Chasity‘s daughter Isabella needs a liver transplant, and they need help to make that happen.
Go check out Isabella’s page and donate if you can!!!
Fred came in the house Saturday afternoon and said to me, “I need to come up with a good excuse for why we don’t sell our chickens.”
“Was someone getting pushy about wanting to buy some?”
“No, he just asked and I said we don’t sell them, and then I was like ‘I’m weird about selling our animals, I don’t like to do it, blah blah blah.'”
Fred is, as I have mentioned before, an overexplainer. If you ask him something and he answers you and then you don’t say anything, he will rush to fill the silence by explaining himself. Sometimes at night I’ll ask him a question I already know the answer to, and then when he answers I don’t say anything because I want to see how long he’ll keep talking before he stops and then says “Y’know?” in a bid for a response.
“How about you just say ‘No, we don’t sell chickens’ and don’t say anything else?” I suggested. “Because we don’t sell chickens. Those chickens are for us, not them.”*
“Yeah, I know…” he said.
Sunday, a family stopped by to buy eggs, and this time when the guy asked if Fred sold chickens, he simply said that we don’t.
“But he kept giving me looks,” Fred told me later. “Like he was looking for an explanation! I finally told him we eat them ourselves.”
*We did sell some little chickens once to someone who stopped by, back in April. But we both felt really bad about selling them and decided we wouldn’t do it again, because we know that here they’re treated really well and given lots of food and room to roam and (now) protection, but we certainly can’t know that in their new home they’ll have the same. We’re weird that way, I guess.
Sunday morning, Fred wanted to go to D0g Days (a flea market in Tennessee where we’ve gotten a lot of chickens, and in fact where we got our last two pigs) to see if there were any pigs there. He was also interested in buying a fig tree. We got five cherry trees at D0g Days a couple of weeks ago, as well as a Weeping Willow tree. The cherry trees are doing fine so far, but the weeping willow didn’t make it a day before the dogs chewed it down to a nub.
Lesson learned on our part! No planting small trees in the chicken/ dog yard.
So we were surprised, pulling into the D0g Days parking lot, to find that there weren’t many people there. Usually it’s bustling, but we also arrived there a lot earlier than we usually do. We walked slowly through, looking at what was for sale, until we reached the table we’d been aiming for. The guy there was selling cooked pork, butter, milk, and eggs.
Oh, eggs.
When we were there a few weeks ago, Fred asked if the eggs were fertile (that is, if there was a rooster in with the hens). At that point, the guy told him that none of them were, but that he’d have fertile eggs in a few weeks.
Yesterday when Fred asked if he had any fertile eggs yet, the guy answered in the affirmative.
First we bought two and a half dozen, and then we walked through the rest of the market, looking to see what there was. There were plenty of chickens, plenty of puppies, plenty of turkeys and geese (HATE), but no pigs.
On our way back to the truck, we stopped and got another dozen eggs. Hey, the incubator holds 42 eggs; why not take advantage of the space? Yesterday afternoon, Fred put 35 of the eggs we’d gotten at D0g Days and 7 of our own eggs into the incubator. In three weeks, we should have some baby chickens.
Yes, it’s an illness.
When my sister and Brian were on their way here at Christmas, she saw these license plates in a gift shop and sent me the picture.
(More George & Gracie pics up over at Flickr.)
Three and a half years old, and brudderly love lives on.
Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: “Oh!” he said, with a big smile. “You’re pregnant!”
2006: A SHELL ON A STICK.
2005: Every movie and every show we watch, he’s in there deconstructing it.
2004: Memes.
2003: A day in the life of Spot J. And3rson.
2002: No entry.
2001: Blech.
2000: I now officially have too damn many books to read.