Here’s the boss hen, ready for her close-up. I’m off the the feed store shortly for more pine shavings and chicken chow. What are y’all up to?
Reader Interactions
39Comments
Comments are closed.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius
The willow is too close to the house.
Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
This blog will pay for itself.
If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!
Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.
Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.
Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.
“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”
A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires
I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
We still have time to mess this up!
You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.
Only Democrats have agency, apparently.
Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.
After roe, women are no longer free.
Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
No one could have predicted…
A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.
Phylllis
Off to Aiken, SC for the day. The rain from Beryl was followed by a cold front, so temps are in the mid-80’s and the humidity is non-existent. Sitting on the porch now finishing our coffee and enjoying the morning.
mistermix
What a coincidence – you posted about chickens, and I posted about chickenshit, almost at the same time.
MattF
Going veeeery sloooowly through my usual Saturday morning errands. Then stopping completely when I found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
Phylllis
@MattF: We’re over folks in this house.
PeakVT
More painting. Do not want.
donnah
Gosh, those chicks got big in a hurry, didn’t they?!
I am working on this:
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d27/Rughooker/4404065c.jpg
for a rug hooking show in August. The theme challenge is “Summer Olympics” so here I go.
hildebrand
Settling into our flat in Florence, Italy, for the month. I am teaching Study Abroad students from my university – History of Florence.
harlana
bok, bok, bo-o-ok!
we had a crazy cousin we’d see once a year, who used to go around imitating chickens
we used to say “do the chicken, Reed!” and he’d, ya know, do the chicken.
that was our idea of entertainment, back in the day
harlana
wow, i’m just noting the start contrast between my comment to the one preceding it and i feel profoundly, embarrassingly inadequate as a human being.
Linda Featheringill
Nice photo of a chicken!
There is an artist [Dotson?] who paints realistic portraits of chickens but has them wearing jewelry, etc. Some of these paintings are quite lovely. I looked for an image online but failed to find one.
Anyway . . . that photo reminded of those paintings.
Linda Featheringill
@harlana:
Don’t worry dear. I can sing like a contented chicken, too. And I do once in a while.
Not much demand for that skill in the big city. Hmmm.
donnah
Okay, Betty, howsabout this?
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d27/Rughooker/490f0381.jpg
It was from a series of rugs by different designers for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and luckily I drew an early number, Three French Hens. The ones in my rug are actually based on three different French hen breeds.
I’m glad I didn’t have to do Lords a’ Leaping…
jo6pac
Getting the firewood spot ready for next weekend delievery. Then some more work in the greenhouse and garden.
PurpleGirl
Donnah: I like both the Olympic athlete and the chickens. Is the chickens piece done with strips of fabric — it looks like folded strips instead of yarn.
Gozer
I stayed up all night trying to resolve a networking issue (fucking Airport Extreme doesn’t want to play nice with the existing network) and trying to look for an el-cheapo (yet reliable) wired router. My venerable and bullet-proof WRT54GL with custom firmware is handling all the DHCP/routing functions so I might just pick up another one to act as a repeater where speed is not an issue.
But now I think I’ll go into the sunroom and nap on the couch. Life’s simple pleasures and what not.
donnah
@PurpleGirl:
Thanks!
They’re actually hooked rugs made with stips of flat, dyed wool. The strips I hooked the chicken rug with are about a quarter inch wide, while the strips I’m using on the gymnast are one sixteenth. Pretty skinny!
harlana
@Linda Featheringill: i feel a little bit better. i also sing to my cat songs i’ve made up about her off the top of my head. but, you know, if you ever saw her, you’d understand.
Xecky Gilchrist
Wow, that picture makes it really clear that birds are lizards plus a bit of evolution.
Gozer
@Xecky Gilchrist: LIES! Errybody knows that chickens magically appeared out of Noah’s head. Also too, Jesus riding a dinosaur.
MattF
@Gozer: Also, a rabbi once informed me that the chicken preceded the egg, according to the Bible. I think he was joking.
Stuck in the Funhouse
That hen sure does have a purdy beak.
smintheus
Rhode Island Reds? The best chicken ever.
I’m still putting in the garden, half of which is still covered in weeds. The 35 tomato plants and 160 potatoes took at lot of time that I should have been devoting to broccoli, fennel, basil, and melons. And spraying my grapes.
harlana
i was about 6 y.o. when a chicken ate my pet frog, “Nosey.” i was just introducing them to each other, and you know, GULP! my whole family still laughs about the expression on my face.
gaz
hehehe. I read “chicken cow” instead of “chicken chow” at first glance and I was reminded of Wesley Willis. =)
The Sailor
@Linda Featheringill: Your comment made me think of Margaret Dumont.
Lojasmo
@harlana:
Funny stuff. Ah, life.
The Sailor
@MattF: I think I did
HRA
I just finished the 5th dessert to take to a suprise birthday picnic party for a relative. Skies predict rain, wind gusts and temperature is 54 without the wind. At least we’ll be in a shelter at the local county park. Will certainly put on a fall/winter coat. What can I tell you -it’s Buffalo, NY.
hildebrand
I am envious of all the folks who are putting in gardens – the soil and climate in Deep South Texas, while fine for big agri-business because they are constantly irrigating, is not quite so conducive to small family gardens. You would need to be a full time farmer to get anything to grow in even a little back yard herb garden. Nine months of 90 degree days might be fine for citrus, but it is hell on basil and chives if you don’t baby them every bloody day.
I imagine that my kvetching rings hollow after my previous note about teaching abroad – but I am envious, I miss the gardens we had when we lived in the midwest, and now must live vicariously through all of you, at least gardening-wise.
smintheus
@hildebrand: Presumably you’ve tried deep mulches (leaves, wood chips)? Have you thought of stretching white row cover fabric in a frame held a few feet above the ground to provide filtered light and some shade?
g
Oh, Betty – beware of predators. My next door neighbor just lost 4 of his 13 backyard chickens to coyotes who slipped through the fence.
Yutsano
CHICKIES!!
I somehow got left to my own devices at the ranch. My sitter is two border collies, and only one of them are in my room. Took the morning round of drugs, now calmly waiting for…something.
hildebrand
@smintheus: I have not tried the cover fabric, that may be the trick, at least for the direct sunlight and heat.
One of the real problem we are confronting is the fact that so many of our plants grow so fast (with all of that lovely sunlight and warmth) that they never produce decent root structures. They grow straight up, as quickly as you can imagine (tomatoes are the worst culprit for this), but then are so spindly they cannot support anything if it does actually happen to come to fruit, or simply cannot sustain long-term growth (for herbs and such) because the roots are stunted. All of the energy seems to go to stem growth, and we are left with very tall, spindly plants – the garden equivalent to Manute Bol, exceptionally tall but essentially useless when it comes to production. Any tips? It doesn’t seem to matter how good the soil,or how deep the mulch layers – my wife labored for quite some time creating the perfect beds, it didn’t seem to make a whit of difference. Either we are cursed, or we are missing something painfully obvious.
wmd
I had some predation last night, lost my sole Barred Rock. Not sure what got her or when, I suspect it was before I closed up the coop at around 10:30. Carcass was missing breast meat, past raccoon raids focused on livers.
Will be setting a trap tonight. Restringing electric fence wire is also on the agenda.
smintheus
The Boston Herald’s attempt to destroy Elizabeth Warren takes an even more bizarre turn today. It accuses her and her family of (gasp) profiting from buying cheap houses, fixing them up, and reselling them for relatively small profit margins back in the ’90s. At the end the Herald tacks on the info that her nephew is a contractor. But not before insinuating that she took advantage of…well exactly whom is unclear…by “flipping” houses (in some cases years after they were bought). I guess this is supposed to mark her somehow as unscrupulous for buying a couple of foreclosed houses, or maybe the idea is she’s part of the parasitic class that destroyed the housing market? It’s just incredibly lame stuff. Maybe it’ll now become so ridiculously transparent that the right-wingers are desperately dredging up anything to fling at Warren that the MA public will completely turn against them?
smintheus
@hildebrand: Too much sun might cause that problem, I don’t know. We create a lattice frame for things like tomatoes and try to get them up off the ground. But too much growth with little fruit set, esp. on tomatoes, often is caused by unusually large amounts nitrogen in the soil. A lot of manure added to the soil would cause that condition. You could test for that.
Anyway, it should be possible with enough of the right kind of fabric to create less intense sunlight and heat on your plants. Or just build a massive grape arbor spanning your garden and let the grape leaves shade it.
hildebrand
@smintheus: Many thanks. At this point, we will give anything a go.
eye strips
I’m currently in Brazil, meeting many of the musicians here in Sao Paulo. I don’t think there’s been one singer or musician who has not mentioned Tom Ze as one of their primary influences. The guy is a force of nature!
tkogrumpy
Good lookin’ bird