Sunday leftovers

 Random picture of Alan because ... ear tufts.

 Why did the cat cross the road? To avoid the chickens.

JohnnyCashCat really doesn't like the chickens.

 They scare him...

 ...and he thinks their feet are really weird. Me, too.

 Johnny: AAACK! What do you mean we're getting three more chickens?

I can't handle the chickens!

Too bad. I ordered more chickens this week, for pick-up in the spring once the weather gets warmer. 

The new girls will lay blue/green and speckled eggs. We're all about variety. 

Here is a picture of my mom, taken Thursday night at an Andrea Bocelli concert.

Andrea Bocelli is to my mom what George Strait is to me. We both have the groupie gene.

Here she is working the red-carpet hand-on-hip pose.

Where did she learn that?!

Sunday leftovers

My Sunday posts are a place to dump all the leftover pictures from the week 

that didn't make it into one of the other posts.

This leftover of George purring while I'm rubbing the inside of his ear is all I've got, though,

because I wasted way too much energy on home decorating ideas instead of taking pictures.

I'll blame it on the new coffee table. I've been shopping for a new coffee table for four, 

maybe five years. Okay, maybe six. It's embarassing how long I can be paralyzed by indecision.

Poor Ethel has suffered through it all. I've emailed her pictures of options, she's emailed me pictures

of options, and I've opted to do nothing...until now. It finally dawned on me that I didn't really need 

a coffee table; what I needed was a comfy place to put my feet up while sitting in my favorite chair

or on the couch. And now I've got it. Done. Whew.

But in my world, one thing always leads to one more thing, and as I sat on the couch 

with my feet propped up on my comfy ottoman, looking at the wood stove 

sitting in the corner all lonely and sad, I acknowledged that it is the single most important feature

 in the whole house and it should have more of a presence...some gravitas indicative of its worth.

So I got this idea to raise it up off the floor and extend the stone wall and set it on a piece of slate

and add a stone mantel. Now if the contractor would just call me back with a price,

we can get this party started. But meanwhile, why not paint the dining room and kitchen?

Can you see the snowball rolling down the hill?

How many years will it take for me to select a color? None. 

I have a self-imposed deadline of seven days, which is the next time I will be out and about 

and near a paint store. I do my best work under pressure. 

Sunday leftovers

JohnnyCashCat has developed a sense of entitlement with the recent wintry weather.

Every time he stands at the door asking to be let inside, he expects me to open it, and I comply.

Resistance is futile.

I've been trying for weeks to get a picture of the doves all lined up, sunning themselves on the barn roof.

Talk about flighty...all I have to do is stand in the window and they take off.

Every time I see them up there, I'm reminded of Amelia. 

It was three years yesterday that she made her first appearance at the 7MSN.

If you don't know her story, click on the label "Amelia" in the list at the bottom of the page.

She was such a character. I wish she would have stuck around.

Solveig in Northern Alberta e-mailed me this week, asking what became of the egg in the cupboard,

which, as predicted, I had forgotten about. It's been six weeks since I stashed it there,

in the name of proving and/or disproving the egg freshness test.

Would it now float in a bowl of water, proving itself unsafe to eat?

Yep. It floats. Not safe to eat and time to throw it away...

...but not before I cracked it open to see what it would look and smell like.

For the record, it looked good enough to eat and it didn't smell at all, which surprised me.

I didn't put it through a taste test.

As a chicken and burro keeper, one might think I'd know the grammatically correct way
to write about "laying" eggs and "lying" down to take naps.
In fact, I struggle with "lay" and "lie" and every permutation thereof
every time I try to include one of those words in this blog.
So when I saw the chart below somewhere on the internet this week,
I immediately saved it to my desktop and share it here, hoping someone besides me will find it of use.

Sunday leftovers

I was on the phone with my mom when I saw this happening outside the window.

I wasn't sure who would go after whom first, and luckily nobody went after anybody,

because how do you explain to the person at the end of the line that you have to hang up

because your cat is attacking a raven or vice versa?

With annual vet visits out of the way, it was time to wrap up the horse trailer for another year,

or so I hope. Not wanting to replace the trailer floor yet again, I throw a tarp over the top 

to keep out the rain and snow. Last year, I had help; this year, I was on my own.

 Aided by a breeze that was blowing in my favor...

 and a strategically placed pulley...

 ...it's a wrap.

 For the record, I wrap trailers better than I wrap packages. 

Maybe if I wrapped packages with baling twine instead of scotch tape, I'd have more success.

The weatherman predicted that my neck of New Mexico would escape last week's arctic blast.

He was wrong. Had I known that the temperature would drop to 16 Thursday morning,

I could have protected Edith's comb with vaseline. Alas, the grey tips indicate frostbite. 

Clara and Peach suffered frostbite back in 2011, and their spikey combs rounded off. 

I haven't the heart to tell Edith that she'll likely lose her signature look.

Sunday leftovers

 Reason #237 why I love Lucy: When a couple of horses show up out of the blue 

and charge the fence line and scare the hell out of me because I think they're going to jump over it,

Lucy doesn't bolt or buck or otherwise do anything silly.

 Had I been riding one of my horses in a similar situation, all hell likely would have broken loose.

Yes, Hank, I'm referring to you. He was quite the ride in his youth.

 All of us found ourselves napping and yawning and stretching at all the wrong times this week.

A few more days and maybe I'll stop looking at the clock and thinking, 

"it's 8:30, but that means it's really 9:30, so isn't it time to go to bed?"

 Alan's been a little off since his vet visit on Thursday, so we've all been keeping an eye out on him.

 He always has a reaction to vaccines, and this time it was no different. 

I'm sure he'll be back to his normal wacky self in a day or two.

 Smooch got to go on the Saturday errand run for the second week in a row. We had to make a stop 

in Mountainair yesterday, which meant going out the other way to the highway...

 ...over the condemned bridge. The guardrail is almost gone, and it's just a matter of time

before somebody drives off the side.

Don't worry, Smooch. It won't be us.

Sunday leftovers

Before we begin with the week's leftovers, a great big thanks to all of you 

for your comments and appreciation of the videos I posted on Thursday and Friday. 

Lesson learned: next time I'm at a loss for blog fodder, just take the video camera out to the barn 

for a few minutes of "this is what goes on here."

 A gang of four has been in residence all week – these three
(two young males and a young female, judging by their horns)...

...under the close supervision of this big buck. 

Whatever he says goes, and when he says, "Run!"...

 ...they say, "How fast?"

 Then I yell out, "Junior!" And whichever one stops is Junior for the day.

I have no idea if any of them really is Junior, but I like to think whomever stops

and makes meaningful eye contact recognizes my voice and remembers me fondly.

 

When last we saw Mrs. Hughes, she was sitting atop a hidden stash of 26 eggs.

The little bugger hasn't laid a single egg since ... that I can find. You don't want to know

how many treasure hunts I've conducted in the front yard that have turned up empty.

 Lady Mary and Edith have resumed their egg-laying in one of the regular nesting boxes...

 ...when they're not busy doing other things.

The biggest event of the week ... ok, maybe the fall ... happened Friday. I hauled Hank and Lucy to the vet 

for their annual checkups. No matter how many times I make the trip, I still agonize over it 

as if the world is going to end, and it never gets any easier. But as usual, it was completely uneventful,
the x-rays of Hank's knee looked no worse than last year, and they both got gold stars for being
such cooperative patients. The bad news is that I have to do the trip all over again in a couple of weeks,
this time with George and Alan. The fun and excitement just never ends.

Sunday leftovers

 I put away the fly spray this past week, which means summer has officially ended at the 7MSN.

The grazing muzzles will probably stay on for another month, 

or until we have our first hard freeze and the grass dies off.

The tumbleweeds are particularly tasty this time of year, and 

they're the first things Alan and George aim for when I remove their muzzles.

Lucy prefers weeds to grass, as well. There's no accounting for taste.

The fall of 2012...

The fall of 2014. 

It's not just the grass that is happy; the difference in the cholla is startling.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to take pictures of my feral pocket cat.

 His favorite place to be is next to me.

Johnny: I know you're in there somewhere. I could see better if you'd wash the window.