Show Season is Winding Down

There are only a couple of poultry shows left in this season, one in Red Bluff and one near San Diego. Red Bluff is just a couple hours' drive up the valley. San Diego is quite a drive, but I'm going to try it. The length of the drive doesn't bother me, it's having to go through Los Angeles. I may be timing the drive so I do that at 3 a.m. just to avoid the traffic.

Here are some of my traveling buddies.

#33

This is the first bird that won Best of Show for me, my hen #33. She has been to 20 shows. In addition to BOS once, she has 17 blue ribbons, has been been Best of Breed 10 times, Best RCCL and Best Bantam twice, and Reserve RCCL 3 times. I mostly take her to shows because she keeps herself in wonderful condition and she likes to show. Laying eggs is not her thing, she only lays by appointment. She has produced maybe 6 chicks over the years.

Want to take her picture? No problem, just bring out the camera and #33 runs through her Top Model poses for you.

#28

This is #28, a pullet that did really well this year. She isn't as sprightly as #33, but she has excellent color. Barred and cuckoo females are often very dark, the color on their wings and back is muddied with gray. This girl and her sisters have very sharp color with a 50/50 white and dark pattern. All the judges liked her except the very last one who judged. He didn't place her at all and marked "too light" on her card. He needs to study the Standard of Perfection. He also judged the large fowl at the same show and placed my best LF pullet last because of her (excellent) color. This happens sometimes. I'm hoping the other judges will be able to pull this judge aside sometime soon and bring him up to speed.

The two girls above are bantam Dominiques. This is a large fowl Dominique that I've been showing.

#25

He's not an outstanding bird, but he's adequate to show. His tail could be better if he had wider tail feathers so there was no gap between them, and longer sickle feathers. The sickle feathers are the main tail feathers. Below is a picture of an ideal Dominique male.

This is from an old picture of an actual bird that was retouched by Schilling (a renowned poultry artist) to show the ideal. #25, the bird I'm showing, could be "gamier," which means more upright and have less body mass. #25 also could benefit from a neater comb and smaller wattles, and a fuller tail. Until I find a large fowl that meets these criteria, I'll just keep showing the one I have.

I do raise a few large fowl chicks a year, maybe a dozen. I would prefer to find an ideal bird and buy it to show, I don't ever intend to raise a lot of LF just to get a good one. Large fowl eat too much and take up too much space, compared to bantams. They are also harder for me to handle. When I first got #25 he'd been free ranging up in Oregon and he was one tough fellow. I could barely hang onto him. It took a lot of work to tame him for showing.

So this time of year I have fewer birds than at any other time. I raised 200 bantam chicks last year and have about 50 bantams left. Next week I'll be mailing off 6 more to people in other parts of the country. There are about 25 birds in breeding pens, I'm collecting their eggs and hatching them. The others are spares I'm keeping. I have 10 old hens in a spacious outdoor pen in case I need to do some linebreeding. I have probably 6 extra males in case something happens to their brothers that I'm using for breeding. I hardly ever lose a chicken. The pens are predator proof (at least they have been, knock on wood), the birds are healthy. But sometimes a male will prove to be infertile or a female will not be a good layer, so it's wise to keep spares.

I have hatched 18 bantams and 5 large fowl chicks so far this year. This is my least favorite part of showing chickens. I hatch and brood the chicks in the house. That's noisy and dusty and I hate it. But if I want to raise birds that will be big enough when the late summer shows start, I have to start in winter, and the incubators and brooders are not reliable when they have to function in a building that isn't heated and insulated. So, it's inside the house...

...the house with boxes stacked everywhere, the house that's already the scene of so much chaos right now. I need to get things back in order. Or maybe I need it to stop raining so I can get outside and enjoy the tulips, the camellias, and the lilacs that are blooming.

Still a Grumpy Mess

I still have no furniture. Everything is still in boxes that are stacked all over the house.

Before I can empty at least 4 of the boxes back into my antique bookcase, it needs to be moved. That takes 3 men. This is a really busy time of the year on a farm, it's hard to find 3 guys at once, they're all out working really hard.

Last week they were kind enough to squeeze in some outdoor work for me. The "killer" storm that was supposed to hit California wasn't near as bad as advertised but we did get about 10 minutes of very brisk wind. The sort that moans and whistles just outside the rattling windows. That knocked down a few trees here in Sloughhouse and took the entire top off the old Signorotti hop kiln, a local landmark.

Three of the trees were on my property. Two fell into the horse pasture. They rested on the fence but didn't break it. Tightened it nicely, in fact. The other was half a tree in the yard. It fell right next to my ancient Chevy truck. Nothing here was damaged. I have a tree service come every other year to take out and trim problem trees. There's still plenty for them to work on. But the guys from Davis Ranch came over with a tractor, a trailer, and a couple of chain saws and made quick work and a stack of firewood.

An observation: the "killer" wind didn't even blow the tarp off the bale of hay next to the fence. Nor did it blow the blooming tulips over. I don't think it reached the ground. Can wind do that? Just stay about 20 feet up in the air?

I'm hoping for some time soon to just be able to go through the boxes and get the house back in order. I hate disorder, it makes me crazy. Maybe I haven't cleaned up the mess just so I can blame disorder on my craziness?

The cats also need to have order restored. Biscuit just lays in his bed, temporarily on top of the dining room table. He's wise, he knows that's a safe place.

He would prefer to sleep on furniture. I loaned the wheelchair to a friend last month. When she returned it, I left it in the living room to use as a chair. Biscuit tried to make it work for him.

It didn't work for me, either. The floor is high in the middle and low on the edges, so the wheelchair rolls down into the wall. 

Gollie doesn't mind all the chaos so much. It gives her new places to hide. But she's been in this house for 13 years and wants her familiar hidey holes back, too.

Wesley takes advantage of chaos to make more messes. He pulls things out of the boxes and uses them for toys. 

To add to the catfusion around here, I'm having to take all the cats in to a new vet this week. Today is Biscuit's appointment. The mangy little black cat that was hanging out on the porch this past year got sick and had to be euthanized. I had just managed to start petting it, it was really a sweet little girl. Except I found out at the vet's it was a boy, and that it was in the last stages of feline leukemia.

I'm pretty sure Wes and Gollie have been vaccinated for that. But I can't find the box their papers are in, and their old vet has retired. I doubt Biscuit was ever vaccinated for anything until he was neutered at SPCA last fall. Biscuit spent time on the front porch eating out of the same bowl as "Little Girl," so I need to have him tested. If he's negative, the inside cats should be safe. He shares feed and water bowls with them in the house. If not, I'll need to take the others in, too.

I'd like to say thank you to the lowlife butthead who dumped a sick cat out in the country. Someday I'll get to catch someone doing that and they will suffer the wrath built up by years of others committing the same sin.

Still a grumpy mess.

What Just Happened?

Some of you readers know how long we in Sloughhouse have been battling the county department of waste management (DWM). Their enormous dump mountain hovers over all of us in the rural eastern part of Sacramento County. It has been a long, tedious journey to get DWM to just honor their word.

Their first word, when they sited the dump in our area more than 45 years ago, was that it would only be used for 25 years, then it would be closed and turned into a park.

At the end of 25 years they came up with a grand plan to turn it into a regional super dump instead. That's when we started fighting back. It took at least 5 years to kill that plan. We didn't succeed in closing the dump, but the size was limited. To accomplish this we, the citizens, had to attend countless board of supervisors' meetings downtown Sacramento. Also we had to speak at state water quality control meetings and state waste management meetings. Are you like most people who hate speaking in public? So were we. We had to overcome that.

One of the things the county did along the way was procure property around the landfill as a buffer zone. Not to buffer US from their dump, but to make sure there would be no development near the landfill. There was no threat of development from the Sloughhouse side of the dump. We're a farming community, on an active floodplain. There has been no new building allowed here for a long time. The land on the north side of the dump, however, had been bought by a developer who threatened to put apartments on it, and to sue the county if he wasn't allowed to do that. This developer routinely buys land around landfills in other locations and pulls the same trick.

So the county drew a circle around its dump and claimed it didn't need environmental documents to confiscate the land because it was only changing ownership, not function. The land, they said, would be open space forevermore. They even wrote that into the county general plan. Until a couple of years ago when it was changed to: "...forevermore, or unless the supervisors or DWM changes their mind."

And then they changed their mind. Probably pushed by the board of supervisors to make some profit off all that land, DWM decided to put a complex of recycling businesses on the Sloughhouse side of the buffer zone. We went through another round of idiotic public meetings, studies, environmental documents, all the same crap that is done on county employees' work time, but us citizens have to take time off our jobs to attend.

If you're a citizen like me, you study all the documents for at least 2 weeks, then write and rewrite your comments, editing them up to the last minute. Citizens only have 3 minutes to speak at most public meetings, if you want to make all your points it takes a lot of work to craft a short, efficient speech. Gut twisting work. The last thing you want to do is fail and go home thinking that you could have saved your community if only you'd had a better prepared speech, or if you'd only been able to persuade a couple more people to attend the meeting.

Last week I was mailed notice of yet another meeting. DWM would be at our local community planning council (CPAC) to give us an update on their plans. Oh goody.

I didn't bother to write anything this time because there were no accompanying documents to read for comments. And the bottom line is, the details don't really matter. What matters is the lies. Someone needs to just keep reminding them about their lies. I can do that without a script.

I inadvertently sat next to the new director of DWM. I had never seen him before. When the meeting started and DWM was asked to give its presentation, it surprised me when he stood up and walked to the front of the room.

"I am here tonight to let you all know," he said, "that we have withdrawn our plans to develop the buffer zone." We're not reworking them, we have no further plans, the buffer zone will remain open space."

We won.

How did that happen?

No Forward Motion

Spring came to California a couple of weeks ago, in its typical manner. One day it's winter and the next day it's 76° and everyone is wearing their shorts and sandals. Not me, I don't wear those things ever. And anyway, even though the weeds are already a foot tall, everything is green, the fruit trees are blooming and the bees are buzzing, I'm not in a Spring mood yet.

I have been very busy with poultry shows. I went to one in Hollister (about 3 hours away) in early January. For the first time since I've been a member of the Cal National program, I won a plaque.

I was 18th of the 20 people who won one. The top winner had over 1000 points. She often shows more than 50 birds, all different breeds. I show two breeds, so it takes me a while longer to accumulate points.

In late January, Anna and I went to the big show in Modesto. That show was the American Poultry Association (APA) national event. There were over 3000 birds. We had Dominique friends who flew in from Maryland and Missouri, and one came down from Oregon on Amtrak.

This is our friend Mark, from Missouri.

He is THE national expert on Dominique chickens, and is also the life of any party. Does my face look bloated and tired? That's an accurate evaluation. Too much fun can take a toll.

Here are some of my other friends, Nadja and Michael.

By the time I got 27 birds ready for the show, I was beat. It was so nice having Anna's help.

Early this month I went to the show in Ferndale. My friend Katherine drove the car up and back, I got to be the passenger. Bob and Anna came up on Saturday, spent a little time at the show, then went off exploring for the rest of their weekend. This is their valentine from Glass Beach.

This winter, two of my favorite famous fellows passed. Kenny Stabler was quarterback of the Oakland Raiders in the late 1970s. He, Fred Biletnikoff, and Dave Casper are the reason I became a football fan. They made the game an adventure to watch. Stabler and Casper were great with their fans, too. I have pictures and autographs tucked away from those wonderful years when the Raiders were often in the Superbowl.

One of my favorite TV shows about that same time was Grizzly Adams, starring Dan Haggerty. There was no high drama, it was just a cute story about a peaceful fellow who lived in an isolated log cabin with his grizzly bear. I believe Haggerty was the bear's trainer, I think this show could have been his only acting job.

These are photos of Ken and Dan in their younger years. Neither of them aged well, Ken was beat up by football and Dan evidently had a drug problem. Aging beats us all up, even if we don't have drugs and football in our lives.

Despite going to a lot of poultry shows, I am feeling stuck in a rut. I needed to have the floor in the living room redone, so we pulled out the carpet and had it hauled to the dump. The living room furniture had already gone there. Vladimir came out and he and his brother installed a new Pergo floor. Like anything that's done in this house, it wasn't easy. They discovered a leak near the fireplace. From outside we could see that the chimney has pulled away from the house about 2 inches. Bob maintains the chimney is actually straight, it's the house that's leaning. Evidently because we actually had some rain this winter, water leaked down the gap and ran down a 2x4 onto the floor inside, where the carpet was starting to mold. The cats, who I had suspected, were blameless.

The floor under the carpet is tongue and groove. It's in very good condition. However, if you measure it, it starts at the west wall, goes up about an inch in the middle of the room (where there's a big timber under it) and then goes downhill to the east, outside wall. There's a 1-1/2 inch drop from the middle. The lip on the Pergo boards is not very big. The guys laid it very carefully, hoping nothing will pop up over time.

In the meantime, I have walls on both sides of the fireplace that need to be replaced. They can't be easily patched because 40 year old drywall is thicker than the modern stuff. The fireplace rockwork was done over the top of the old drywall. New drywall will have to be cut out to go around the rockwork.

Bob had volunteered to do this, not fully appreciating what was required. He came out yesterday, already suffering from a back ache, and just sat on the floor with a glum look on his face. "What's the plan?" I asked. I could tell by the look I got his only plan was to retreat. Which is exactly what happened. So now I need to hire someone to do the work.

Meanwhile there are only 2 chairs in the house, the rickety old computer chair I'm sitting in right now, and a folding chair. Things from the living room are stacked along both sides of the hall, which means no night trips to the bathroom without a flashlight (the light switch is blocked). Wesley routinely pulls things out of the storage boxes and drags them around the house. Biscuit and Gollie have found cozy spots and are nestled between the boxes. This whole mess makes me extremely grumpy. Thankfully it's just me and the cats here, and they know to stay hidden.

Awards

I'm very proud to announce that I've been presented with a distinguished blogging award. 

TOP BLOG BY A MATURE BLOGGER

Janice Blawat for "Cosumne Girl"

Having only recently crossed the line into maturity,

Ms James-Blawat continues to display a youthful enthusiasm

for life in her well-expressed and well-illustrated blog.

The Awards Committee referred to her as a feisty blogger with

strong opinions on a range of subjects but also a patient

country woman who shows great expertise as a 

poultry enthusiast and cat lover.

............................

I suspect there was a bit of rule bending to make this award so. Mr. Pudding, who is in charge of the award process, is a retired teacher and published author who has very high standards that include skills in writing and photography. He is one of those rare bloggers who contributes a new post almost daily, and I think he appreciates that in other blogs. I haven't been a very reliable blogger this past year.

Many of the blogs I used to follow are dead now. Their keepers appear to have moved on to Facebook, where profound thought is not required. Indeed, profound thought is usually punished there. But it's a good way to keep track of what your younger relatives are doing.

I can't promise to be a better blogger this year. My life is pretty dull between poultry shows. I don't mind that, dull means there are no problems I can't handle. I have plenty of chores, but they would be boring to write about every day.

I can't promise to be a blogger who is in more control of this media, either. I've had a terrible time today trying to get type to center and other basic things most 10 years old know how to do. For example, what's the arrow up in the headline? I didn't put it there.

I also have other awards that I want to share with you, so I added them over on the side. They are from the Dominique Club of America and they reflect all the hours I've spent with my birds over the past few years. 

Things Are Not What They Seem

I spent last evening at the Laughing Horse Tavern in Orlando, Florida, hoping to celebrate New Year's eve with my blogging friends and hear the winners announced for the coveted Laughing Horse Awards for 2015.

Like everything else in Florida, nothing followed the plan. We were supposed to have the tavern to ourselves. Like other events involving writers and other literary-minded folks, I figured we'd have taken all our clever selfies by 10 p.m. so we could each waddle back to our own room and snore off to sleep into the new year.

But a motorcycle gang fouled those plans. We could hear them as they pulled in, the noisy racket of their cycles announcing their intentions. It was intimidating, but at least they were white guys with guns and knives, not foreign terrorists. The tavern owner tried to get them off to a separate corner, to leave us to our ceremonies. I saw her lean into the leader and whisper into his ear, "...just wait over there, this bunch will all be passed out in an hour and you can have the whole place to yourselves, and I'll have a pretty penny from selling them watered-down drinks."

But the "Angels" were having none of that, it would have been an affront to their masculinity to take back seat to a bunch of writers.

It wasn't long before the ladies in the group were leaving, each with her preferred biker. I could see Yorkie taking notes, the gossip monger, knowing he'd be spilling the beans in his blog. So I slid my hand through the arm of a big guy whose leather vest bore the outline of a golden cock* and said "Let's blow this candy store, dude."

Outside we passed several rough-looking cycles and made our way to a flashy red machine at the far side of the parking lot, where it wouldn't get scratched.**

"What kind of fake Hell's Angel are you?" I asked.

That's when I found out that Rooster's real name is Darryl. He is a retired lawyer who lives in Tampa with his wife and 3 poodles. If I'd seen the hand-crocheted drink holder by the passenger seat, I might have been forewarned.

Rooster said, "I'm diabetic, my night vision isn't very good, usually I just follow behind Gnasher on the way home." I said, "No problem, Dude, I can drive this thing."

He tapped the GPS on the dashboard. "Just follow the directions to Tampa, I feel drowsy, I'm gonna snooze on the way home."

There I was. Almost 70 years old, left in charge of a very cool machine, and the guy wanted me to take it to a town that was named after women's sanitary products? No way.

Instead of taking Hwy. 4 west to Tampa, I headed the big bike south down 441. So here I sit this morning, blogging from Yeehaw Junction. Rooster is still asleep (or maybe it's a diabetic coma). I dragged him into the booth here at Rosie's Café, where I'm enjoying a great breakfast of bacon. Only bacon, no eggs. Pretty soon I'll need to get back to Orlando, though, I'm still eager to hear who won the Yorkshire Pudding awards.

*You forgot that I show poultry and use the proper professional terminology, didn't you?

**Photo taken in the parking lot at Rosie's, I thought it was funny when the Honda truck pulled in there and the driver got out to eat breakfast, too.

***Go to Yorkshire Pudding's blog (listed to the right) if you're wondering what's up.

Biscuit's Story

I've been piecing together the story of Biscuit's life for the past year. Over the Christmas holidays, as neighbors dropped by to share some seasonal cheer, a few more pieces fell into place.

I already told you about the big cat's early life. The big Maine Coon cat and his brother Gravy belonged to a relative of one of the Davis brothers (of Davis Ranch). They grew up in the country about 5 years ago, and were happy there playing with their doggie buddies and hunting in the fields. Then coyotes killed Gravy. Biscuit was taken to the shop at Davis Ranch. The shop is not quite a mile from my house, it's where the tractors are kept and maintained. There are several outbuildings there and the guys like to keep cats around to keep the mice in check.

Biscuit hung around the shop for a couple of years, then he would disappear for a week at a time. He was a tomcat, and was evidently out tomcatting. We know this because this year when the neighbors came around and saw him sitting on my porch, or in the chair in my living room, each one of them said, "I have a cat that looks just like that at home. It was a feral kitten."

I'd already suspected Biscuit is Wesley's father. Wesley has a small head and finer bones, like his feral mother's family, but he's a big, big cat. When he stands next to Biscuit, they're about the same height and length. And the same color, with the same markings.

The last mystery about Biscuit was cleared up when the neighbor from the seed company across the field stopped by. She said, "So he's still alive! I haven't seen him for 2 months, he always came around and stayed for 3 or 4 days, then he'd be gone for a week." That would be the week he was at my house.

When he was at the seed company, Biscuit kept the rats and mice under control, and caught jackrabbits in the alfalfa fields. He wasn't wild, but they couldn't pet him.

So now the only mystery is which of my neighbors caught the big guy this fall and hauled him off to SPCA to have him neutered? No one is confessing. I think the neighborhood has lost its might hunter, though. The big guy has totally become a lap cat.