Catching up

It's been a busy month! Here are some of the things that have kept me occupied recently...

First and foremost being our baby chicks. What cute little balls of fluff! They are growing very quickly, and the biggest and bossiest (Audrey fforbes-Hamilton) has tail feathers coming in now, in addition to her very large wings. We are hoping that her remarkable growth is not due to the fact that she is a rooster. We ordered 2 Easter Eggers and 2 Red Star chicks from mypetchicken.com. Unfortunately, the Red Stars didn't make it past day 2, so we had to buy replacements from the local feed store. They didn't have any Red Stars, so we ended up with Rhode Island Reds instead. They have furry feet, so we named the two reds Pippin and Merry. Pippin is the smallest--we figured that Pippin could also be short for "pip-squeak". The other Easter Egger is named Daisy.

Daisy is the one taking a drink, Audrey is the big dark chick, Merry is right under Audrey, and Pippin is off to the right.

So far, Merry is the only one who has really taken to hopping on the perch.

We bought a coop for our girls. They won't be big enough to live in it for another month or so, but we are ready. It's pretty slick--with panels that can be removed on the sides, and a handy little egg door on the end next to the nesting box. Ryan has already come up with about a dozen different ideas for improving on it. We'll see how they do in it.


School has been keeping me pretty busy as well. I'm not sure why, but I never seem to get caught up. There are always the random things that come up at school that make it entertaining. Yesterday, I was cleaning up all the shrapnel that had piled up on my desk after a round of EDvisory (basically study hall on steroids...) in addition to a normal day's worth of classes. One of my kids comes in, totally out of breath. Turns out he is on the tennis team, and they were doing laps inside instead of fighting the wind outside. Did he feel a burning urge to get caught up on things for my class? No, I'm afraid his visit was a "Hey, I'm popping in because I'm supposed to be running and want a break." After I laughed at him, I sent him back out the door to finish his run.

I also read one of the lamest books I've read since I picked up Twilight. Skip this paragraph if you liked The Thirteenth Tale. (Ryan: So why are you continuing to read this book if it's so dumb? Me: Because it's so stupid, I have to see if the end is any better than the beginning.) Fact: The end is STUPIDER than the beginning. Good grief! Maybe the problem lies in the fact that when Ryan looked it up on Wikipedia, it was termed a "gothic" novel. I think "gothic novel" in this case means the most ridiculously absurd twists of plot in a tale involving people who need to get over themselves. In some ways, it was reminiscent of some of the stories my sister and I would make up together when we were kids. Our stories had all kinds of plot twists, one of the most common being that the really evil person would magically end up not being evil--she just had an evil twin sister. In the case of this book, not only did we have a set of twins (one of them being evil), we also had a half sister show up 20 pages from the end who looked EXACTLY like the twins. I dunno. It just stretched my suspension of reality a tad too far. Not to mention the weirdness of the incestuous love affair between two of the characters in the book. Eww. Anyway, I wouldn't recommend this book.

Last weekend, we had some last-minute visitors. My brother and his family stayed overnight on their way to a funeral in Idaho. It was wonderful to see them--we don't get the chance to see them as often as we would like. We had a blast playing with their kids. My house is also cleaner than it has been in a few months...nothing like guests coming to inspire a round of late-night housecleaning. We should have guests over more often.


And...I've also been playing with different recipes. I found a pretty good granola recipe on Allrecipes.com, and tweaked it a bit to match what I had in my kitchen. I'll post it--it was really good.