8 June, 2011

Why is it “sick as a dog”?

I have a cold. I hate summer colds. At the moment about all I want to do is lie around alternately sleeping and whining about having a cold. The only foods that sound good are things that are cold and sweet; for lunch I had honey nut Cheerios and Frosted Flakes. For dinner I will likely have chocolate ice cream. There is no point in being a grown-up and getting to set your own menus if you can’t have ice cream for dinner, although come to think of it some chocolate pudding would go down a treat, too.

I should get Sid out and work him, but tonight when I get home I think that instead I will cut up some cheese and reward him heavily for lying around looking majestic. He does that really well these days, it’s just possible he is getting to be a big dog with a serious expression (when he’s not being a ginormous rampaging dork). A service dog can never have too much practice at lying around looking majestic, I tell you.

In other news, Sid’s new harness came. I need to do some hacking with it (adding padding for Sid’s benefit and for mine) and mink oil it but good to soften it up before we start using it. I can probably manage to add some padding in my current state of “blah” but mink oiling the whole huge thing might be a bit much. We’ll see. I ordered it in tan leather because a) it will be way more obvious on him than the current dark leather harness, and hopefully that will stop people claiming they “didn’t realize” he was holding me upright when they started trying to molest him and b) it will match his leash and collar better once I’ve worked some mink oil in, not that I am vain about my dog or anything.

All right, fine, I’m vain about the dog. He is gorgeous and when all suited up in harness and leash he looks very fine, and it’s important to me that he look good. Probably more important to me than looking good myself. But I digress.

Luckily this weekend will be low-stress, I have nothing planned but watching some baby chickens hatch. The eggs in the incubator go on “lockdown” tonight: I take them off the automatic turner, turn the humidity up to 80%, and then wait three days to see what hatches. Exciting!

7 June, 2011

Happy post time!

As characterized by the bluebird of happiness:
My body, from the chest up; I am wearing my Aida t-shirt and a fetching red paisley bandana. One arm is slightly outstretched, and cradled in my hand is a small poofy blue chicken (more a bluey-grey really) who sits and calmly regards me.

And I’m going to be REALLY lazy and do it with links to my husband’s blog. HA!

1) Jeremiah Swakhammer survived the winter and is in fine form.

2) OK, so, back in Feb 2010 when Daniel came to visit, we went up to DC and wandered around the mall and there was a white squirrel and I didn’t believe him at first when he said “Hey, a white squirrel!”

But today we saw a white squirrel across the street, and Daniel got a picture! There’s also a black widow spider pic on that page so click cautiously if spiders bother you.

Also I should note in reference to the whole White Squirrel in DC thing that he had been joking around about wildlife and whatnot previously, so it was not TOTALLY out of left field for me to at first disbelieve his assertion that there was a white squirrel. I’m just sayin.

5 June, 2011

The world rolls onward, the garden gets useful.

The original crop we planted in the garden is mostly a month out from harvest, theoretically. Today I got around to thinning the carrots, finally, and fed the thinnings to the chickens. The Black Seaman tomatos are getting buds on them! So soonish there should be black tomatoes, which means funny-colored pico de gallo and funny-colored tomato sauce and funny-colored salsa…

Also today, we caught Annaham crowing. Previously I was pretty convinced Annaham was a hen, and Annaham’s comb and wattles are still very henny, but her tail is very roostery, and then there’s the crowing thing. So we shall see.

At any rate, we also planted some plants we picked up from Home Depot: red, orange, and yellow sweet bell peppers; a couple of strawberry plants; a Mr. Stripey tomato plant; a yellow pear tomato plant (we are going to be deluged with tomatos); and a zucchini plant. And we put in some seeds to see if they could make it through July to give us a second crop: capitaine lettuce, salad beets, buttercup squash, and watermelon, all courtesy of my friend Gowan who sent me surprise seeds. I learned this time, though, and did not overplant things like I did with the last set of carrots.

Once we harvest the purple spinach, I will dig out the “Teflon Spinach” seeds we bought, which theoretically are heat- and drought-resistant, and plant those for Third Crop, along with possibly some other shortish grow-time things. Sometime in September we’ll put parsnips in the ground for Fourth Crop, and if I can find some collard seeds maybe plant some greens, too — they’re much better after a frost, much like parsnips. I’m tempted to order some mangel wurzel seeds to plant, just to grow forage for chickens.

Having grown such mighty variety this year, we shall dig some of our own chicken-enhanced compost into the beds after Last Harvest and let them rest, and then next year shall be the year of Nitrogen Fixers: peas, green beans, black beans (my favorite of the actual beans), and probably building a fourth garden bed in which we can plant the corn and squash and lettuce and spinach and tomatoes and carrots and things. Although I strongly suspect after this year, when we have five Black Seaman tomato plants what sprouted from seeds and then one Mister Stripey and one yellow pear tomato plant, we will get slightly more conservative with those. I’d like to grow some pumpkins, though.

2 June, 2011

Does it count as a task if the dog taught himself? Also, baby chicken.

Sid will now open the gate to the fence on cue. Of course, he will also open the gate not on cue, such as when he has decided he is bored sniffing the things in the fence and would like to sniff the things outside the fence, or when he would like to go for a ride in the car and therefore needs to go stand next to it and stare at me hopefully. We are having to be REALLY RELIGIOUS about putting the carabiner clip on the gate latch, and I do not have any faith whatsoever that Sid won’t figure out how to remove the carabiner at some point if we give him the time to explore.

He’s kind of scary that way. He is not a terribly analytical dog, one who sits and thinks a problem through and then performs a solution. Zille does that, and it weirds me out on occasion. But Sid is really, really scary good at figuring out what he just did that got him what he wanted. Case in point: the door to the bathroom in the hotel room we stayed in when we went to Kentucky. The problem, from Sid’s perspective, was that the door was between him and me. He started out just randomly bashing at it, but his random bashing brought him in contact with the lever-style doorknob, and the door opened. He was pleased. And the next time he wanted the bathroom door open, there was zero random bashing, he just went straight for the knob.

Another case in point is the gate latch. He opened it the first time with random jumping and flailing because the gate was between him and me. The second and all subsequent times, he has opened it with a quick and practiced nudge from his nose, followed by a nudge to the gate itself to swing it open. He learns scary fast, seriously. Tink, for instance, will work on problem-solving by manipulating objects, but it takes her a few successes to figure out exactly what she did that worked. With Sid, it never seems to take more than one success for him to recognize what just happened and what he needs to manipulate and how to make it happen again.

You may also notice the theme of “there was a barrier between me and Sid” as the precipitating factor in his door- and gate-opening expeditions. Sid does not approve of barriers that prevent him from being with his person. As we do more training on his service doggery, he becomes more and more certain that his job is taking care of me, and that this job requires him to be near me and not, for instance, on the other side of the bathroom door. Since our bathroom at home is quite tiny, things get a bit crowded in there, and have you ever tried to pee while a 75lb dog sat between your knees and stared up at you? It’s an adventure.

Meanwhile, on the chicken front, the baby silkies are about ready to move outside. Daniel is going to set them up a temporary pen today, since unseasonably high temps this week have kept us from building them a more permanent home. Once they’ve moved out, the 16 bantam babies of various breeds in the smaller brooder will move into the Big Brooder. This weekend, the six members of the Pasty Butt club will go back to their home with Christine, leaving ten here as permanent residents. There’s five blue silkies and five Ameraucana babies. The Ameraucanas are hilarious, and have a tendency to stare at me intently whenever I appear over the edge of the brooder. I’ve named them after quarks, using the names I learned in high school (because Truth and Beauty are much better names than Top and Bottom) and so have Up, Truth, Beauty, Charmed, and Strange.

Here, have a picture of Charmed making eerie eye contact:
A teeny fluffy grey-brown chicken, cradled in my hand. He is staring directly at the camera in a sort of unsettling way that suggests he will peck you if you get out of line. And he will, because he is like that. I have been pecked by this tiny, tiny chicken more times than I care to think about.

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