Homestead Update

We spent a rather toasty night, as our air conditioning unit started to freeze over for the third or maybe fourth year in a row. Funny how when it gets super cold, none of the rest of the house does. There's a little leak in there somewhere, but so far it has remained small enough that we can call our repairman and he can recharge us for the summer months. Amazingly, we called this morning and he had it fixed this morning. Yes!!! I just schedule a payment to him every April/May into our budget book, because we know we're going to need him to swing by. I cannot even tell you how much cooler the house is with a healthy dose of Freon pumping through its veins. Ahhhhhh!!

Let's see, what else is new? Oh, we have a broody hen. Oddly, it is our formerly molting chicken who has grown into a gigantic bird whom we've renamed "Turkey." She big. We're pretty sure she just doesn't want to lay eggs, since neither molting nor brooding hens do. Basically, she sits on the nest they all like to share all day long and super heats our eggs to feel like they've been boiled. She's trying to hatch them. They will never hatch. This also complicates things for the other birds who are wanting to get in the box to lay their eggs.

So, we have a couple of options--let her work it out on her own; sneak some tiny baby chicks under her wings at night and let her think she's been successful, or ban her from the coop altogether--she's not laying anyway. We decided to go with option three--but wouldn't you know it? She's adopted our four baby chicks as her own! We've found them crowded into the nest with her and thought, "Well, that's odd!" But it turns out, she defends them from the other hens as a mother would. Banishing her to free-range actually makes things more difficult for the (big) babies, who are now getting chased again as they mimic Turkey chicken's movements outside of the chicken wire. Conundrum for sure!




We've been letting the birds free range more, except now they're nibbling my blueberries and scratching in the corn patch. To keep them busy elsewhere, Graysen has been working on the chickens' parade line-up :) He gets an empty ice cream bucket and drums the lid while they all follow in a happy (expectant) line behind him.

In other updates, Buck saw a doctor on Monday about his continuing lower back issues. They ordered an MRI for next Wednesday. They suspect a herniated disk with a pinched nerve, so hopefully the scan will be able to confirm or refute that potential diagnosis. He's been dealing with it for over a year, but it has escalated since the pain in his neck and head is now reduced. However, speaking of that pain, he is still experiencing a lot of upper neck pain (since they did the ablation lower this time). He sees his pain doctor/surgeon on Monday for a post-op follow-up and to discuss another surgery to fix that upper part of his neck. Tooth post seems to be healing fine, and that follow-up is in August.

Whew! We're getting everything and everybody fixed up :) Except for whatever it was that the fox (?) bobcat (?) we saw carried off over the hill yesterday morning. There's no fixing that fellow. Good news--it was NOT one of our birds!