Happy Thanksgiving

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim:

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

Diary of a Mad Chicken

Diary of a mad chicken:

Due to Dixie's continuing vertigo and impaired depth perception, you'll have to settle for my version of events.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Out of quarantine but still in protective custody. Dixie is allowed free time on the patio to interact with the other chickens with minimal supervision. That means we check on her occasionally to make sure she isn't being pecked to death. After about an hour, Chuck looks outside and screams, "(Expletive)! We have a chicken in the pool!"

Sure enough, Dixie is doing the chicken paddle in the middle of the pool. Chuck runs to the edge, squats down, and starts calling her. "Here Dixie...Follow the sound of my voice...That's right...Keep coming...Follow my voice." I'll be damned if she doesn't follow the sound of his voice all the way to the edge of the pool to be scooped out. She spends the next hour wrapped in a towel shivering and crying but comes out of it okay. No harm, no fowl death.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Continues with more heavily supervised visits with other chickens. These encounters require diligent human supervision with frequent intervention, as the others chickens will threaten and peck causing Dixie to squawk and spin around in circles.

I'm sitting out on Bette's bench drinking a beer and watching the chickens. I notice that three of the new teenagers are starting to get little buds on their legs. Crap. Three more roosters. Double crap, Dixie has the same buds.

Apparently Jim was onto something when he suggested the name Lowell.

Thursday, October 2. 2008

Dixie (hard to think of her/him as anything but now) is rapidly outgrowing and more rapidly beginning to resent the rabbit cage. At about 10:00 a.m., Vic decides that she (he, dammit) will be happier hanging out under the bench and tree while all the other chickens are in the back four. When she goes to check on Dixie about an hour later, he is gone. Gone without a trace. Not one feather left behind.

Being terribly upset, Vic calls Chuck who rushes home from work to try and figure out what happened to Dixie. They search the property. They try to get Small to track her (him, dammit). They stand very still and listen very carefully trying to hear a faint cheep. Nothing.

Chuck spends the afternoon composing a fairy tale to tell me when I get home. That happens at 4:00 and we have this exchange:

Chuck: Dixie went to lunch and fell in with a bad crowd and hasn't come back.
Me: What do you mean? Where is she?
Chuck: Well...We don't know?
Me: Did someone EAT her for lunch?
Chuck: Maybe.
Me: Who? Was it one of the dogs?
Chuck: No. We looked everywhere. There's no sign. No feathers or anything.
Me: (Looking out into the pasture at something distant and white) Did you look over there? Is that her?
Chuck: No. That's a rock.

So, I go into the house and Vic and I are talking about it when she looks up and sees Chuck walking across the pasture holding Dixie.

He found him calmly standing in the shade under a tree.

Holy crap.

Love from Spring Branch,

Robin

Snake follow-up

You know, now that I've had time to reflect, I feel a little sorry for Chuck. Think about it. If he lived with Sara Palin, he wouldn't have been bothered about something as trivial as a rattlesnake.

She probably would have killed it with her bare hands, skinned it with her teeth, and had it frying in a pan by the time he woke up.

News from Spring Branch

We are having way too much excitement around here, and it has
nothing to do with Ike.

I went out just before sunrise to open up the hen house and got
the shock of my life. As I opened the hatch/ramp, I heard the
awesome, heart-stopping sound of a rattlesnake. It was just light enough
to see that the snake was about 10 inches from my hand.

I froze. That's what one does.

Once I could see that the snake was moving away from me, I flew
(no, really, feet didn't touch the ground) back to the house, pounded
on the master bedroom door, and shouted, "Chuck, there's a rattlesnake
out here!"

Rude awakening.

By the time we got back out there with a hoe, the snake, all 5-6
feet of it, was moving slowly toward the back of the hen house. Chuck
tried to hit it with the hoe, but missed, and the snake picked up the
pace and secreted itself under some piles of fencing near the back.

He's in now putting on some boots, ready to go flush it out.
Yikes. It's funny how complacent we get. Eight years without a trace of
a venomous snake, and we forget how dangerous nature can be.

Time to get a guinea hen.

Hope you are all well and safe.

Love from Spring Branch,

Robin

Dixie Chick

Hi, all,

So. I was driving down a 6-lane divided highway in Seguin this afternoon when I saw something odd. A young white chicken walking in tight circles. I stopped the car (luckily, nobody was coming), put it in park, started the emergency flashers, jumped out, grabbed the chicken, put her in the passenger-side footwell, and took off.

Oh, she was scrawny, filthy, and obviously ill. Once I was able to pull into a gas station, I put her in a box and gave her some water with a syringe until she was able to drink out of a sawed-off water bottle. That's when I noticed what was playing on the radio. Jim, you'll like this: it was "Dixie Chicken" by Little Feat.

We're guessing she fell off a poultry truck and has a head injury, but she may have some sort of neurological disease, so she's in quarantine in the laundry room for now.

If you're feeling sympathetic, please send a nice thought Dixie's way.

Love from Spring Branch,

Robin

P.S. Ike is probably not going to have a big impact here, but we are fretting a little about the Houston relatives, so send them nice thoughts as well.

Finally

Well, much thanks to Dooce. Because I like to look at her Daily Style link, I found out about etsy.com. Now I have a place to market my stuff.

Whenever I'm asked why I don't sell some of the stuff I make, I always say it's because having to do it would take the fun out of it. That's not true. I just have not a marketing bone in my body. Thanks to etsy, I don't need one. They made it really easy for me. So, all those unfinished (soon-to-be-finished) projects are on their way out.

New pets

These are my new pets Carmen and Electra. Aren't they cute? When they are grown, they will have lots of feathers on their legs, and it will look like they're wearing ruffled pantaloons.

They are Cochin chickens, and you can find out more about the breed here.

I first saw Cochins at the Quadrangle at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

Hey, before you mock me, consider: I don't have to take them for walks, and someday they will give me delicious eggs. Okay, so I do take them for walks, and maybe that does deserve a little mocking, but the eggs will be great.

Not dragged kicking and screaming

Okay. I know this won't appeal to many, but there are still some of us out here who have a bit of a lag time and are easily amused. For example, I'm still not rich and hip enough to be Mac user. However, I am a recent convert to both Firefox and Gmail and am here to tell you I'm enjoying the hell out of discovering their comparative advantages. I'm writing them each a little love note.

Oh, Foxfire, I adore you. It thrills me to no end to be able to post links to my favorite Websites directly into a toolbar. When I was using another browser, it took a couple of extra clicks to get where I wanted to go. How did you know how impatient I've become? And the way you let me Stumble! around the Internet discovering interesting Websites excites my geeky blood.

You, Gmail, have made managing my ridiculously high volume of email so much easier. The way you automatically keep conversations bundled, allow me to tag messages and then retrieve all current and archived similarly tagged ones is so much more convenient than shuffling through folders. You keep my inbox visible even as I send replies, and it makes me feel grounded, like I'm not going to just spin off out into the ether.

Six-words might save the day

A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I attended a memorial service. It was a lovely service, and we could see that it had required a lot of the family and church. Just one week after a sudden and unanticipated death, they had put together a complicated program, planted a tree, scattered ashes, written letters, and, and, and...I don't know. How does one know what to do? How to do it?

An agnostic, a secular humanist and a Methodist are travelling across Texas in a Ford Explorer...

Not the start of a joke. We had a 5-hour drive home. Each of us was thinking about our late friend, those he left behind, our own and each other's inevitable deaths, the kind of services we would put together for each other. We talked about it. We questioned each other. Since the service is in honor of the dead but experienced by the living, what does one do? Say the agnostic dies first. Does someone stand up and talk about Jesus? And when the Methodist predeceases the agnostic?

We also asked one another to make song selections. Unfortunately, as soon as someone (I) mentioned I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (equally inappropriate for a wedding reception), nobody could give a straight answer.

Anyway, being the take-charge person I am, I'm making plans. I've taken inspiration from Smith Magazine. When one of my people dies, I will send to everyone who knows him or her a request for a six word biography. Once I get them, I'll compile and publish a collection to distribute to family and friends.

Not having thought to do this in time for the recent loss, in memory of our friend we purchased a brick that will be used in the construction of our new public library. We came up with six words to describe our friend, but unfortunately, the brick inscription is limited to 60 characters and spaces, and since we wanted to include his name, dates and a quote from one of his favorite songs, there just wasn't enough room.

The others, gold

Just got news from an old friend. Chad Clark, a former colleague and fellow survivor of place I'll just call Bruceville, just had a brush with mortality. He was a Kelly Girl, and I was a nurse, and much to my shame, I got him addicted to computer solitaire. We haven't spoken in years and have emailed one another infrequently, but I think of him often and mean to touch base. Isn't that always the way.
I had a Chad flashback just last week when I heard an NPR interview with the genius Mike Doughty. Lo these many years ago, Chad introduced me to the music of Soul Coughing. They were so very far away from what almost anyone else in the world would expect this outwardly ridiculously white-bread girl to listen to, but Chad knew something about me that even I didn't. First (to me) came the CD Ruby Vroom, then a live show at the Black Cat in D.C. Transformative. Thereafter, I trusted him about all things musical, and he never failed to expand my world in all the tight places.
I don't know how it is with him these days, but back then Chad had a trunk full of CDs. None was in its original case. He had this habit of putting the most recently ejected CD into the case of the next one he wanted to hear. You could have backtracked and reconstructed his listening experience if you'd had hours and hours and an administrative assistant to take dictation.
Most endearingly, Chad laughed in all the right places when I told unabashedly exaggerated anecdotes about chance encounters in the elevator of our building.
Chad Clark, I miss seeing you every day, and I'm glad you're still on the planet.