The biggest double-yolk egg I’ve ever seen! Just as I suspected.
Chickens are sitting on eggs
Big Red has gotten broody and decided she wants to hatch some eggs. She has taken over the lower nest box in the coop, and has eight eggs under her! She is very serious about it all. I only know there are eight eggs because she gets off the nest once a day to go out and poo and have a drink and a snack, then comes right back and sits on them again. If I disturb her she fluffs up and hisses!
I have been told I need to mark the eggs with a pencil so I can tell if anyone slips an extra egg in there while she’s off the nest, because if the eggs don’t all hatch at once she’ll abandon the ones that don’t hatch once she has some chicks. Also after ten days I’m supposed to candle the eggs and get rid of the ones that don’t have a developing chick in them. She has to sit on them for 21 days, and if some of the eggs are bad, they will go really bad and explode and leak nasty goop on the other eggs which might kill the chicks.
Of course my friend Martha has new chicks every year because her hens sneak off and lay their eggs somewhere, hatch them, and come marching back with a whole flock of chicks following them. So obviously it’s not that difficult!
Her sister, Little Red, also got broody, but she kept moving from nestbox to nestbox. I had been taking the eggs away from her, but once it seemed like she was serious I gave her six eggs to sit on – I just slipped them under her skirts. At first she was hissing and fluffing up at me, but once she saw I was giving her eggs she started happily clucking and rolling them into position under her! I don’t know if she was letting the other hens bully her or what, but a couple days later she had moved to another box and let her eggs cool off. Unfortunately it won’t work if she only sits on the eggs for a day then switches to another box, once she starts sitting the eggs she can’t let them cool off for more than about a half hour when she gets off to take a break once a day. So I put her in this small coop. The nestbox is the dog crate, and the caged area has bedding and food and water. She is currently setting on golf balls in the crate, and if she continues to sit on them for another day I’ll remove the golf balls and replace them with some eggs. Chickens can’t tell golf balls from eggs. Close enough for them!
I took the eggs she had sat on for a couple days and cracked one open. You could see there was a little bit of development starting, just the ring on the yolk where you can tell the yolk is fertile had expanded a bit, but otherwise it just looked like a normal egg.
I am saving up the eggs I collect from the other hens by setting them in a carton on the shelf there in the shed next to the coop. Once I have six or eight I’ll slip them under Little Red in her new private nest box and see how she does sitting on them.
Big Bird thinks I am interfering with his hens too much! Back off! And get away from my coop!
Sleepy Barclay
Barclay played hard, then I gave him a pig ear to chew on, and shortly after I noticed he had fallen asleep with his pig ear safely clutched in his paws so Alki wouldn’t steal it from him 🙂
Ginormous egg!
One of my hens laid this HUGE egg! Here it is next to a regular large egg. Someone laid one almost that big a couple weeks ago and it was a double yolk egg. A friend said she was talking to folks about eggs and they didn’t believe there were double yolk eggs, because the machinery in modern factories kicks them out so it’s rare for people to see them anymore. But when I was a kid it was a big deal to be lucky enough to get a double yolk egg for breakfast!
Look at the size of this thing!
My broken Canon Powershot S2IS
I would show you a picture of it, but obviously I can’t.
Many of the best pictures I’ve taken have been done with my much-loved Canon Powershot S2 IS. It has been a wonderful camera for me, and a nice step up from the ‘point & shoot’ cameras, giving me control over exposures and ISO settings that I never had a chance to experiment with before.
But a couple weeks ago it started giving me a black screen intermittantly. So I thought my rechargable batteries weren’t up to the task anymore, and I decided to replace them. Yesterday I finally got them, installed, turned it on and …nothing. The black screen of death. I get an LCD where I can view the menu and settings, but no picture.
Fortunately I had run across many discussions of this on the net when I was researching the intermittant problem. Seems there’s a problem with the Canon S series which has to do with the optical assembly. Some people reported that canon was fixing the problem at no charge, so I contacted canon and they quickly replied that they only repaired the S1 for free, not the S2. That was going to cost me $130! This is annoying because it’s the same problem by description, and there’s many many people on the net discussing this problem with their S2, and many who managed to get it fixed for free, but canon still wants to get out of fixing it. I expect better when I spend $350 for a camera, even if it was three years ago. To me a known problem that effects a whole line of cameras is the company’s responsibility to fix.
But maybe all is not lost. Because while reading a discussion of this problem on flicker I found the following advice:
==I set the camera in TV mode, set the shutter at 15 sec, click to take a picture and during that 15 secs (like, after 7 seconds) I open the battery cover.. When the battery is inserted again the camera works and I can take pictures. Maybe it needs a little exercise.. If you don’t succeed the first time, just keep trying. It has worked for me, and it made me feel so relieved!===
Now, as a software engineer this sort of thing makes me cringe. How could that possibly ‘fix’ a bad optical assembly? However, since my camera was essentially a paperweight at this point I gave it a try…
And it worked. Ok, that annoys me even more than the camera not working in the first place. But actually it only sort-of worked, because now the camera is back to working intermittantly. So it works roughly every other time I turn it on.
I’m considering sending it to canon and just arguing with them about it until they fix it for free – that seems to be what has worked for other people. At this point I’m not prepared to spend $130 fixing it, or to spend hundreds on a new camera. I could buy a broken s2 on ebay with a different problem and attempt a repair myself (It can’t get any more broken than it already is).
How I wake up most mornings
He’s on my feet when we go to sleep, I don’t know when he ‘moves up’.
The comic book show
Several times a year we pack our toys and head out to do a show. Sometimes it’s a one day show, sometimes it’s a couple days. This past weekend it was the Emerald City ComicCon in Seattle. It’s a BIG show and it lasts all weekend. Lots of artists come to talk to the fans and sell drawings and push their new comic books. Celebrities, like actors from Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Serenity come to sign autographs and pose for pictures. And dealers, like us, set up tables and sell goodies to the fans. A fun (and profitable) time is had by all!
It is a lot of work to pack up our stuff and haul it 300 miles away, set up displays, and haul it all home when it’s over, but it’s worth doing, and it’s kind of fun too. We enjoy all the customers we get to meet face to face, since we are a mostly mail-order business. I particularly enjoy seeing the people who come in costume. It’s a lot of effort to come up with even the simplest costume, and I admire folks who put out the effort. Some of them show up in incredible detailed outfits. They don’t always pull it off perfectly, but if I can look at them and know what they were going for, I think they’ve done a good job! Oh and the T-shirts! It seems like every year I see about a dozen T-shirts I would LOVE to have, I always wonder where they find them. The net, of course. Here’s my favorite from this year click here
The other cool thing about the comic book show is just being completely immersed in this group of people who are so diverse, yet all share common interests. You see every kind of person at these shows, from families toting kids around to old folks, from extreme geeks to punks with green hair. Lots of tatoos and piercings as you might expect with people who are so into art and fantasy. These things all seem to go together. Plus we can chit chat about stuff like who’s going to be the new Doctor (Doctor Who) and we’re all on the same page. I think they always wonder if we just sell the toys or if we’re into it – we’re into it.
So it was a crazy weekend. Drove to Lacey, WA, dropped off the RV at the campsite, drove the rest of the way to Seattle. When we set up the booth it seemed like the toys would never all fit, but a few hours later the toys were on display and the extras were tucked underneith the tables. Then we drove back to Lacey (stopping for dinner along the way), and spent the night in the trailer. Why do we camp in Lacey when the show is in Seattle? Because there’s an Airstream club campground there that is only $18 a night, which is SO much cheaper than getting a hotel in Seattle, and we know the trailer is safe there all day while we’re working the show.
We got up at the crack of dawn the next morning and drove back to Seattle. Ran the booth all day and it was crazy how much stuff we sold – people were shoveling money at me so fast sometimes I didn’t even know what they were buying! Dave spent the day running around and restocking form the overstock we’d hidden under the table. By the end of the day the booth was picked clean of good stuff. So we headed back to Lacey, stopping for fast food along the way and eating on the road, picked up the trailer, and headed home. Got home about 11pm, dropped off the trailer, packed more toys for the show, got to bed about 1:30am and slept a few hours.
We got back up at 4, left the house by 5, back up to Seattle, loaded in the new toys, got everything displayed just in time for the doors to open. Ran the booth all day Sunday, not quite as busy as Saturday, but still busy all day long, I barely had a break to leave and go peek at the celebrities! Packed the van with the leftovers, and hit the road for home. Makes for a fun, profitable, but very busy weekend!
Many thanks to our friends who ran the retail store for us while we were gone, and our petsitter who takes care of the critters when we can’t be there!
Is it me, or is it a tree?
Kind of a funny story. Alki is very hard of hearing, to the point where you can stand right behind her and call her and she’ll slowly look around like she thought maybe she heard something (though she can still hear the clink of the cookie jar sometimes). Also she’s getting blind, so she’s never sure if she sees you or not until she’s good and close.
The other day Barclay and Mighty were playing in the pasture right outside the paddock, making a bit of noise, and Alki was in the yard, and she started wandering in their direction. I called her but she didn’t hear, so I followed her until I was right behind her, and called her name again – loudly. She heard me, and looked up, looked straight ahead (I was behind her) and got that look like, oh, I see you! And went trotting off into the pasture, heading for a small sequoia at the bottom of the field. I trotted after her. When she got to the tree she kind of squinted at it confused – wait, that’s not you? Then she looked around and saw me coming up behind her and got that happy look and ran wagging up to me – hey, there you are!
So now I’ve been mistaken for a sequoia.
Unexpected visitors
Today is our day off, the store was closed, and so we were out running errands this afternoon. We got home mid afternoon to find a message on our machine saying the alarm had gone off at the store half an hour before. So we pulled up the security camera to see if there was any activity there and saw this:
Yikes! Firemen in our store! Well, luckily we’re insured. Dave hopped in the car and headed down there while I called the alarm company. They were very good. They got the alarm activation and could hear voices in the store, and so they called the police just like they are supposed to. The police told them there was a fire incident in progress and that there were police there already.
By the time Dave got there everything was back to normal. The fire had been some minor thing in the store next door in our building, which luckily had NOT set off the sprinklers or caused any damage to our section. Whew – close call! Our store had been locked back up after the firemen investigated, and they did no damage to the door getting in because the landlord has a key. So all around an interesting end to the day, but luckily not a bad end!
Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick
I was playing with Barclay this morning with his favorite toy in the whole world, a tennis ball on a long rope tied to a stick – kind of like a giant version of a cat toy where you’d have a feather on a string on a stick. I swing the stick around and the ball bounces around and he chases it and leaps in the air, twisting and snatching it in mid air – it’s quite a show. He has incredible fast relexes, and how he calculates where to be to snatch it out of the air is amazing! When he catches it he’s so proud he brings it back to me all wiggly and happy 🙂
This morning we were playing right before I had to leave for work, and he had already made some pretty spectacular mid-air catches, when he jumped up and miscalculated and the ball thumped him right in the eye! Hard – I heard the ‘whump’ and knew that was a hard hit, coupled with a YIPE from him! He stopped and fell over and started pawing at his eye and rubbing it on the ground – poor puppy! I finally got a look at it and it looked ok, he just didn’t want to open it. So I scratched his neck to relax him and took him inside and he cuddled up next to me on the couch and licked my hand while I gave him a good rub to calm him down. Pretty soon he was squinting through it, and before I left for work he had it open again and everything looked pretty much normal. I don’t know if dogs get black eyes, but that hit certainly would have warrented it!
Poor pup, we’ll just have to be more careful. We can’t stop playing with the toy though, it’s his favorite, he even will go get it and drag it around the yard looking for a game. I’ll just try not to put his eye out!
Steff Does Stuff! 