Good Morning From the Cluckin' "A" for the last time!!!!!

We've Moved!! See all future blog posts at:

http://www.cluckinacritterfarm.blogspot.com 

OR

http://www.cluckinacritterfarm.com 

which has a link to the journal too.

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What a beautiful, chilly fall morning here on the Cluckin’ “A”

Don't forget to check our new blog at the following address:

http://www.cluckinacritterfarm.blogspot.com 

and our homepage at:

http://www.cluckinacritterfarm.com

 

This brisk fall morning is what it’s all about! That chill in the air seems to make you shiver a little as you try to wiggle and scrunch your neck down into the warmth of a long sleeved flannel shirt. You do that little shake from head to toe and hug yourself just before making the Brrrrrrrrr noise. Fall is here. A rejuvenator of the body, much like a jumper battery puts life back into that drained old car battery and readies it for running. A fall morning gets everyone cranked up and moving.

We are really looking forward to going to the Altamont Apple Festival today since we have virtually missed every other event except family stuff all summer long with building the barn. We now both want to do the fall events as they come along, because fall is Vick's and my favorite season. We love to see the Mums and other fall flowers, the pumpkins, gourds and Indian corn hanging on doors. I like the shocks of corn tied to porch pillars and railings too. The evening breeze rustling through the dry leaves in the trees makes me think of many past fall seasons because the chill, sound, smells and sights of fall are like opening a filing cabinet of your life.

Falling leaves now reveal the harvest moon behind them on the horizon, still giving you that funny feeling, taking you back to earlier years and previous memories that are embedded in your mind as you remember jumping into a pile of raked leaves or hiding to scare someone on a bright moon lit night. I can never actually remember each individual instance in those memories or which of my early years they occurred, but they come to me like a whirlwind of falling leaves in a huge gust of wind. If I sit momentarily to take in the fall beauty and draw in a huge whiff of the smells drifting with the wind, I ultimately find myself drifting away to earlier times and childhood adventures every time.

We can’t wait to get there………bundled in fall clothing, ready to walk, hand in hand, enjoying the day together……… stopping to see the vendors offerings and partake of the fall foods and goodies. I don’t care who you are…..if you are able to get around without a walker or wheelchair, you will feel years younger when you are at a fall festival with your loving spouse. If you are in a walker or wheelchair, I hope you have a loved one that will see to it that you get out to enjoy a beautiful fall day so you can see the sights, smell the smells and take that trip back to childhood memories and experience those wonderful seasonal feelings. If you have no one to get you out and you are in a wheelchair, email Vicki or me and we’ll see what we can do for you if it is at all possible.

AOL hometown is closing their doors & we’re MOVING!!

In fact, we’ve already moved and you’re all invited to come with us! The link you will need is as follows, so just click on it and when you get there, do a right click, look at the drop down list and choose “create shortcut” and you will have an icon on your desktop that will send you directly to our new blog site. It’s at: http://www.cluckinacritterfarm.blogspot.com/ Here we will continue to blog on a bi-daily basis as we have in the past to keep you informed about the farm, Vick and I, the critters, funny stuff and just about anything to lighten your day. The AOL hometown journals wasn’t really AOL anyway, so we could never get the hit counter to work to see how many people were viewing us and no one could fix it, so good riddance to them. I have also heard of many people who just had AOL for the journal space, so they are now going to seek service in another area and I understand how these people feel. We have been toiling over what to do ever since we got word that our journal was closing and we needed to find another avenue to continue our daily blog. We have been told that people that read it get hooked and look forward to reading it and wish we would post on it several times a day. Sometimes, we can’t even come up with enough to write about to post twice a day, but we still try to. Anyway, make a shortcut to our new home or visit us daily at http://www.cluckinacritterfarm.com and catch the journal link from there on the home page. We’re a waitin’…………

AOL Sucks

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Friday, Oct. 3rd… The site is resurrected and updateable now……

This morning after sending all the critters to the freezing outside elements, (where they seem happy) I zipped back into the house to work out the problems of our websites and recovering the ISP data needed to do uploading to the internet...... AND sip nice, hot, coffee in the process. It is not exactly cold outside…just the coolness of the fall chill we love. It defines the autumn season, when we see pumpkins, goblins and ghosts, and ripe apples, apple cider, hayrides, colored leaves and the smell of wood smoke.

I think it is my favorite time of the year because it reminds me and transforms me back to a young teenager, walking the street with an old girlfriend, as we watched kids torment “Big Bob” Treaster, the local elementary school principal on Halloween Eve. Oh...... how they waxed and soaped his windows and oh, how he scared the bejesus out of us all when he came out and ripped off a shot from his shotgun…… and how we were further scared when we heard the bb’s falling all around us and felt  them bounce off of our heads! (I later recollected that he probably shot straight up in the air and the bb’s fell back down to bounce off of the tops of our heads, but who thinks that clearly right after a gun blast and you‘re 14 or less?) I remember him getting into trouble for "shooting at kids". (either that night or a later incident) I also remember back then of the little kids passing us as they hurried from house to house trying to get as many stops in as they could before the allotted time elapsed in that one evening of Halloweening back then. Everyone halloweened on the same night in those years…… Halloween Eve only…… never more than that and you usually only had time to terrorize your own neighborhood before it was over for the year.

I remember one year when I was 12 years old and a bunch of us kids were harassing old man Crownover by sneaking under his garden fence to get tomatoes to throw at passing cars. He would hear us giggling and rummaging through the rotted tomatoes and come out with a long stick and chase us out of the garden, almost catching us as we slid under the fence. We would wait a little while and try again only to be met with another capture attempt. Well, we knew of a neighbor that had a dummy in his garden, so we “Borrowed” it and stuck it in the opening under the fence and then made a ruckus beside the fence, then ran a short distance to hunker down and watch the fun. Old man Crownover came sneaking around the corner of the house as usual, and we started yelling “come on Tim hurry he’s coming……COME ON!”. Old man Crownover saw the “boy” under the fence and he started hollering and running. He grabbed the dummy and yanked it out from under the fence, shook it and laid it over his knee and proceeded to whip the tar out of the dummy with a stick. This of course was immediately met with our uncontrollable laughter and the “everlasting chant” that was probably verbally cast out by all the kids as they rode past old Man Crownover’s house….

”WHO cuffed the dummy, who cuffed the dummy, nah nah na nah nah?”

I suppose this was an embarrassment he bore until the time of his passing........ but remained undoubtedly, very funny and an affectionate memory of the gruff old man who probably was only doing what was expected of an elementary principle. I was told some time later that he was a very nice old fellow, but acted this way because everyone expected that from him. Even more affectionate was the memory after that.

Oh to be young again! You know what? We can all be young again if we just close our eyes and allow our memories to revert back to a time in our youth that we enjoyed……… and then open our eyes when we’ve had enough and remember that we don’t have to go through all of the undesirable crap we had to endure back then by doing it this way. This is exactly why I love fall so much…… because it brings back all these memories that transport me back to enjoyable times in my life.

Thurs. eve, Oct 2nd… These days need more hours in them!

We just got back from dinner in Coxsackie at 10:30. Had pizza at Paul’s!!! It’s been a while since we’ve had a pizza there and since we finished late in the barn, we figured it was time.

Today we finished the panels on the chicken side of the barn AND……… now it is finished! Every opening is closed, keeping the cold night air out and you can tell the difference. It is actually cozy and warmer in there than it is outside…… by 10 degrees, easy, which tells me we aren’t going to have as hard a time keeping the animals warm in there this winter as I thought.

We installed a light high up near the ceiling to create lots of light in the chicken coop, have the two lights centered in the entryway and two receptacles installed…… one for the bunnies and one for the chickens radio. We need to install the motion controlled light on the corner so when you go to or come from the barn, the light turns on shining on the barn entry and toward the house. Then we want two small carriage lights on the poles out front on a dusk to dawn switch controlling them and one at the rear of the barn.

Vick wants a large goose neck light like they had years ago, high up on the front eve controlled somehow. We’ll figure that out when the time comes. Below are the pictures of the inside of the lighted up barn.

Beyond the birds you can see where we placed the plywood panels.

The nesting boxes get a lot of use.

Just like a sporting event.....Room left at floor level only. Everybody wants the top seats.

The other side panels above the chickens. It's warm in there now.

A better view of the panels we added today.

Front entry door of the barn.

The feed room in use. Twenty bags of chicken feed.

 

More feed and supplies

Pine shavings for the chicken coop.

Looking at the rear entry door.

Bye, Bye

 

Thurs. Oct 2nd… Running, Running, Running…getting nowhere!!!!

I got up late today, made coffee and turned all the critter loose this morning and haven’t gotten anything done yet. I initially got an email about the grandson and his projects at Adelphi University where he is doing a thing on Brest Cancer awareness. Adelphi uses a program that doesn’t allow you to save the pictures in the gallery, so I worked on that all morning and hunting data to reload for editing our web pages and some others. I still haven’t found where I put the data, but I did capture the Adelphi pictures. Now I am going to make a phone call and then we will be on our way to working in the barn or running for parts.

We will do a more expansive blog this evening with updated pictures. What a week this has been! But we love Fall!!!!!

   Bye, Bye

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Wed. Oct 1st… AOL really sucks at times…… Like now!!

We have just received notice that at the end of this month, AOL is going to dump all of the blogs on it’s community page. Probably because all these blogs are free. You can bet your butt that something will rear it’s ugly head to replace it shortly after they do away with this free site, but you will be required to pay monthly for it. Many people have said that this is the only reason they ever kept AOL service and they will now cancel their AOL account and go to another ISP with less bells and whistles or problems. I think it’s a crock. Our sign has this http address on it and all of our blog followers know it. (even though they will follow us to the new ISP site) Perhaps I will get the software for a nice blog page & publish it on http://www.cluckingacritterfarm.com which is our huge domain anyway. I’ll be checking on what we need to do to get away from leeches like AOL anyway.

The stock market still sucks (basically) and I’m sure some greedy investors have become overnight millionaires at everyone else’s expense, as this thing continues to unfold. I still say it was driven down this road, like a car, by shrewd people… that create a public scare, causing people to quickly sell stocks all at once, driving prices of every stock down…… then they grab it up for pennies and make billions of dollars as the prices stabilize and the market recovers as the scare dies off. Thanks to these guys, in the end, we will all pay for the losses in a multitude of ways.

Today, all the chickens from the original hen house are free ranging again and the ducks are running around with the turkeys and everyone looks better and back, close to normal. We will determine whether or not to continue the antibiotic treatments today or not. We will go out among them and observe their behaviors to decide. The clutch of eggs out in the new barn is now, two nests with at least 10 eggs each. We need to adjust this to a manageable size today and take the rest of the collected eggs to hatch in the incubator in the basement. We can then introduce the newborn chicks to the original broods for the hen to watch and raise. In the next two days while the antibiotic leaves their system. We will mark all the eggs present with blue food coloring, then we will know the clear eggs from the old eggs from the hatching clutches. It should be interesting. The two hens in the new chicken house (in the barn) are doing an excellent job of nesting. I haven’t seen these eggs uncovered yet! They are constantly sitting on them. As soon as the original hen leaves the nest to eat or drink, another hen jumps on the clutch, fluffs up and nestles in on them until the hen returns and chases them off. It’s cool to watch them.

Today Vicki and I will both work on the barn, doing a door upstairs, panels outside the chicken room, plywood panels on the office wall partition, then electrical lights and receptacles. We’ll finish this thing yet!!!!! We’re close now……… and lovin’ it!

We are not going to pass up any fall activities we find out about to work in the barn now, since we are this close to being done.

Bye, Bye

Tues. Sept 30th… Over the mountain beyond the ski slope… to Grandmothers house we go……sings Katie!!!

All afternoon, Aunt Vicki and Katie worked on her school project dealing with chickens and their feathers. She needed at least ten species of chickens pictures, their species name and family. They are going to place a feather from each chicken on a page in a book with the chickens picture and their genus and species or the scientific name. There will be ten or more different chickens on individual pages. Seems to be going above and beyond on this project, so she should nail down an “A” for it. It is really interesting.

I spent the day in the barn running lights from a newly installed electrical panel. Tomorrow I will run a few receptacles at the bunnies and chickens and maybe install a light in the feed room.

Soon we will gather all of Katie’s homework, her and our things and us, then head for the mountains. Tonight is going to be roast turkey night at Katie’s house. Yum….Yum!!

OOOOOh…..by the way…… don’t let wall streets sudden surge in stocks rattle you. Remember I said there are some greedy bastards doing things to set themselves up to get rich? Well the sudden buying is them buying penny stocks by the thousands after scaring hell out of less informed stockholders, causing them to dump and run, losing their respective asses. Now these greedy shits buy it up for nothing…..and lots of it and sell it tomorrow when it begins to recover on the market. There is evidence of some 1,000% gains doing this making millions!! (But you better be brave and stay on top of it. One false move and you’ll have only pennies! If you’re lucky…

Sit tight and be conservative. Don’t buy anything right now. Bye-Bye

Tues. Sept 30th… Stocks drop… birds sick… worry, worry, worry!!!!

Each and every day is a new chapter in life! Stocks tumble, causing everyone to loose grip on reality. If you have stock, sit on your hands and do nothing right now. Now is the very worst time to dump unless you wish to experience the financial success of the 1929 stock market crash! Everyone needs to just hold on and weather the storm. Keep you nest egg protected by making sure your stock broker is invested in FDIC insured accounts or gold and silver, which are stable commodities that will always be of value. You positively don’t want to run wild right now, based on Wachovia’s being bought out by Citigroup because these guys feed upon one another in times such as these. One makes a bad decision, they crash and are acquired by another. It will all settle out with the dust after the panic quiets down. There are many places being taken over by another right now and this is basically a result of greed and market trader panic. Things are bad… no doubt about it, but not nearly as bad as the conditions in 1929’s crash. Unemployment then soared at 40% and we are still in the single digits. Banks are still dispensing money from the ATM’s and open for business signs are still in small business windows. SIT TIGHT!

The last thing you want to do is dump and run, as many have done, which adds to the problems already there. Every time something like this happens and an investor gets a little panicky, the removal of your money from, where ever it was invested in the economy, now leaves a void that must be filled by other's money. Enough of this kind of voids and you have exactly what we are experiencing. The blame lies with the greedy bastards on wall street…… they very ones begging for more money……. And don’t think that there aren’t a lot of greedy bastards that are now orchestrating a "set up" for them selves to make a killing over this, so sit tight. Unless you are a “Jim Cramer” or a “stock market genius”, don’t do anything. Put your trust in the broker that has been managing your money and doing a good job in the past. If you dabble in the market, perhaps you should seek out a good broker now, that knows when his butt is nearing hot water, because it is close my friend. There will, at least, continue to be a recession (which we are now and have been in) greater than the 1980 fiasco, but if someone doesn’t do something soon, there will be a depression with business closings, job loss and bank buy outs with locked accounts if not bank failures that will parallel the 1930’s disaster. If the right thing is done…… all this will be averted and stocks will appreciate and rebound. It always happens!! Just sit tight!! If you pull now and run and you’ll never recover your losses. Something needs done NOW, but not by us at the lower levels!

This morning I again went to the chicken house and checked the flocks, which looked good. Everyone seemed to be holding their own, but when I went to the brooding house, sadly, I found Tara (the turkey) had died during the night. The others in there seem to be coughing occasionally, but none seem to gurgle when they breath. We are still treating them with the antibiotic and holding all their eggs, which we will do for about 4 or 5 days. In these days, we are pulling all eggs and putting them under two layers that want to "perk" a clutch of eggs, so we will have more young peeps to replace the ones we lost. The little ones should be ok in the barn this fall season. Anyway, when this bout with colds are over, we will wait for two days so the antibiotic can clear from the birds system and then start pulling the unmarked eggs from the houses and begin selling again, leaving the marked ones to be hatched.

Katie, our niece, stayed over last night for the first time since we have moved up here and is lounging around this morning watching TV and fussing with the dogs. We will take her home later today and have dinner with the family again this evening.

Last night at 11:30, when we returned home, we all went to check the animals, gave them food or water if needed and Katie played with the bunny babies. They are getting big and we will need to make a new wire cage to separate them from their momma’s so we can put the does back in with the bucks for awhile to have more babies later. The circle of life, ya know…………

Beautiful fog across the fall mountain near Lexington

Crossing the Gilboa-Shandaken water tunnel vents

A mountain meadow boasting fall surroundings

Same area looking toward Westkill

How beautiful the foilage and fog on the mountains

Near Jennings Hill Road and Vick's parents & brother's house

Katie-Q, our niece....

Monday, Sept 29th… Tomorrows the last day and today is lookin GOOD!!!!!!

Tomorrow is the last day of the month and even though we officially entered fall or autumn on Sept. 22nd, it never quite feels like autumn until October traditionally ushers it in. October is always when you think of fall hay rides, pumpkins, Halloween and such, but it also makes me think of falling leaves, the approach of Thanksgiving and then winter. Oh, how the seasons do fly, much as a marble rolling downhill on a smooth surface.........the way it gains speed as it goes further and faster. Such are our lives……… Everything goes faster as you get older. Every year, although they still remain 365 days long, they seem to become shorter in length, as do the hours in a day when you are trying to get things done on a schedule. We need to all revert back to the days when we were in grade school and each summer was a lifetime long. How was it possible to cram so much laughing, fun and living into three short months, yet I can’t seem to do half that much in 12 months? It seems I never get started on something I want to do, before I encounter a disaster which needs to be addressed, which takes the entire day to resolve. Then, after looking back, it seems I should have been able to do that and much more in that amount of time, but it never works that way. I guess we get caught up in procrastinatory thoughts of dealing with things we are really unsure of, then spend more time thinking through different optional avenues that we may use to resolve them. Perhaps we have lost that youthful disregard of fear in our decision making process, as we perfected our though process.  You know of course, that was usually absent in our youthful decision making. Anyway, my point is that life is passing us all by as we search and labor over the problems in our lives. After we are dead and gone, no one will remember our problems, nor will they even remember most of us, so I think we had better wise up and live our lives to the fullest.

This coming month, go to a Halloween function and laugh….eat some fall pastries…… go to the Oktoberfest activities near you and take a little day trip with the family to somewhere out of your area and eat a meal there...... and spend the day! Explore a new town somewhere by walking their streets and windowshopping while holding your spouses hand.  Live the fall months and enjoy them before you are trapped in your house with the snow blowing. (what a mistake that is when there are so many wintertime places and fun things to visit and do too)

Today, we are going to work in the barn a little, because the chickens all seem to be holding their own. The five in the brooding house seem better and are moving around and wanting out, but I didn’t turn anyone out because we are planning to go to Vick’s parents & brothers house for dinner and a visit, so we’ll work on the barn this morning & leave for Lexington at 5:00 this afternoon.

Bye, Bye

Sunday Sept. 28th… What to do…What to do… SICK Chickens!!!!

Again, we have suffered another blow to the starting of the farm’s chicken flock. We now have chickens that sneeze and cough, are shaking their heads and have a gurgling noise when they breath. We noticed four yesterday, and quarantined them, but before the day was out, We found another one. Anyway, the five that we quarantined and treated with Terramycin powder, added to their drinking water, seemed to improve, but it said on the instructions that we should see results in 24 to 48 hours. That was only last evening, so it has only been about 19 hours now, so are we safe or will it get worse? Who knows!! Vicki is now cutting up garlic to add to their scratch feed, which is supposed to help with colds. They were all ok until they stayed out in the rain all day Friday. We have checked on the internet and it seems that other people have had the same problems and we have been doing what they recommend to treat them. All we can do is treat the entire flock of chickens, ducks and turkeys (one turkey is sick too) with the Terramycin and hope for the best. We cannot collect and sell the eggs during the time we are treating them with the antibiotic powder, so we will mark all these eggs and place them under the layers to hatch them and have little ones. By marking them, we will know which eggs are treated eggs and after two solid days of no chicken antibiotics, we can then start pulling eggs to sell again, leaving the marked eggs for them to hatch. Obviously, egg sales will cease as soon as the eggs in the refrigerator are gone and will not resume until two days after we quit treating birds. Boy oh boy……. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. We don’t need this kind of luck! It has been tough enough getting the farm established and going. Hoping for better news tomorrow. Stay tuned…

We might try to work in the dark, in the barn this evening after dinner. It’s not a bad thing to do, as it’s inside and we have temporary lights to work by. Who knows…… maybe we’ll just hang it up until tomorrow. This chicken problem has made us weary, trying to deal with it all day….watching birds, moving them to isolation and scouring the internet for information. We’ll see.

Bye, Bye

 

 

Sat Eve, Sept 27th… More and more chicken dilemmas!!!!!

Well, we didn’t get anything done in the barn today. I went out this morning late…… after blogging and writing a little more in my book and I found a dead chicken laying on the floor under the perch roost. I then remembered the day before, when I opened the door, that the first chicken out had sneezed twice. Now I had never heard a chicken sneeze before, so I didn’t realize there was a problem. Thank God I have Vicki around to rely on, because she is the “If I have one…..I’ll read all about it” lady. She reads “Back Yard Poultry” magazine and anything else she can find on the internet about anything that has to do with our chickens or ducks and turkeys. I forgot to tell her until later in the afternoon when I heard one of the chicken breathing like there was fluid in their lungs. They actually bubbled when they breathed. She decided we needed to immediately go to Agway, where we picked up pine chips and a powdered antibiotic which you add to their water. Now we cannot collect their eggs, because we chose to not only treat the four or five we quarantined into the brooding house, we treated all the birds in the old hen house. That way if it is something catching, all the birds are on it earlier. We will mark their eggs and place them under the sitting hen in the other barn and let her hatch them since she won’t get off of her nest out there. We will keep the chickens on the medicine and collect and mark the eggs for 4 or 5 days, then give it a good two days for them to clear the antibiotic out of their bodies before we will sell their eggs again. We’re hoping to see a marked improvement in the 4 or 5 tomorrow or maybe the next day if they can stay alive until then. If that is the case, we hope the rest we have started on the medicine, get a better starting chance. We spent the day cleaning out the chicken house and spraying it down. Stay tuned for the outcome………

Bye,Bye

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Sat Sept. 27th… Sit up and Take Notice Folks… BAN Chinese Imports!

Again, how many people must die before we get wise and stop importation of anything known to originate in China! Buy all your farm products needed for your business from our own guaranteed, safe, American farmers!!!!!!!

Now read this anywhere on the web, but we told you about it twice since our original blog of Sept 15th.... It has only become a widening horror story for the Chinese infants.

The Milk Scandal is becoming worse and ever widening since Chinese milk suppliers were found to be adding melamine to watered-down milk to boost its apparent protein content. The chemical, which is high in nitrogen, can fool tests aimed at verifying protein levels. The compromised dairy products are blamed for sickening 54,000 children. Now it has spread to anything made with Chinese whole milk powder and can be found anywhere in the world as these ingredients are purchased in bulk from China for a song and dance by world wide snack producers using chocolate or icings etc. Take Kraft’s statement that none of their Oreo-based products contain any milk powder from China, this statement apparently sent out immediately after emails about the Oreo icing containing such tainted Chinese powders.

READ MY LIPS!!! (in print) They are fooling the testing methods in China that insures quality milk now! The poison they are using to do this is telling the test results that the protein is there, thus making it good quality milk. It does not identify the poison as such! Who can be sure of anything from China. We have suffered many recalls from the past killing children and pets in our country.  

Being safe and careful is great and everyone should remain so, but does it ever occur to anyone that while you take care in what you purchase in the supermarket, are you so sure about what you get at a restaurant? Chinese restaurants, (which we frequent quite regularly, use food and preparations imported from Chinese companies over seas. Now I’m not saying anyone here in the United States is using something they know is tainted and I have a very high regard for the Chinese and Japanese working people and business owners for trying to provide high quality food and service at their establishments, but…… as you do not really know what is in what you buy from American producers in the supermarkets, (due to imported spices and fillers in their products) neither do the honest, conscientious, Asian restaurants.

This is why I think we should immediately ban any importation of a food product with a known origin in China. Surely some things will slip through the cracks by originating in China and flowing into another “Who Cares Country”, then on to us in their prepared products, but it will reduce our exposure greatly. Let them kill themselves or deal with it in their own country. No foreign country likes the American people anymore anyway, so we better start looking out for ourselves! As I’ve said before, Bring our troops home and use all the foreign aid money to make ourselves safe by paying our service men to protect the United States borders and keep illegal immigrants out. Build up our military defenses to thwart any outside country’s attack of us and finally feed and cloth our own people and deal with crime and corruption here.

                                                 

Today, I think we will work on the barn things still needing done. We have two panels to install in the chicken run area to close off the cold air of the fall evenings and lights and stuff to install. There are a host of little things that will finish off the barn and make it as we have dreamed it would be from long before we started placing foundation stakes in the still frozen ground last spring. It is not such a big deal anymore, because we can stay inside a closed building and work where there is no rain or cold wind…… enjoying the same protection from the weather for us, that we have afforded the animals, for the coming winter. We need to do a little plywood installation on the office wall upstairs and mount the glass paneled door too. The nice thing is that we are almost done with the barn and can now relax to enjoy life a little more than we have since last spring when we committed to doing the barn ourselves.

Bye, Bye

Friday Eve, Sept 26th… Lost in the ordeal of living my life………

Again, I missed blogging this morning. I wrote all morning long, trying to finish my book, “An Uncommon Journey”, which is basically a biography type book that I will publish soon. It is in the final stages and I will be ready for a second writing soon. This book is a story of two people who’s lives seemed like they were over, Vicki’s due to the death of Carl, her husband of many years and mine as a result of a lousy marriage of many years. It details the amazing journey we both made through difficult times and how we became as one combined and enjoying our life’s dream of living on a farm and raising animals and enjoying nature and God’s bounty everyday. I got so enthralled in writing this morning that I truly didn’t realize that throughout all the writing I had done between getting up for coffee and toast, I hadn’t done the blog. I’m still amazed that I didn’t. Anyway….. We just got home from Vick’s parents and brother’s house where we enjoyed the evening and dinner. Tomorrow we are going to see Audrey and her husband Alfredo, who is in a rehab after a fall down a flight of stairs in a restaurant this week. He had fractured his pelvis and has been in the hospital and now the rehab since he fell, so we will be going to see him down at Monticello, which is where the rehab is. Again, I will plug an address into the GPS unit and away we’ll go, putting our faith and car in the hands of the NASA people with their bright, shiny, satellite and the little, electronic genius in the box, on the dash, that tells us to turn left in ½ mile.

We didn’t do anything in the barn today except feed the critters and tomorrow we will not do any more than that before we leave. Sunday, we’ll work in the barn. Maybe………if we feel like it.

Bye, Bye

Thurs. Eve Sept. 25th… Hey there, Hi there, Ho there you’re as welcome as can be.

Makes me think of the Mickey Mouse Club from back in the early 60‘s. Well, we’re about as happy go lucky as that and just want to live and laugh and have a good time. We advocate everyone doing what you want to do in your life and being happy. Joseph Campbell talks about finding bliss in your life and that to find that bliss, (or happiness with life) you must find what makes you happy and have the guts to follow. It’s like having the guts to do what makes you happy, whether it’s your job, where you live or how you live and he is correct. Too many people do what their parents or a guidance councilor say they should do…… “This field is where the money is“… “If you do this you’ll like it“… “If I were you I’d try to get a job doing this. The pay is great.”…… “Do this and once you climb the ladder of success, you’ll be glad I told you this!” All too many people make these decisions based on what others say and then are never happy. Once they climb to the top of the ladder they find that they put their ladder against the wrong wall and they hate it. Follow your bliss toward the things you like doing. Money cannot buy happiness, nor can it buy you love. Make sure to follow your bliss and when you find love……….. love of your work…… love of your mate…………. love of your home, and all these loves in your life, you will know you have found your true bliss and will live an extremely full and happy life. Miss your bliss and you’ll never be satisfied with anything in life. I once wondered why I was born and what my purpose was to be living……… what was I to do…… what was the meaning of life. I had a lousy marriage, was very successful in my job, had climbed to the top of my career ladder and was making more money than I had ever thought possible for me in the area I lived, but I was not happy…… I had nothing, though I had everything. My ladder was against the wrong wall…… Hell! My ladder wasn’t even against the right house. I realized this and after much thought and consideration, I made plans to change my life…… to retire and follow my bliss, even though I didn’t know where it was, but I knew it wasn’t where I was and who I was with. I planned to retire and move to another place to live, then I met Vicki. Much happened to me and much happened to her in the following year and a half. Her husband died of cancer andI had moved the December before that. Time past for both of us and one day we met again….. And we knew…… this is where we were meant to be. And here we are today. Very much in love and happy on the Cluckin’ “A” Critter Farm.

Speaking of which…… Last night Vicki took her rings off and sometime during the night, must have knocked them onto the floor. Today when she got up, there was only one ring to be found. We assume the other ring, the engagement ring I got her…… is now in the tummy of Casey Mae the “Little Black Devil” Vicki’s wages for the mistake now takes her to the doggie exercise yard where all the pooping is done and she is now monitoring poop piles, Looking for the missing ring. We are hoping it turns up among the many prizes she found today, such as chunks of plastic, (which I think is remains of the shock collar battery), complete socks, pieces of underwear and wood, pebbles and fuzz balls. Casey Mae is like a biological vacuum cleaner with a flapping tongue.

We finished the rear door trim and battens today and the weather roof over the back. Everything is really starting to look finished now and I’m pleased with our building……..both design and how it turned out. Tomorrow is to be rainy all day long, so we will do the plywood panels which are inside under the roof. Today’s work was all outside.

The weather roof turned out nice.

All the battens are in place.... no more cracks.

Door at far end is to feed room, the stairs to loft and near door is the chicken door. Looks good eh?

Once again, the panels we did last evening.

These are the ones we'll do tomorrow in the rain.

As you can see.....the panels won't go all the way across. Some is blocked off over the feed room.

Chickens and Guinea fowl. The Guineas are ugly birds and loud as can be.

 

Gak, Gak, Gak, Gak, all day long. That's all they do....Gak, Gak.....

 

We took a break..... looking out across the serene Pupskill with the ducks swimming carelessly.

Timmy Turkey is on duty 24/7 protecting EVERYTHING.

And that's the way was here on the Cluckin' "A" today!!

  Bye, Bye !!