Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Bare Butt Buffy

Being a chicken whisperer's daughter has taught me a few things.
Such as, chickens are not bright.
Chickens are messy.
Chickens are scary at night.
And chicken terminology is a language all its own.

I believe it all goes back to what people have heard through generations.
For instance, my grandparents have 'leggern' chickens. If you try to look up a picture of a leggern you will not easily find a chicken. But if you put in 'leghorn', then you will find a lovable Looney Tunes character along with other pictures of lean white chickens. But on the same hand, if I ask Grandma about a 'leghorn' she would quite possibly give me the stink eye.

However, I did find a website that spelled the term 'leghorn' but also offered the pronunciation as 'leggern'.
So I know that it is commonly called such and it's not just a family quirk.
(i.e. wasps = 'whaustes')

Sorry, I'm rambling.

Another example of chicken terminology is if you have a hen that wants to 'set' (maybe it's supposed to be 'sit'--which is to mean that she wants to sit on eggs and hatch them) but you don't want her to, you have to 'break her up' or she needs to be 'broke up'.
Some say to 'break a hen up' you can dunk her in water.
Yeah, ya see, I don't think I would be doing that to Momma's chickens because I think the hen would win.
Ever gotten flogged by a chicken? Me either, but I'm scared I might one day.

Well, Momma has a chicken that would not 'break up'.
Now Momma didn't try to dunk her in a bucket of water (I think she was a little nervous about that), but she would run her out of the chicken house.
When she did, the hen would get so mad she would fluff out and pick fights with the other hens.

Poor hen, she didn't know that sitting on those eggs wouldn't do her any good.
Momma got rid of the rooster.
One of the reasons he had to go was that he made this particular hen a little crazy.
She was real skiddish and would run around like the sky was falling.
So Momma named her Henny Penny.
Well, she didn't think the sky was going to get her much after the rooster was..um..disposed of but she had lost most of her feathers off her back side.
So she got the name Bare Butt Buffy.
(She is a Buff Orpington chicken)

Now, she has almost all her feathers, so she is simply called Buffy.

Almost all the chickens have names such as Bertha, Momma Hen, Ethel, and even one is named Miranda Lambert  (A story for another time) Correction: Her name is Taylor Swift.

Still rambling, I promise this story is going some where.
Well, sort of.
Bless your heart for reading this far.

So, since Buffy was determined to sit and refused to be broke up, Momma called a few other chicken owners around here to see if they had any eggs they wanted to hatch.
She collected an assortment of 20 eggs.

Alright, so she had the eggs and the sitting hen but she couldn't just put them out in the hen house because then the fresh eggs might get mixed up with the others.

If you have ever tried to catch a brooding hen you know it can be a loosing battle.
There's a trick.
Chickens can't see at night.
Once they roost and it's dark, you can pretty much do anything you want with them because they can't see and don't put up a fight.

There are some things you just never picture yourself doing.
One is sneaking into a hen house full of hens in the middle of the night with a tiny flashlight to pick up hens and put vasoline and sulfur on their backs so they would quit pecking each other.
Momma and Daddy have done just that.

Well, we used the same technique to get Buffy out of the hen house and into the old rabbit pen so she could sit on the eggs.


Oh and by the way, the eggs are several different types so that should be interesting.


Momma had to suit up.
She was afraid of getting flogged.
I don't blame her and would never tease her for that.
Her fear is justified.


Now, for the scary part. Like I said, it was well past dark and we had to sneak into the hen house with a tiny flash light.
The chickens' eyes are so creepy. Then the flash on the camera spooked them.
And they make a deep gurgling sound and puff up.
It really makes you think twice about just reaching in and grabbing one.


Bare Butt Buffy was not in the mood to be messed with...


So she messed on Momma.
Like I said, chickens are messy.
And scary at night.

Oh and as you can see, she isn't bare butted any more...however, I will still call her that.


In the end, she was safely put in her temporary home as a soon to be surrogate mother.

So, if you are thinking of raising chickens but this doesn't sound like some thing you would want to do on a Tuesday night, then you should probably rethink your plans.




Monday, July 18, 2011

M.I.A.

 
The reason I have been gone for a while is because my computer bit the dust.

Daddy and I worked and worked with the thing, but it was doing some creepy stuff.
It would beep at us and go to some weird screens, and the motor would rev up like it was about to take off.
Luckily we kept it working long enough to back up all my important stuff on an external hard drive.
We think.

I finally took it to someone when it would not come on at all and he said the motherboard was shot.
I'm not exactly sure what the motherboard is, but it sounds important and expensive to fix.
It is.
 

The money I would spend on replacing this mother of boards would go pretty far on buying a new computer. 

So, I'm in the market for a new computer. 
Sort of.
I'm taking my time, mostly because it isn't a necessity right now but also because I'm in the mood to casual shop.

Otherwise, things have been pretty much uneventful around The Little House.
Just the way we like it.