29 June, 2011

This is the kind of thing that only happens to me, Turtle Edition Part II

So I have a bunch of telcons today at work which meant I ducked out around 0820 to grab food for lunch. As I’m driving by an area that’s being developed, as in “all of the lovely second-growth forest cut down and the trees burned in big piles before the ground is totally leveled and a big-box store is built on it” I see three guys standing around looking at a small lump on the bit of road they’ve built. It’s a turtle.

Eastern box turtles, as people who have read my EBT posts before know, live their entire lives within about 600 feet of where they hatch. If you move them away from there and do not prevent them from trying to go home, they will try, and they will most likely die. And if you destroy that little patch of second-growth forest, well, they die. Slowly and painfully, since they have no idea where to find food and water and places to hide.

You know where this is going, right? I mean, what else was I supposed to do? Of course I pulled over and grabbed a box out of my car and smiled cheerfully at the nice gentlemen staring at the turtle and said “Let me just grab him real quick.” And then before they could recover from their confusion over a cane-wielding redheaded lady in a long skirt stealing their turtle, I hopped back in my car with him and drove away.

He’s very pretty, his front legs and head are marked with a vivid salmon-pink and he has bright, bright red eyes. Currently he’s hanging out in an Amazon box under my desk with some leafy greens from my salad. Sigh.

27 June, 2011

And then there were two.

On the back of an exciting weekend, this morning I took the last 5 Hatchapalooza participants who were in the market for a new home to their new owner. Coupled with the completion of the Bantytown Suburb, which the 5 baby bantam Ameraucanas and 5 youngest silkies are now occupying, that means the house is now occupied by only two chickens.

Number One and Number Three have stayed with us. Number One will be with us forever, and if he turns out to be a rooster then Mel will be given a pen with some silkie hens in it to lord over and Number One will stay in with the hens. Number Three, if a roo, will have to be rehomed, but we selected Number Three for his hennish qualities. still, at this age, it’s a crapshoot.

25 June, 2011

Chicken swaps and tired dogs

Because we are a hospitable people, we took Pawpower to a chicken swap this morning. I was trying to offload some of my tiny adorable roosters. The Bantytown, suffice it to say, is awash with massive amounts of testosterone. Unfortunately people were looking rather than buying, and after a couple hours in the sun with temps climbing we all retired to the Manor, where Pawpower’s guide dog Laveau and my Siddy played and played and played and played. They have really similar play styles, involving lots of hitting other dogs with paws and waving their mouths around and bitey-facing and slamming their bodies into one another, so they were having a really good time.

Except as if it wasn’t bad enough that I kidnapped Pawpower, Laveau then had a good roll in the doggy pool, a small plastic affair for Zille to splash in, and then had a good roll in the dirt afterward and came up grinning and wet and muddy. Luckily there was enough time to let the mud dry and then I broke out the curry comb and the shedding rake and got her respectable-looking again because I would be really horrified if I kidnapped Pawpower again after Amtrak declined to let a muddy dog on the train.

But the people had fun, and the dogs had fun, and I did send one of my spare chickens home with Christine. She took young Galahad off, as she has gold-laced Sebright babies at the moment who will grow up to be adult gold-laced Sebrights with whom Galahad can hang out. And now I am trying to figure out how to drag my husband and Sid down to New Orleans to visit Pawpower, so I can apologize to Mr. Pawpower in person for kidnapping her.

Oh and Daniel refused to let me buy any cuckoo Marans pullets at the swap. I was all “Look! They are stripey! How cute!” and he said “Uh huh” and gave me the look that says “If you think I am building any more chicken pens this month, lady, you are out of your goddamned mind.” But in a loving way. So I have no new chickens.

This is the kind of thing that only happens to me, people edition.

Dear diary:

Yesterday I kidnapped PawPower.

I DO NOT NORMALLY DO THIS KIND OF THING.

Anyway, she was coming through Charlottesville on the train with a 6 hour layover so the plan was to have dinner and hang out with dogs and meet chickens and then get her on the train home. Except that while the phone told us the train left at 2115, it actually left 10 minutes earlier. This is possibly the first time in the history of Amtrak that a train left somewhere early.

Today, therefore, I am dragging the patient Pawpower to a chicken swap, because that is the kind of hospitality we display here in Virginia. “Welcome to Virginia, let us kidnap you and take you to chicken swaps!”

Meanwhile Zille tried to kill Daniel this morning, Sid is refusing to eat his breakfast, and there was a HUGE white tail buck hanging around the back acre when we let the dogs out that had a staring contest with Beowulf. The world continues apace as I explore my new role as kidnapper.

20 June, 2011

Weekend fun, Sid is very handsome.

Daniel’s sister was here on Saturday, and then while he took her off to the airport on Sunday, I headed down to Blackthorn Kennel. Christine and I had a heck of a good time trying to get a family photograph of Sid, his sisters Oda and Olivia, and his mother Xita.

And then before we went off to lunch, I got Christine to get a few of Sid in his spiffy new mobility harness:
Sid, a black German Shedder, stands with his body pointed left and his face looking at the camera with good humor. He is wearing a tan harness with a Y-front and a wide girth behind his front legs, and a narrow girth four inches back from that one. A rigid handle stands eight and a half inches above his back.

You may notice he’s in a prong collar. This is because 98% of the time, he does not pull on the leash. That remaining 2% of the time has a good chance of knocking me over and getting me hurt, though, so he wears a prong for insurance. It’s not something I’d put on a dog who still chronically pulls, because I don’t want them getting constantly pinched, but it makes an excellent insurance policy in case my adolescent partner forgets himself in the face of a squirrel.

And for reference, here we are together:
I stand to the left of the frame, a white woman of average build, about five feet eight inches tall and wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Sid's ears are obscuring the handle of the harness but you can see my hand grasping the cross-bar between them. I wear a leash looped across my body, one end attached to Sid's prong collar.
He looks, as Christine put it, like he’s wearing his daddy’s work shirt at the moment, with the harness so big on him. It’s actually loose at the moment but that’s all right since I can’t put weight on him. At the moment when he works he provides me some forward momentum to brace against and I use him in exactly the opposite fashion as I use a cane. With a cane I lean toward it to keep from wobbling away from it, with Sid I lean away from him to keep from falling into him. Once his growth plates have fused and we get the OK on his hip and elbow X-rays, I can stand a little more upright. But you can see from the photo that his prong collar isn’t going to tighten unless he’s actually gotten far enough ahead of me that I can’t hang onto his harness anymore.

15 June, 2011

Songs from Manorstock ’11

The House of the Fetchy Dog

There is a house in Virginia
Where I’m the Fetchy Hound
Get in my way when the ball gets thrown
And man, I’ll mow you down

My daddy, he did Schutzhund
The sleeves, he bit them all
But the only thing I’ll ever bite
Is this here fetchy ball

My momma, she was Danca
“Chase the ball!” she said to me
And since my momma told me so
A fetchy dog I’ll be

Puppies, I must tell you
To do what I have done
Learn to be a fetchy dog
And you’ll always have fun

I’ve got one paw in the backyard
And an orange ball in my jaws
And if the monkeys won’t throw for me
I’ll smack it with my paws

There is a house in Virginia
Where I’m the fetchy hound
Get in my way when the ball gets thrown
And man, I’ll mow you down.

14 June, 2011

Sid: Still Brilliant

So in all the chicken-related excitement this weekend, I failed to update you on Sid’s latest fits of brilliance. Sunday he went all kinds of places: the car dealership to drop my car off (and then pick it up later), Panera for breakfast, WalMart to get buns for bratwurst and sloppy joes. He was, as the post title will tell you, still brilliant for a dog who will be one year old on the 4th of July.

At Panera we sat outside again, and now he’s not even bothering to get up when the suicidal little birds hop right towards him all “I could totally take you, dogboy.” Sparrows are hilarious but not really all that bright. Sid is also starting to figure out when I get sudden fits of vertigo, good boy. Sitting in a chair at Panera and waiting on my food I started to feel dizzy, which resulted in Sid heaving his front half into my lap and leaning into me. It was soothing and actually pretty helpful but I’m thinking it might not be an ideal response for restaurants, where service dogs are suspected to be less obtrusive.

Then on the way into WalMart I asked him to pick up the pace while vertiginous and he gave me a look that is possibly best translated as “Are you on drugs that your doctor has not prescribed?” and kept noodling along at a leisurely pace until I was less wobbly, at which point he was happy to kick in the afterburners and lean into his harness. These are fantastic developments! Pet dogs and obedience champions may be required to unquestioningly follow orders, but when Sid decides to tell me that no, he will not be speeding up while I’m dizzy, it’s just evidence that he’s picking up that he is supposed to be keeping me safe, and part of keeping me safe may be ignoring me when I ask him for something like that.

The day was also marked by a total lack of people attempting to interfere with him, which was fantastic. The guy at the car dealership did, however, want to talk about him and how pretty he is. I get that a lot with both Sid and Zille: people who had GSDs as kids want to tell me how good looking they are, how they’re built just like those childhood Shedders, and then they fondly reminisce about their dogs.

But anyway, I will soon get a chance to ask an expert about training and reinforcing the intelligent refusal that Sid is just now developing on his own, because in a couple weeks PawPower will be stopping through the area and I will get to meet her! I am very excited, we have known each other online for a while so meeting off-line will be grand fun I suspect.

13 June, 2011

Hatchapalooza Concluded Successfully

We got 11/11 eggs converted into live, cheeping, pecking chicks.

After sober discussion[1], Daniel and I have decided that No 1 will stay here at the Manor. No 1 is after all the first creature born here, or at least the first domestic one, and we’ll keep one other for a buddy for him, since it is not good for chicks to grow up alone. We’re kind of hoping No 1 is actually a hen, but even if he turns out to be a roo, we’ll figure out how to keep him — possibly by building a pen for Mel and giving him some silkie hens.

There’s a pile of pics in my Hatching Eggs set on Flickr. But let me give you just one pic of No 1, who looks a bit pompous and silly, in the way of small baby chickens:
Chick No 1 stares at the camera in three-quarters profile. He has a leetle orange beak and leetle orange legs. His face and fluffy tummy are pale yellow, shading to a dark gold on his back and wings. Adorable? And how!

[1] DANIEL: WE COULD CYBERNETICALLY ENHANCE HIM AND KEEP HIM FOREVER! HE’S SO CUTE AND FLUFFY!
ME: HOW ABOUT WE SKIP THE CYBERNETIC ENHANCEMENT PART?

11 June, 2011

Excitement!

The eggs in the incubator went on lockdown early Thursday morning. Two of them had pipped at 9pm last night, and at this point, five have pipped. “Pipping” is the word for when the baby chicken breaks a small hole in the egg shell and begins to breathe outside air. They pip, and then they wait for several hours while you dance around impatiently and take naps and check in on them repeatedly. One of them got so excited to pip that he knocked a largish hole in the shell, through which you can see some movement periodically.

So today I am sitting around, playing SPORE, and waiting very (im)patiently for baby chickens to make their appearance. I am adding pictures to my flickr Chicken set as new eggs pip, etc. Also I am @civilwarbore over on Twitter, if you would like to follow my live-tweeting of what my friend mel has dubbed “Hatchapalooza ’11″. The action is quite slow at the moment but it should pick up!

10 June, 2011

I’ve had better days.

Yesterday not only was I still sick, but I got delayed 20 minutes by road work coming home, lost my voice (and I have a big presentation to give at work today), and then found Guenivere the bantam hen dead when we went out to make sure all chickens had gone to bed under shelter, as rain was due.

It was not my best day ever.

Today I’m feeling some better, at least this morning, but my voice is still pretty well gone. That presentation should be pretty interesting. Here’s hoping this weekend goes much better than the rest of the week did.

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