Setbacks

We started out with 12 chickens, 11 babies and a hen. One got sick and we put it out of its misery. One got killed by a dog. That was last fall. One was eaten for Thanksgiving. So we had 9. Then 2 were run over by a car, at least that's what we think, about a month ago. The weekend before last, a dog killed two and injured one so severely that I had to kill it. So now we have four chickens left, which are just not enough for it to be worth the hassle, so we are getting some more in the Spring. We haven't worked out all of the logistics yet, but I'm sure we will get there. We learned a few lessons and will make some changes to the way we keep the chickens. They are not going to be completely free-range anymore, thanks to irresponsible dog owners that refuse to contain their dogs, but assured me that their dog does not attack any animals at all, even after I followed him all the way to their house from where we keep our chickens. I hate the idea of changing the way we do things because of someone else's ignorance, but we realized that we need to pen them up for some other reasons as well. Such as preventing them from tearing into out flower garden and the veggie garden we're planning to have, and from leaving their droppings in our driveway. And sadly, there is more than one free-roaming dog in the neighborhood. Christina found some simple chicken pen plans for making them out of PVC pipe, and we will give that a try. If it works well, we will make several that we connect to have one really big one, and it will be easy to move it. And when we're outside in the summer, we will let them out as well. On top of all that, one of our cats, adventurous Gator, was lost all day yesterday, and didn't show up at night either. It was such a huge relief to see him at the back door this morning as if nothing had happened.

Demand justice!

As you probably already noticed, I haven't been posting very regularly lately. Part of the reason is, that not that much is happening, another part is, that a dear friend of ours is having some trouble with the law, and we've been trying to get him out of jail for some time now. Usually, we like to keep this place more or less anonymous, which we're probably not all that successful with, but today is the day we're gonna have to start naming names.

Geoff "Puppy" Jenkins is one of the greatest guys you'll ever meet. Fun-loving, genuine, always up for anything. Not a good cook, but at least he tries. Puppy has been wrongly accused of a whole list of crimes, including, but not limited to, not paying 27 traffic violation tickets, burglary, possession of controlled substances and intention to acquire unregistered firearms. This is not all he's being accused of, but these are the most severe. We believe Puppy is the victim of a malicious case of identity theft, with the identity thief cleverly disguising himself as Puppy while committing these crimes. We are still in the process of gathering evidence to support what we know is the truth, and we have also put up a sign in the yard to raise awareness in the community.

This is totally unrelated, but check out the huge watermelons Christina's dad grew this year. They're in the back to the left of the sign.