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