While others are being entertained by Monday night TV programming, I am entertained by a chicken.
My husband has nicknamed me The Crazy Chicken Lady.
I don’t care. Sticks and stones and all that jazz.
Although videography is not my forte, and I am using my phone, and there is a red light in the box making the video hard to view, this is just a snippet of how almost every free waking minute of mine is spent.
I’m easily entertained.
And a little bit crazy.
We have a pet chicken.
We call her Freedom. She wants out of the box in the worst way imaginable.
She’s the only one who discovered how to fly to the edge of the box. Since then we taped up the sides. She appears to be a Barred Plymouth Rock with a long stripe down her head. She is only one of 3 that we can differentiate between. They all look the same.
Freedom dreams of wide open spaces. When she lays her little chicken head down and closes her little chicken eyes she dreams of eating grubs in the garden not hanging out in a cardboard box. The brown cardboard walls are closing in and driving her chicken crazy.
She is not content in this box with these other peeps. There’s a whole world out there waiting to be discovered and she knows it deep down in her little chicken heart. She’s destined for greater things.
When you lay your hand palm up in the box, all the other chicks scatter, but not Freedom. She hops in ready for a ride out of that place.
She’s curious, friendly and bold.
But manners? She has none. How does she expect to get far in life with antics like this?
She has so much to learn.
Today was a windy day. I went to put my hat on and it didn’t fit. I think my head is swol up over all your compliments on yesterday’s blog.
Good grief! My intention was not for you to leave me comments about me or my blog, but you’re cool like that. I thank you all for the sweet words. Really, I mean that.
You rock. Plain and simple.
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I took all the names from yesterday’s comments, put them in a box, turned my head, ran my hand around a couple of times, and drew out a name. And the lucky winner is:
#6—-Leon!!!
Leon has been my fan probably the longest. He was one of my first readers way back when I had a different site, and one of my first commenters, and oh yeah, he happens to be my uncle, brother and best friend of my dad.
Congrats Leon!!
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I got 3 suggestions in comments yesterday for chicken names: Bob in memory of my dad, Bookworm, and Sassafras. I am taking all of them to heart. I can’t guarantee that I can remember who is who, but I’ll try. All these chicks look the same. Except some are black, some are yellow, and some are black and white. But besides that, they all look the same.
Today I just want to give a shout out and let you know how much you mean to me.
Yes, you.
You make me want to do this every single day of my life.
Even when I’m tired. Even when I’m hungry. Even when my brain is a pile of mush and the thoughts I think shouldn’t be shared with others.
As I write this now, I see you. Your faces, your comments, your encouraging words are swirling in my mind.
It isn’t always easy. For instance, I’m in the process of changing addresses. I was supposed to get internet service last Saturday at my new house. You know how that goes, “Your technician will be out sometime between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and next Friday. Please have someone available during this time.” As if I don’t have a life. Okay, okay, I don’t have much of a life, but geez. Anyway, the technician was supposed to be there on Saturday from 8:00-12:00. So I woke up early on Saturday, (which should be against the law in the first place), and sat around in the quiet to wait for him. Around about 8:35, I received a phone call from the company telling me that my technician called in sick. Really?!?! I wasn’t buying it, I’m sure he was probably hung over, or fishing. They said they couldn’t have anyone else come out until Wednesday. Not wanting to take time off from work, I rescheduled my appointment for tomorrow. Another Saturday to wake up early. This inconvenience in internet has meant that each day after work, I have come to my old house to blog.
On Wednesday, WordPress (this blogging site I use) had technical difficulties. I had written a post about my house I’m moving from and memories from my dad in the house, but when I went to click the publish button, I got this error message stating no changes could be made and how they were working very hard to fix it, but to keep trying.
Because I committed to doing a “Postaday” challenge, and because I am a little bit obsessive-compulsive when I make commitments (except exercise) this went against my grain and ruffled my feathers. I had problems. How was I supposed to publish a blog post with technical difficulties? How could I try later when I don’t have internet at my new house and I needed wanted to get home? How could I live with myself if I broke my “postaday” commitment to myself and the handful of readers that I have?
As much as I hated to do it, I waved the white flag and posted a status update on Facebook that read: to my blog readers: My blogging site is experiencing technical difficulties. I don’t have internet at my new place, and I’ve got chickens to tend to, so there may not be a blog posted today. Please don’t eat rat poison. Or dance a jig.
I didn’t expect to hear much from my Facebook friends, but instead I got this:
(Suzanne) WHAT?!?!?! I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD DO THIS!!!!
(Michelle) Ack…..I knew it was only a matter of time before the chickens took the place of your loyal & faithful fans!! 😉 enjoy your evening Angel!!
(Donna) ahhhh, I so look forward to them.
(Lena) Ok double blog tomorrow
(Lara) What will I read tonight??
(Sheryl) 
(Jennifer) Aww man, I was looking forward to it. 😦
(My sister Jolea, as if there is any other) What??? Nooooooooo!!! You must blog now…:/
(Linda) aww snap!
(Jay) I don’t think that was the deal!
I wish words could express how wonderful this makes me feel. To know that my writing matters to someone out there inspires me, encourages me, and uplifts me. It makes me trudge ahead.
Needless to say, I got a post up that day. Not because I’m awesome, but because you are.
I want to let you know how much you mean to me. I want to give you something back in return for the commitment you’ve made to read my ramblings, which aren’t even half good half the time. But you stick with me anyway!
I’m going to have a small give-away to one faithful reader. All you have to do to enter, is click here, print this form, fill it out, make sure and state your mother’s maiden name, and the last 4 digits of your social security number, have it signed in front of a notary, in blood, and witnessed by a celebrity on a deserted island.
That’s all.
No really, just leave me a comment here on my blog (not on Facebook). Be clever, be cute, be serious, be snide. I don’t care. Tell me what you like to read, what you hate to eat, what I should name a chicken. Anything. I just want to hear from you.
In exchange, I’ll randomly choose one of you for a $25 Visa or Mastercard or something-like-that-gift card. Accepted at lots and lots of places in the nearest 3 blocks.
It’s not much. I wish it could be more. But I’m just a poor, broke cowboy’s wife schoolteacher with 14 mouths to feed. Chicken mouths, but nonetheless mouths to feed.
I’ll announce the winner tomorrow after my internet is installed at noon. Better make it afternoon, well sometime between noon and midnight.
Waiting to hear from you and hoping for a sober technician…….
The sweet little chicks aren’t very little anymore.
They are growing faster than anything I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if you can tell the difference in their size between the first and second picture, but it’s quite substantial in “real life”.
The first picture was their first day with me, the second was taken this week.
Here’s another picture for comparison. Here are two of them lying on a thermometer in the very corner of the box. The first one was taken when they were a couple of days ago. The second one was taken a couple of days ago. You can barely see the thermometer. Two of them almost cover it completely now.
It’s silly I know, but I am plumb smitten with their new tail feathers. At first they just had little rounded butts, but now these cute tails are emerging.
Not only are they growing, they are gaining some serious confidence and boldness in their flight ability.
I created a small perch for them in the box, which was probably a big mistake. But, thinking like a chicken, I thought they would like to roost on something. The perch serves the purpose well and also adds some extra height so they can fly to the top of the feeder and waterer. Once there, they strain their chicken necks as far as they can to look out. They want freedom!
The other day, I temporarily stored them in a smaller box while I carried their larger box outside to replace the straw. When I returned, here was this booger checking out the view from the cord of the heat lamp.
Jason called me the other day to report that one of them flew to the top of the feeder and then managed to fly to the edge of the box and perch there. I wish he would have gotten a picture but he didn’t.
We had to pull the box flaps up and tape them so they have more of an obstacle. I only hope they don’t conspire to use their perch as a pole vault and high tail it out of there. I’m currently on the lookout for a window screen to put over the box to keep them in.
These breeds of birds I purchased, (Buff Orpington, Barred Plymouth Rock, and Australorp), are dual purpose birds. Meaning they are good for both eggs and meat. I might wring their necks and fry them up if the notion strikes me. But it won’t. Not to worry.
They are heavy bodied birds and will weigh about 7 or 8 pounds full grown. They shouldn’t be able to fly too high because of their heavy bodies, so I don’t think I’ll need to clip their wings. Thank goodness.
We are enjoying these gals and spend much of our time sitting on a stool peering into their box watching their antics.
Here J-Dub holds a sweet baby chick in his rough, calloused hands. This picture is so precious to me. I could probably write a whole blog on it.
Maybe I will someday.
Class clowns. They’re in every classroom across America.
Yes, even mine.
Today before writing time (which I love to teach by the way), I read a sweet children’s book called The Old Woman Who Named Things by Cynthia Rylant.
It’s about this cute little old lady who’s outlived all her friends, so she reluctantly gets a dog and they become good friends. Don’t you just love her cowboy boots?
After reading, I told my students to think of a topic to write about. To help them, I suggested they use the story I read as a springboard. I recommended writing about a pet dog or cat. Or maybe tell about a time a stray wandered up to their house. Did they get to keep it? Did they feed it like the little old lady in the story. What happened? Or, if they didn’t have an animal story, maybe they would like to write about their grandmothers. Their sweet, loving, kind grandmothers.
Here’s a story written by one of my girls.
My Grandmol’s Flab
My grandmol has more chins than a Chinese phone book.
She can’t see her feet.
When she sits on the toilet it says a-b-c-d-e-f-g, get your fat butt off of me.
Peace.
I hadn’t read this story myself prior to asking her to share it with the class. Needless to say, she had the whole lot of us in stitches.
Yes, including me.
I hope someday I can say, “I knew her when.”
As we packed up the house this past week, and walked out the door to spend the night in our new home, I looked around the rooms at the emptiness of them. The pictures were off the walls, the furniture had been carried out. There was nothing left except an old chair or two and a sack of trash here and there. The sun had set, the day was done, and we were exhausted.
Pausing at the door, I took a deep breath and told my husband, “I’m
sad. This is sad.” He sweetly replied, “Well we can bring sleeping
bags back and stay here. ” I giggled. “No, it’s not that. It’s just that there are lots of good memories here.”
Memories of birthdays, Christmases, celebrations of many kinds. There are memories of family, friends, snowed in days, and dog dribble.
And there are memories of my dad, who died barely 3 weeks ago. Those are the memories I don’t want to leave.
The house I’m moving from is the last place I saw him walk. That’s the last place I saw him alive. And it makes me sad.
I’m leaving that place. And it almost feels like I’m leaving him and his memories. I can still see him coming down the hall into the kitchen. I can hear the crinkling of the Chips Ahoy Chocolate Chip Package being peeled back. And then there he goes, back down the hallway to the bedroom with a handful of cookies in his big old paw of a hand.
Or I see him with his coffee cup struggling down the hallway, sloshing his coffee. My husband used to tell a joke about him. He’d say, “My father-in-law doesn’t drink coffee, he spills most of it.”
The last time he was here was at Thanksgiving. My sister insisted we watch a movie. He finally agreed, even though he’d already seen it. He laid on the floor with my sister and we laughed and laughed.
I sit in this house right now, the house I’m moving from. I don’t have internet at my new place yet, so I come here to blog. I’m alone in this quiet house, but if I sit real still, close my eyes, and listen hard, I can hear my dad. I hear him holler for me to come fix the TV in the bedroom because he’s pushed the wrong button on the remote, or figure out how to get to his email on the computer, or get his basket of pills out of his truck.
I see him laying on the end of the bed, on his stomach, snoring with the TV blaring when I come home from work. I only wish I could hear him snore one more time. Just one more. I wish I had more coffee spills to clean and TV remotes to fix.
But I can’t look back, I have to move forward.
I have new memories to make. New roads to travel.
I wish he was here to travel them with me. I wish we were making memories still. I want him to see my chicks. I want him to stay in my new house. We laid laminate flooring instead of carpet, simply for the ease of cleaning up coffee spills.
I’m moving ahead, but there will be times on my journey, I must pause to remember my dad.
Just for a moment, but not too long.
I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.
They, whoever they are, say death comes in three’s. Since I last wrote about my chickens, one more has died, which brings the number of fatalities to 3. It was the little chick I was worried about before. The antisocial black one with a little yellow spot on its head who stood in the corner and stared. She didn’t even get a proper burial in the chicken cemetery. I watched J-Dub carry her by her legs and toss her over the barbed wire fence into the pasture. Apparently, we’ve become desensitized to chicken death. It’s just the way it goes. My husband says, “If you’re gonna deal with livestock, you’re gonna deal with death.” He’s right. Nothing lives forever. And what is it that old Augustus McCrae says in Lonesome Dove when young Sean gets bitten all over with water moccasins, “Life’s short. Shorter for some than others.”
But I must admit it’s a bit embarrassing to confess how many I have lost. I feel like it’s my fault. The first thing people say when they see me is not Hi, How are You, but rather,”So how many chicks have died now?” And then they look at me like I have Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or something. I am hoping the death spree is over. One died on Wednesday, one on Thursday, and one on Friday. I now have 14 surviving chickies, and I’m feeling pretty dern good about the health of these 14. I haven’t seen Ol’ Spaz, the seizure thrower, convulse in a couple of days, and Molasses, the one who got trapped under the water trough seems to be doing just fine. I even think she may not be as bow-legged as she once was. Truthfully, I can’t even recognize her anymore. I’m confident these 14 will survive. At least until I put them outside and a chicken hawk or bull snake gets a hold of them. But for now, they are safe and sound in my spare bedroom. For now.
I get a kick out of them. They are quite enjoyable and provide many laughs for us. When I put fresh straw in their box, if by chance there is a little piece of seed head that even faintly resembles a bug, one of them snags it up and starts running, thinking they’ve really found a treasure that they’re not sharing. As soon as the other chicks catch on that their sister has a jewel, they begin chasing her around trying to nab it. They start grabbing at that little seed head, pecking it from each other’s mouth, even playing a little game of tug o’ war, all the while, peeping loudly.
After watching this sport, I got a little nerve and decided to give them something “real”. Something they would forage for in the yard. A tasty morsel to fight over. I scraped some mud off the bottom of a big flower-pot and found 4 earthworms. Scrumptious, juicy, wiggling earthworms. I took the smallest I could find and tossed it in their box. At first, 2 or 3 chicks circled the worm taking turns pecking at it. They displayed a little curiosity, but not any real gumption. Not until this bold little chick walked right up, pushed her way through the circle, grabbed the worm in her beak with one peck and away she scrambled with the others right on her tail feathers. After a couple of circles around the box, a zig, a zag and a fake-out, she quickly found a spot in the corner, tipped her head back, and swallowed the worm right down her gullet. Thinking she was Hot Stuff, she strutted around, sharpening her beak on the box. In a few minutes, the others laid down for a nap, but not Hot Stuff, she was loaded up with protein and feeling fine and frisky.
I have since put in a couple more worms, and every time a few of them circle and peck until Hot Stuff struts in, nabs the worm and eats it whole. The funny thing is she’s the smallest of the bunch, but definitely the most fearless. It will be interesting to see if she turns out to be the most dominant chick in the coop.
Well folks, that’s it for today.
Tune in next time for more Tales From the Chicken Ranch for the latest fatality report and our special segment, “What’s on the Menu?”
Until Next Time,
Chicky Mama
Morning Time is quickly becoming my favorite time of day.
I can easily say this today, on a Sunday.
More specifically the Sunday after I’ve had 8 days off of work.
Maybe tomorrow morning I won’t feel the same. Tomorrow. The dreaded Monday. More specifically, the first day back to work. The first day back to work after Spring Break. The first day back to work after Spring Break and Daylights Savings Time. The first day back to work where instead of driving 10 seconds to get to work, I must drive 10 miles.
But this Sunday morning was glorious, and I can easily say it was my favorite time of day.
Where I now live, in the mornings, the cows in the neighbor’s pasture lumber their way, softly mooing as they go, to a barbed wire fence to stare down this county road. J-Dub says they’re waiting for the neighbor’s feed truck, but I have yet to see it arrive.
Hoping for breakfast.
But their curiosity of me and my camera gets the better of them.
In the mornings, the birds sing softly. I gaze towards the telephone poles and the fence lines looking for them, but never find them.
As you can see, there aren’t many trees to perch in. They must be hiding in the grasses, raising their song of hope towards the heavens.
In the mornings, the grass is a little wet from the dew and the fresh breezes gently blow, refreshing me.
In the mornings, I set my coffee cup in the pasture so I can operate my camera. And the horse poses for his portrait.
In the mornings, the sun warms the blossoms of the fruit trees, giving hope of new life. And sweet apricots.
Mornings are filled with hope.
Hope of new beginnings.
Hope of fresh starts.
Hope of happy days to come.
Happy Spring!
Stress. We all have it. It attacks us at different times and for different reasons.
I’ve been feeling a tad bit overwhelmed lately. When I stop to think about my life, I realize that in the last 3 weeks I have buried my dad and have (am presently) moving to a new house, while not selling my other one. Two semi-large stressors added to my life. Then, if you add in the new baby chickens, that’s like additional family members right there, ain’t it? I’d say they rank right up there with birthing a new baby, wouldn’t you? I mean they have their own nursery for crying out loud. I check on them constantly, make sure they’re breathing, and listen to their peeps through the baby monitor.
Kidding, kidding.
About the last part anyway.
Instead of packing, cleaning, unpacking my belongings, organizing for a garage sale, and doing things to help RELIEVE my stressors, instead I google stress just to see if I’m really stressed. You know sometimes I need to confirm my thinking. If I think I’m stressed, well by golly, I need to prove it to everyone else.
There’s a little test you can take online. It’s a simple inventory where you check off a few things that have happened in the past 24 months. So I clicked away, and discovered that actually I’m not as stressed as I think I am. So I must tell myself to Get. Over. It. and Get. On. With. It.
In my google searching, I found a little article however that talked of the small things that actually stress us out more than we realize, and sometimes more than the big stuff. Things like co-workers and facebook. Can you believe facebook can be stressful? Why yes, yes I can. It is the absolute zapper of time, leaving us feeling more stressed because we don’t have time to do what we should’ve been doing while we were busy stalking and poking others. This article also says it can play a big part on your emotions, leaving you feeling inadequate when you read that someone just met Their Mr. Perfect, while you’re still waiting by the phone.
So what do I do when I’m feeling overwhelmed, overcome, and overextended?
I hit the road walking. I unplug myself from the busy world via technology and head out. Now that we’ve moved outside the city limits, I have nothing but wide open spaces and a long country road to walk. No cars and no dogs. Just the singing of the birds and the blowing of an occasional train whistle falls on my ears.
I walk and I pray. Out loud. I thank God for everything. I start counting blessings. Being out in nature just makes me feel so blessed and thankful. Lately I’ve been feeling so close to God the Creator. I’m in awe of Him.
Look at this picture of brown dirt road, meeting green hay field, meeting blue sky.
This view speaks to me.
It says, “Hello, I’m God.” And I speak back and simply say, “Thanks.”
While walking and talking with Him, He grants me peace and lets me know it’s okay. Everything is okay. It’s as if He says, “Angel, look around you. Look at all this. I did it. Nothing is too big for me. See the size of this Texas sky?”
Let me give you a link to this beautiful song.
It’s saying what I’m trying to.
Angel Wheeler 
