BLLLLLBLBLLLBBBBLLL
So, being the evil person I am, I started calling back to him:
Me: pew-pew-pew
Crooked Toe: BBLLLLLBBLLBLLLLLBBLLLLL!
Me, dying laughing: pew-pew-pew
Crooked Toe, puffing and turning blue: BBBLLBLLBLLLLBLLLBBBBLLLLL!!
Me, dying some more: pew-pew
Crooked Toe, horking his neck out and looking like he's about to have a stroke: BBBBLLLLBLLBLLLBLLLLBBBLLLLBLLLLL!!!
Me: *falls over laughing*
Dude, seriously. Cheap entertainment! (Get it? :P)
(Not only this, but our mornings are punctuated by Crooked Toe totally going off every 5-10 seconds for, oh, an hour and a half or so. Yes, EVERY morning. o.O)
 G Kitty in the laundry basket. This laundry used to be clean.
Now it's covered with cat hair.
*sigh*
It's a gorgeous day today, bright and sunny, if a bit cold. It's been overcast and snowy the last couple of days; indeed, our day started off that way. When I went to take care of the turkeys, I left the coop door open, as I've done several times before. Once again, the turkeys cautiously crept their way out, peeping and pecking at the snow.
 Lavender and Crooked Toe. I let them go, figuring they deserved a bit of early afternoon sun. They weren't shivering or acting cold, so I let them creep around as I turned their bedding. They started creeping further. And a bit further. Still not far, mind you, but further than they've been.
The trouble came when it was time for me to herd them back to their coop and go on to my next chore.
We've gotten quite a bit of snow. A lot of it has packed down, but a 25-lb turkey weighs a lot less than a 165-lb woman. I kept breaking through to my knees, and the snowshoes were in the garage. Grumbling, I thrashed my way over to where Ben has packed down snow along one of his trails. (150-lb dog being a lot closer in weight to me than a turkey.) I made my way up the hill, figuring that once I got around them, the turkeys would make for the safety and security of their coop.
I was wrong.
Nope, the turkeys were more interested in outpacing me, the tom (Crooked Toe) flapping his massive wings to make way in the snow. I'd grabbed a lightweight lawn rake to head them off with, hoping they'd head back down the hill.
Nothing doing.
 Dog track to the left, butt print to the right. Finally, I resorted to grunting my way up past the turkeys, planting my butt on the snow, and using wide-spread legs to corral the turkeys. I scooted down, bit by bit, and had to wrap one arm around Crooked Toe (who was emphatically not interested in any of this, and could he please go hang out in the trees) to keep him from bashing me in the face with his wings. The hen, Lavender, kind of got a little run-over as I held her massive partner with one arm and tried to nudge her along before me.
This worked, albeit smoothly, until I got a few feet from the coop. At that point, my backside took a sudden dip into the snow--not far, only a few inches--and I was unable to get any real gravity purchase. Ever tried to gently throw a live turkey somewhere? It's more difficult than it sounds.
Somehow, I managed to get them back to the little landing of packed snow in front of the coop and herd them in. I'm glad I do my winter chores in snow pants, that's all I'm gonna say.
Apparently, today is the day where the animals eat all of my food.
Went to the grocery store today. Greg's back at his winter job, which means he has regular hours on top of his other gigs, but I knew he'd be home in time for dinner tonight. As a surprise, I'd picked up a bargain-bin steak for him and some blue cheese sliders for me.
Once home, I dumped ice and water out of the animals' buckets and used them to bring the groceries inside. I left the steak and sliders for the second round, not wanting to put raw meat in with the vegetables I'd bought. I left the back of my car open and went to put everything away.
Half the groceries away, water buckets emptied, rinsed, and refilled, email checked, and lunch eaten, I went back outside to finish up. I absently loaded the rest of the groceries into a reusable bag and took them over to the base of the steps. While I was dickering around with ice in the rabbits' bowls, I suddenly realized that . . . I . . . hadn't . . . seen . . . either the steak or sliders in the back of my car. I walked over, checked, wondered if I'd left them at the store, remembered my decision to leave them in the back of the car . . .
. . . and, looking at the giant dog asleep in the parking pad, suddenly understood all too well what had happened to them. *facepalm*
To add insult to injury, I went back to finish with the rabbits. While I was doing so, one of the goats wandered up to me to sniff at their grain pellets. I hollered and swatted at the goat. She wandered off while I tended to the bunnies.
Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the cabbages laying on the ground. I whipped around to discover the goat merrily munching away on the outermost leaves of the other cabbage, her head halfway inside the grocery bag. Cue more hollering, swatting, and cabbage retrieval.
. . . Some days, I think the mosquitoes might have been worth putting up with after all.
A snapshot of life around our place for the last week:
Our cat came down last weekend with what was likely "songbird fever"--ie, gastric upset/food poisoning at eating too many small wild critters that were already a little too dead. Sunday, it felt like all I did was clean up feline bodily fluids (mostly bloody diarrhea): vomit in the hallway, shit in the bathroom, two more of each in the downstairs bathroom, more in three or four other places around the house, etc.
The cat wasn't eating or drinking, so I wound up snagging the eyedropper from my herbal tincture in order to force-feed him water and mooshy food. $150 later, he had his own eyedropper of nasty pina colada-smelling gook. Susan, my herbalist, tried not to laugh too hard when I asked her how to sterilize the eyedropper and explained why I needed this information.
We got our baby turkeys on Friday. I'd gone in with two other people on an order and neither were able to deal with them right away, so all 27 came home with me to start. Let me just say, over two dozen tiny birdies running around in a small box are friggin' impossible to track. A few hours later, one was dead in the empty water bowl and a handful more weren't doing well. Cue me sitting with a syringe and electrolyte water, hand-feeding baby turkeys. Also cue said babies crapping and occasionally vomiting ropey slime all over the front of my ratty T-shirt. Sadly, we lost a second baby that day.
Saturday morning, I went out to water the goats, only to discover that they'd gotten into the bin with the sweet feed in it. The yearling wether wound up with scours (diarrhea) by mid-late afternoon. Luckily, he seemed to be doing pretty well: we had a vigorous argument about me grabbing his collar, then his horns, in order to inspect his backside. I figure that anything well enough to avoid capture was probably doing just fine, and he was.
On Sunday, while doing the morning chores, Greg discovered another turkey poult dead in the broody box. Still another wasn't doing well. Cue more syringing, shit, slimy vomit, and another dead turkey baby.
Then there's the dog's reaction to his change in food, and the 24-hour stomach bug I got at the beginning of this week . . . but I'll spare you those details. Let's just say it's been more of the same 'round here. I sure hope next week is better.
 Fuzzbutt
The other day, I realized that part of Ben's weird size issues were due to the fact that although he'd blown his winter coat on the front half of his body, his haunches and tail were still covered in thick insulation. After finger-combing fuzz and grime out of him for a half-hour or so, I grabbed a small hairbrush and started going to town on him. He loved it.
 Hair of the dog, seen from 20' above I brushed him for a couple of hours, combing out thick down (which I was sorely tempted to gather and try to spin--his undercoat was about 3" long) all over the place. I snipped out the dreadlocks from behind his ears and got most of his pre-shedded back. Ben did really well, even when I got into the thickly matted stuff. He would just turn around with a slightly injured look on his face, as if to say, Hey, that kinda hurts! Although he got fidgety in snarled areas, he never got snippy, which was quite a relief.
Looking at all the hair I got off of him! Combined with how long and soft his undercoat is, I'm quite tempted to save it, get it processed, and spin it up. Like I really need another project, I know . . . but it's tempting. Very.
Also, I would like to note for the record that we need to get him a Kong or some other toy. In the middle of the night, Ben ate four of our chive plants, although I think a large part of it was the yellow plastic containers they were in. He left the containers scattered in a semi-circle on the parking pad, and has run off with his little yellow bucket as a play toy, too. Goofy dog.
The past several days, we've been awakened by a territorial robin. Said robin starts flying into the window to attack his reflection at, oh, 6 am or so. This means that as Greg and I are lying in bed, cuddling and getting ready to start our day, that the background music sounds very much like:
*silence*
*bonk*
*silence*
*BONK*
*silence*
*flutterflutterscrape*
*silence*
*BONK*
*silence*
*taptap*
*silence*
*softbonk*
*silence*
*BONK*
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much that will dissuade this avian frat boy. Rolling the window shade up and down only makes him fly off for a few minutes, as does Greg running outside naked and throwing wood chips at him. (Can you guess who has a higher tolerance for this sort of thing? *grin*) I've resorted to taping strips of ripped-up sheet on one of the windows, but that doesn't completely stop the robin. Not to mention, we have a LOT of windows around the house. *sigh*
Our other feathered attacker is a woodpecker, who also likes to start doing his thing at about 6 am. So, between the gentle *BONK* noises coming from the windows, we have Gatling gun noises coming loudly from the roof above our bed. It sounds like we're being strafed.
Who said living in the country was quiet? *laugh*
My parents wound up coming through town last week. As it so happens, it was Easter. Over the last several years, the way we've observed it has fallen into the "Oh, hey, it's Easter" category, rather than any particular rituals.
Growing up, we'd do the Easter basket thing, but that was about it. Greg, being Jewish, never even got that far. He and I have talked about "doing Easter" before, but it's not been a priority by any means.
With my parents coming in and it being kind of a family tradition, we decided to go ahead and dye eggs and the whole ball of wax. Mom even brought a small Easter basket; she'd been involved in some sort of community thing and one of the women she knew had made an Easter basket, but didn't have anyone to give it to. So Mom passed it on to us, complete with basket, neon cellophane "grass," jellybeans, and little chocolate eggs.
 Greg and Mom, dyeing eggs
The night before, I snagged a Paas kit from the store and boiled up some eggs. Somewhere around mid-morning, we got started with the dye. Mom and I were disappointed that Paas no longer includes a white crayon in their kit, so I scrounged up an old candle and we used that.
 Dad napping
Dad, of course, kept to his traditional Easter-egg dyeing role.
Peabody thought it was a great idea, too. Then again, that's pretty much his typical MO.
 What a patient dog! After the eggs, for some reason I decided that it would be a good idea to dye the dog's feet. (Don't ask me why; all I can tell you is that alcohol was NOT involved.) I went for purple and wound up with a lovely shade of lavender. Purple puppy piddy-paws, as I kept saying to him. I planned on redyeing his feet again the next morning, before our Heeling Friends volunteer shift, but Mom threw out the purple and I had to make do with green. Hardly anyone noticed (all of one person, I think), but I had a grand time doing it. With it being non-toxic, it wasn't going to hurt him, and the water-soluble aspect meant that it washed off very easily. I think we have a new family tradition. *grin* Later in the day, Greg and I had to make a run into town. When we came back, we discovered that the Easter bunny had been there and had hidden all of our eggs. Being a practiced hand at this, I spotted three within the first ten minutes of walking through the door, but waited until Mom was out of the tub for us all to go searching. I beat Greg 8 to 4, but considering that he's never done it before and, as Dad stated, seemed to think the Easter bunny was smarter than he really was, Greg didn't do bad at all. We had a lot of fun and some good family time, which is what all holidays should be. :)
Also! We have a fox den somewhere on our property. Even though they nailed three of our turkeys last year (operator error; totally my fault), I love having them around. They're beautiful and an unexpected surprise. I halfway named our place Kitsune Hame because of them.
So. This, I love:
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