Cautious mommy, nasty birds, safe at home

For being only a four-day week this week has seemed to be long. There is not any rationale for that. It is just what seems to be true.

Tilly is a good mommy to her seven little ones. So much so, that she will not tolerate Mama handling the babies in any way. It brings back memories of a sow we had in West Virginia that caught me by the pants as I was trying to escape her attack and ripped the back pocket off my jeans. I was in the pen to get a dead piglet she had laid on and smothered. I did get the little body out of the pen but she got me back. We took her to market a few weeks later. Tilly is not so mean as that, I hope. She is a lot smaller than that sow but even with her tiny stature she could inflict some harm if she chose to do so. Maybe we will get her calmed down in the weeks to come. For now, the babies are doing fine so we will let her tend to then – all by herself. Neither Mama nor I move quickly enough anymore to avoid harm if she intended to hurt us.

Every time we get a batch of chicks I am amazed at how messy they are. I think there is something in the crumbled feed that causes the maggots to grow in the droppings below the cage. I should be used to the site as many times as we have raised a new batch of chickens, but it still makes me wonder how such a filthy bird could taste so good. Anyway, Mama and I have a lot of such mess to clean up this afternoon. At some point, Mama will take the not so little ones out of the cage and allow them to have freedom in the side of the coop where we now have them in the cage. I am not certain how that will work out but I am willing to go along with the idea. The twenty-one of them are very rapidly outgrowing the large cage Mama has them in. About five weeks from now all the roosters will be dressed for a future dinner date. The hens will live to lay eggs and become Mama’s pets. Poor, tasty roosters.

Maggie, Aaron and the kids arrived safely in North Carolina. They will have to live in a hotel for the next several days while their apartment is being prepared for them. It is a third-floor apartment in a very nice complex, I am told. If I have to live in an apartment again I would want the top floor also but that will not happen unless there is an elevator. Mama does not do stairs. Going down is particularly hard on her knees. It might be a chore at times to get up to the door for Maggie and the kids but for the time spent living in the space it is generally better to be on the top floor. When we lived in the apartments in New Jersey we had one little bitty woman who lived above us who, when she crossed the floor of her apartment (our ceiling), sounded like she weighted three hundred pounds. When she got her heels on it sounded like a jack hammer on the ceiling. Fortunately, either we moved or she did fairly quickly. It was quite disturbing at times – especially when I was sleeping through the days because of working night shifts.

The Lord has been good to me and Mama so we have almost always had a house of our own. No competing for parking. No trying to sleep while your neighbor’s party was still going at 2 a.m. No wondering if the guy you see around the complex is as weird as he looks. But there are limitations to having our own house. We do not have access to a gym or a pool or any other of the amenities available in most apartment complexes. We have to tend to the property – lawncare, maintenance, taxes and insurance, etc. There are pros and cons to both and Maggie and Aaron may not be there for more than a few years which makes buying a house a toss-up financially. Hopefully they will find a place they like and stay there like they did in Alaska. Unlike Chase and Makaila who have had seven addresses in three years. Not that that it bad if each move is a step up.

They are just professional house sitters – sort of.