Sadly, a very important member of the family is no longer with us. Apart from the postman, Mika was everybody and everything’s best friend.
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It turns out I was wrong about the annual day of snow, as we had some proper snow today complete with snowballs and a snowman. Only the chickens failed to get into the spirit of things, refusing to come out of their house.
If the image looks odd, it’s a result of me inexpertly playing with multiple exposures to create an HDR image using qtpfsgui.
Wind is probably my least favourite kind of weather, and moreso when we’ve had what seems to be weeks of it. What’s normally an easy journey up and down the A1 on Friday was made a lot less pleasant by various obstacles in the way, ranging from lorries lying on their sides to bits of signage that had become detached and blown into the road.
We must have done something bad because someone or something has decided to unleash a plague of vermin on our garden.
Despite the sudden explosion of techy posts on here, life in the real world goes on. The highlight in recent weeks was my sister’s wedding, which was a brilliant day. Mia, in particular, enjoyed it immensely, singing away to herself throughout the service. Afterwards she played the church organ and followed that up with running round and round the outside of the church at high speed with me in tow. You might think that would tire her out, but she later spend a solid four hours on the dancefloor at the reception.
Two quick snippets of unrelated randomness:
1. The things that were recently tasty eggs are now cute chicks, as of last Sunday, hence the picture. Only two though – one yellow, one black. The majority weren’t even fertile this time around, so perhaps Fred is losing his touch.
2. I was planning to go to bed two hours ago, then I started playing with Mnesia, which is Erlang’s distributed database. Very interesting indeed, but I need to stop doing it immediately and go to sleep instead.
Yesterday our ducks migrated to a pond a few miles away, not on the wing but in the back seat of a Mercedes. Only the best for our ducks. Needless to say, they took to the water like….erm… Anyway:
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They settled in well and soon joined the rest of the ducks on the pond, but I suspect that despite the safety advice I gave them before we left, they will be returning home to us in due course – riddled with bullets and oven-ready. In the meantime, the young chickens are over the moon about not having to share their shed at night.
Having been abandoned for the evening, I was feeling rather peckish, and all we had in were eggs, so I decided to poach a couple. The eggs in question are earmarked to go into the incubator tomorrow, and should emerge as cute baby chicks in exactly three weeks.
For some reason, it felt rather odd eating these eggs, compared to ‘normal’ eggs. This was doubly strange, considering that I ultimately intend to eat them anyway when they become big fat chickens.
As an aside, something else that’s odd is that pretty much everybody who discovers that we intend to eat our happy and healthy chickens expresses their horror with a “how could you?” and then zips off down to Tesco to purchase a tortured beast that is frankly lucky to be dead, having spent its ‘life’ in a dark cage.
Anyway, back to my ‘point’ (there isn’t really one of course) – a vegan wouldn’t eat the egg no matter what, that seems pretty straightforward, but I believe that a vegetarian would eat an egg. However, at some point during the next three weeks, it will magically turn into something they wouldn’t eat. When does that happen? At the point where we said “these eggs are going in the incubator”? Tomorrow? Next week? When it hatches?
I can’t figure it out, but they were very tasty eggs anyway.
The ducklings are now on the loose in the orchard during the day, but still going back indoors to the garage at night. Luckily this is an easy process, no sheepdog required, since all eight move as a single tightly-packed unit and can be easily ‘steered’ around.
The young chickens are not quite sure what to make of them though, and much fun was had today herding the ducks towards them and watching them scatter left, right and centre. I tried to capture the excitement on video, but I guess you had to be there:
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Talking of the young chickens, they’re doing very well. Unlike the ducklings, they’re extremely friendly and like nothing more than to be picked up and stroked. They have no idea that they’re going to end up on my dinner plate, and that’s just the way it should be. In the meantime, they’re a happy bunch, at least when the ducklings are not bearing down on them.
I seem to have gone into ranting mode this week, so I’m going back to cute pictures until I can think of something nice to say about someone or something.
So here’s a picture of my big fat cock.