Archive for April, 2010

April 29th, 2010

The Early Birds

You know what they say about early birds!
We set eggs three weeks ago tomorrow evening, but already two little chicks have hatched and many more are on their way.  One was even already dried off by the time I came home.  Fortunately, a second hatched in the evening, so they can keep each other company [...]

People can say what they want about Thor’s crooked ram horns, or his gentle nature, or his other oddities, but they can’t say that Thor isn’t a fighter.  Amazingly, Thor is on the mend again.  After two near death bouts with illness, he is showing a lot of improvement.  This afternoon he started eating again [...]

April 27th, 2010

Update on Thor

I posted last week that our Icelandic ram Thor was very sick and how he made a miraculous recovery.  I may have spoken too soon.  Yesterday, Thor started to have breathing trouble again.  I started the antibiotics in hopes that they would do their magic and Thor would bounce back to full activity.  As of [...]

I’ve already told you about the pigs’ inclination towards food, the blissful state of being it puts them in and of the great lengths that Finn will go to break into stock piles of it.  Well, they’re at it again.
The sheep food sat high up, stacked upon another feed bucket.  Both buckets sat meticulously in [...]

April 23rd, 2010

Bad Ezekiel!

Ezekiel the rooster has been bad.  As with many roosters, Ezekiel has taken to attacking everything that he feels is a threat to his harem of hens.  Although he rarely hurts a person in his attacks, it is a startling experience to have a large bird flying at you with his claws.  Humans are normally [...]

Sometimes the pigs like to use the chicken water fountain as a scratching post:

It is not entirely stable:
Poor, poor Finn.

April 20th, 2010

Poor, Sick Thor

This past weekend was a stressful one.  Thor, our Icelandic Ram, became very ill.
It all started several weeks ago.  He had a runny nose.  I first dismissed it as a gross ram thing, but then started to speculate that something more was wrong.  With the high pollen count in the area this spring, I suspected [...]

April 19th, 2010

Pet Pigs in Wartime

Rare is the war story whose target audience is children.  Rarer still is the children’s war story that is told effectively.  From the get-go, such stories provide so many inherent challenges that writers have a lot of reasons to avoid writing them.  War stories for children run the risk of being too sugarcoated to be [...]

April 15th, 2010

Speaking of Shearing,

How would you like to sport one of these?  Kit’s comment to me on them during my conversation with her the other day: “Vulgar, classless, and a  waste of our top-quality Icelandic wool.”  We’ll let you decide.

April 14th, 2010

Woman Shorn

“The winds of change are at first a breeze and then a whirlwind,” Kit pronounced quietly, but forcefully, with the dignity of a queen who had been exiled, but expected a prompt re-enthronement from a fate sympathetic to her plight.  She was confident, but worn down, wearing this fatigue on her tired face.  Not the [...]