She's Gonna Blow!

My house had become a war zone. Biscuit is wise. Even when he appears to be sleeping (which is always) he knows all, sees all, hears all.

Part of the problem was the winter solstice. I only had to hang on for a few more days and the days would start getting longer again. There would be hope!

In the meantime, the halls were not being decked. There was no fa la la. I was down to my last 2 sacks of pellets for the stove. Home Depot was out of them, they didn't know when they'd get more. How about in frigging July, when nobody will need them, you idiots?

I had been filling the wood box every 3 days, using a lot of wood. It was going faster than normal because I'm down to the old, soft wood that burns quicker. If this was Idaho instead of California, it would be colder and more of a problem, but that didn't stop me from whining about it.

I did try to do a little holiday decorating. I bought several poinsettias. I had to stack books and other junk around them to keep Wesley from knocking them down and breaking the branches off them. That just made him more determined to destroy them.

So, my Christmas decorations today consist of 4 raggedy poinsettias with about half the flowers ruined.

The cats had a peaceful Christmas, though, because I left them home alone, picked up cousin Beverly, and we both went to Bob and Anna's apartment for a Christmas brunch and to trade a few silly gifts. I didn't get a single picture of that.

A couple of days after Christmas Anna and one of her friends came out and planted the 200 tulips I'd bought a couple of months ago. I think spring will be glorious. This spring we'll be celebrating Bob's 30th birthday. The tulips were blooming when we brought him home from the hospital.

Here are a couple of random things I found to close out the year. Bob's aunts on his dad's side of the family are Patty and Tina. Look here!

What are the odds that a random dog rescue page would have puppies named Patty and Tina on the same page?

The fine lady below is called Baddie Winkle. She evidently has quite a following on the internet.

She's my new fashion inspiration. Here's another fashion that I find intriguing: a peacock dress. The hair is interesting, too.

In the winter I often wear only two sets of clothes. When I wear one, I wash the other. Both "outfits" consist of sweatshirts and jeans. I have been known to build a roaring fire in the Buck stove, put my huge old ski jacket on over my sweatshirt and jeans, and fall asleep in the chair in the living room. There is only one chair in there right now, Grandma Betty's old chair. She was about 5'2" tall, the chair fit her perfectly. Me, not so much. It's cozy, though, when all three cats are sleeping on top of me. That's the only time they get along.

This is trending toward Crazy Cat Lady, isn't it?

Well, okay then.

Christmas Addicts

A couple of days ago I told you what my current practices are for the Christmas season. My son has his own. He and Anna live in a small apartment, so their goal to completely fill it with Christmas shouldn't take too long.

Anna is the queen of glitter glue. We had Thanksgiving dinner at my house and she brought some pumpkins in for decorations. Bob and Anna cooked, there were 9 of us who ate and enjoyed a good time. It was a little strange because there was no furniture in the living room.

A couple of months ago I'd asked one of the Jims from Davis Ranch to haul all my living room furniture to the dump. He showed up 2 days before Thanksgiving. Well, OK. Whatever. We dragged Grandma Betty's old rocking chair out of Bob's room, threw some pillows on the floor and set up a couple of folding chairs. That worked.

The Thanksgiving leftovers were barely gone from the refrigerator when Bob and Anna came back to start Christmas.

Not a typical tree saw, but not a chainsaw, either.

I sat on the tailgate while the kids disappeared into the forest. The noisy forest, full of people arguing over which was the perfect tree. When Bob was little, he'd be out in the trees a month ahead of time. I painted him a sign that said "This tree reserved for Bob." He'd mark the tree he wanted, then we'd go back after it a couple of weeks before Christmas. Most years he changed his mind and cut a different tree. One year we found the sign on a different tree.

It took a long time, but they finally came back with a tree.

It looks to me like it's wide enough to take up a third of their living room.

And it has two tips. "No problem," Bob says. "We have two ornaments for the top."

They also evidently have enough lights for 3 trees, every window in the house, and more. They've had a wonderful time shopping for decorations. I hope they have an open house so we can all see.

Gun Control

I think that instead of trying to ban assault weapons, we should simply declare that anyone seen in public with one can legally be shot on sight, questions asked later.

There is no good reason for anyone to be carrying a gun like that in public. If the U.S. is invaded and we need homies with assault weapons for protection, then we can amend the law. Meanwhile, you carry them at your own peril.

Another Chicken Story

Dominique bantams are my primary breed. I also keep a few (fewer than a dozen) white OEGB. In this picture, the bird on the right is my 14 year old hen, #2. The birds on the left are a DB cockerel and his "daughter" a late hatched OEGB. 

My OE are not good mothers, they are great setters, but will kill babies that hatch. This pullet was a lone chick, hatched a month after anything else. I pulled her out of her mother's pen and brought her in. I had no other chicks to go with her, so I took the last-hatched DB and put him with her. 

He forgot about his buddies and adopted her right away. He clucked to her like an old hen to get her to eat and drink, he tried to spread his feathers and sit on her. To this day she's his baby. 

Sooooo. I brought #2 in the house as soon as it got cold outside. She has spent the past 3 winters inside. But this year she just wasn't enthusiastic about her life. I brought the other two in to keep her company. That hasn't worked the way I planned. 

At least 4 times a day the old hen picks a fight through the divider, the cockerel reacts by protecting his precious baby. The old hen loves this, all the while she's doddering around and trying to fight, she clucks happily. No chickens have been harmed to make this story.

Signs of the Times

Davis Ranch sold sweet corn through mid-November this year, a month longer than usual. I can't testify to how "winter" corn tastes because I didn't try it. I don't eat much corn anyway, and it loses its appeal to me after August.

The corn maze field, which is planted with field corn, still stands green and tall. The recent frosts have nipped the leaves a bit, but it still waits to be cut and fed to cows. This is the first season in 3 or 4 that the corn maze field didn't get blown over before Halloween.

The picture above is indicative of what's happening here right now. Corn season is past. There are still a few dried stalks of sweet corn swirling around with the breezes. Christmas tree season started on the day after Thanksgiving. It has been sunny and dry. The rains that helped green the foothills don't last very long down here on sandy topsoil. This picture was taken in the road, by the way, not in a field. There are no rocks in the fields here. And this is all that's left of all the roads being rocked a couple of years ago. The rocks sink out of sight and soon the roads have to be re-rocked.

Christmas tree season started in a big way. With a traffic jam. I asked one of the Jims why there are so many people so early. He said most of them are return customers and they know that later in the season the choices aren't as good. I think there are 50,000 trees out there, but some are very tall and some were just planted last January. I should think there would still be a good choice of trees, they all look the same to me. Maybe people just wanted to take advantage of the sunny day. It's not as much fun cutting your own tree if you have to lay down in mud to do it.

These pictures were taken the Friday after Thanksgiving. A lot of the people were parents who brought their children (or their dogs) to help pick a tree. Children are a lot of help, as this dad found.

Once in a while his son held onto the tip of the tree to help "carry" it. I told the dad to hang in there, in 10 years he could sit in his car with a cup of hot chocolate and let the kid do all the work.

This is another common scene. What to do with the tree after it's cut.

Another helpful kid.

You could take a lawn chair and a thermos of warm drinks and have a great time sitting out in the field listening to the chatter as people search for their perfect tree. Some, probably those who cut a tree that was too tall last year, walk up to a tree and extend their arm to see how high the tree is, maybe in comparison to the space available at their house. Even the trees that aren't especially tall can be very wide at the base, and people argue about that, too.

And then there are the guys who don't pick up a saw at the entrance booth. They bring their chain saws. One fellow's saw had to be carried by 2 guys, it was so big. They ended up cutting a tree that was no bigger than the one on the van above. That's 2 minutes' work with a handsaw, but only 15 seconds with a chainsaw. Then 2 people had to haul the saw back to the truck while one more dragged the tree.

I don't cut a tree. When Bob was little, it seemed important to do Christmas the "right" way. We decorated the whole house, baked dozens of cookies, had Christmas carols playing in the background. Now there is just the simple reality: Christmas trees are messy and it's not fun to take them down and cookies are a bad thing unless company is coming to eat them. The carols are still fine once in a while.

November's Shows

There were two poultry shows in November. The first was in Ventura and the next weekend there was a show in Sonora. Ventura is in Southern California. It's a 7 hour drive for me but I don't mind. There's no driving through the traffic mess in SoCal, the Ventura turn off is the first highway when you come down off the Grapevine. That road goes directly west, toward the ocean. The show grounds, in fact, are almost right on the beach.

There is a paved walkway along the beach. I observed two kinds of pedestrians: chubby people walking their dogs and thin jogger ladies. All the joggers wore similar tight clothes and all had long, blonde pony tails, like they were auditioning for a role.

It was warm that weekend. One of the judges, who came in from Montana, happily wore a t-shirt and bermuda shorts. One of my birds was Best of Breed. One of Parker's (from my stock) was Reserve of Breed. Here I am with Parker, on the left, and Brett, on the right.

I look dusty and faded out in this picture. That's pretty much how I felt, too.

The show in Sonora is a two hour drive from my house. I made the drive twice because I help put on the show. The first trip I took the awards and raffle items, and other show-related stuff. I had made these banners as awards:

The embroidery was commercially done, then I sewed them into banners. What a task! I probably had not sewed anything since the last costume Bob needed for a play at the Waldorf school. After I finally found the sewing machine, it took me 3 days to remember how to use it. The hardest thing was trying to use the foot pedal. I have neuropathy, I can barely feel where the pedal is, and then it slides around the floor. It worked better when I duct-taped it to the floor.

Some of my seams are crooked. Even after I pulled them out and resewed them a couple of times. But the people who won them were happy. I would have been happier if I'd been one of the winners.

Cousin Beverly had also been busy with a project for the show. She made this afghan and a pillow for the raffle.

It was a very popular item and made lots of money for the show. As a bonus, she also made a small afghan with a rooster on it for me, and another pillow that I kept.

I dropped things off at the show, helped set up, then drove back home to get my birds ready. Anna came over when she got off work. We washed and primped birds until late that night, then got up at 5 a.m. and drove back up to the show.

The show was quite successful. We had a lot of fun. Then we stayed and helped take the cages down and sweep shavings off the floor. Aaargh. All of my old 4-H friends know what I mean. The show manager excused us about 7 p.m., we loaded the birds in the car, went back to the restaurant at the hotel and had a late dinner with the judges and a couple of other exhibitors. That was a fun part.

The birds stayed in their carriers in the car all night, which they don't mind because they just sleep in their carriers anyway. The next morning we drove back down through the foothills and finally stopped for breakfast in Plymouth at the Dead Fly cafe.

I love having Anna as a traveling partner. If Bob ever manages to get back to showing, he's going to find that she has more friends there than he does.

November Almost Squeaks Through...

...without a blog post.

When you don't do this every day, or even a couple of times a week, posting something becomes a difficult task. But this morning it's very chilly here, I can't accomplish anything outside until it warms a bit, and it's taking a while to even get the house warmed up. So I'll sit here with the electric heater almost under my chair and try to write something.

It's chilly because there's finally snow on the mountains and the prevailing winds are blowing that crisp, clean air down this way. We've had enough rain to green up the hills.

Now that I see all the pictures I haven't used, I think I should break this up into a couple of posts.

First, the cat news.

The current cat population has not changed for the past two months. Inside the house I still have Wesley and Gollum.

Sweetie Pie

Outside is the fluffy black female I call Sweetie Pie most of the time. She has two little patches of grey fur on her chest that look like boobs. I can pet her now if Biscuit is with her. There is another very wild black cat that originally showed up with a severe gash on it's back. I only see it occasionally. And there is dear old Biscuit who now spends half his time in the house, sleeping as close to the stove as he can get.

Biscuit, staying warm in the kitchen

Biscuit, staying warm in the living room

Biscuit on the kitchen floor, being harassed by Wesley

You might notice that Wesley is as big as Biscuit these days. I don't know how that happened. Biscuit has a very big head, Wesley has a pretty little pinhead that contains his devious little brain.

Two and a half cats outside has not been enough to keep up with the mouse population. The mice come in from the fields this time of year, it would take at least 8 cats to keep them under control. But it's hard finding that many cats that can stay safe from the coyotes.

I did finally put poison out on the alley floor of the new chicken barn. Nothing else could get to it. I found 14 dead mice there the next morning, scooped them up and buried them. The next night there were 4 more. I didn't find any dead or dying mice outside the barn, so I believe the wildlife and the cats were safe. I don't like to poison mice, but sometimes there's no other option. I had bought two different kinds of traps and neither worked very well. I caught 3 live mice in one of the traps and had to drive them down to the creek to turn them loose. The trap is made so you can submerge it in water and drown the mice. Oh yeah. Like I'm going to accumulate that kind of karma, living next to the river as I do.

Wesley caught a mouse in the house this month. The first time he caught it, he played with it very carefully so it wouldn't break. It got away from him. The next morning I found it dead on the floor, evidently he learned his lesson the first time. Neither he nor Gollie would eat a mouse. Wesley isn't very fond of any kind of fresh meat, he only eats dry food. And green beans. And the ends off the sweet potatoes if I leave them on the counter to cool after I bake them.

Biscuit eats anything, but he really loves canned milk mixed with raw eggs and warm water. Sort of a liquid custard. He's very well mannered in the house, except his philosophy on meat is that if it's left on the counter, you eat first and ask questions later, the most important question - "will you please open the door so I can drag this stuff outside?"

The cats are well.