Way out in the Middle of Nowhere

It's been awhile since you've seen a real picture of the geese. They're full grown, with full grown voices and full grown annoyances. Yeah like teenagers. But here's a few of the others things that hand out back: Four Pekin ducks.  Two breeding pairs so to speak: Two male, two female.  That's great right? Yeah, no. One male has usurped all the females.  Most of the time we've got one male dejected duck by himself. Man, even when you stack the deck, things just don't fall right! The ladies are laying eggs.  We'd love to hatch out the eggs, but right now is not the time to start incubating, with winter being about a month away. Incidentally, I don't think those guys can NOT walk and talk at the same time.  They quack away while waddling one after the other from place to place. This one is a bit hard to puzzle out, but there are two hens and 7 baby chicks in the lilac bushes. We started with 10 chicks, but 2 drowned in the pools and one di...

Reality is what hits us every day.  Sometimes we accept it, grasp whatever bits of goodness come out and move on. The people who deal with reality every day will tell you that sometimes the hard parts are unbearable, but must be done. We've been dealing with reality a lot here: Alex gets a job, but it's 45 miles away.  $40 bucks every two days to fill up the car so he can go to his job.  Which means $50 to fill up the van every 2 1/2 days to get both Dave and I to work and school.  $180.00 per week IN GAS.  Reality sucks, my friend. And today I get to finish my chem lab early, drive back home, disarticulate a deer and put what large pieces we have in the freezer to butcher later after I drive back to school at $4 in gas  to take an Algebra quiz. If we don't get this deer butchered, the meat will rot and we'll be eating chicken all winter long.   Reality is we cannot afford to waste meat, nor buy it from the store.  My Brother In Law offered u...

Fred the goose died last night. That's a picture of Fred.  I was out buying new work boots for Alex and found him in front of the pen..already dead. Two geese dead within a week. I'm exhausted emotionally and physically.  I've spent the better part of the last 2 weeks trying to will Fred and George to good health and then cried over their bodies. I'm up early every morning to let them out, feed and water them and to try to keep Fred and George alive for one more day. School is well, school : Professors demand you drop everything in your life to study and then get all shitty when you can't.  Perhaps it was stupid of me to think that returning after 25 years to get a degree was going to work. I've got no tolerance for bullshit profs -and both of them are not as competent as my HS Chem teacher by far- and their inability to remain focused, no tolerance for people who cannot comprehend there's a REAL life outside of University.  School is making us all cr...

Well, Georgie the goose died last Tuesday.  I came home from school to find him collapsed by the lilac bush. I  had him on my lap for about 10 minutes hoping he'd come out of it, but in the end, he convulsed a few times and died.  Dave was a trooper and got him dressed out and  put in the freezer for me. I've put his feathers and down in a bag that I made from pillow ticking and dried it. We learned quite a bit from the process and we'll be using those skills soon.  Cuz you see, Fred's been doing the same thing: Collapsing out of breath...horcking up a lung like he's got asthma.  We've discussed the future of Fred and the ducks, but it will wait until we have the cone. http://meadowcreature.com/poultry/  sells one like we have on order.Ours is on backorder for another week.   Basically it's a galvanized steel cone with a hole in the bottom. Drop your poultry into it, pull out the head and chop it off, or slice the jugular and let them bleed o...