What's Been Going On In My Neck Of The Woods

Did you miss me?  I seem to be going on one blogging hiatus after another these days!  And I'm not really sure why.  I think it may have something to do with the spring weather that hit us, so I find myself outdoors most days.  And since it would be quite bulky (and extremely frustrating) to bring my desktop computer outside with me in order to blog, I just didn't blog.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it! 

So what has been going on in my neck of the woods?  A lot, yet nothing too terribly exciting.  The regular mundane stuff...housework, laundry, meal after meal, bookkeeping for my hubby's auto repair business, going to the gym...yada yada. 

One thing that may be extremely exciting to you (ok, I know it won't, but just try to look excited, ok?)...is that I have an incubator full of eggs!  I wasn't going to hatch any out this year.  But a customer of ours dropped by with 6 fertilized eggs from her hens...so I had to start up the incubator.  And if I'm going to start it up, I may as well fill it up too!  I did offer to hatch some eggs for another customer of ours, so counting his 9 eggs I had 46 eggs a'cookin'!  They are on day 10 right now and due to hatch out the 16th.  I candled them this week and it was so cool!  You can actually see them swimming around in there!  And wouldn't you know that those 6 eggs that started this whole thing never developed.  Such is life, right? 

The chicken craze doesn't stop there....

I saw someone from my town offering up free fertilized barred rock eggs on Facebook.  My dilemma was that I didn't have enough room for them in my incubator.  So I emailed a friend who has that breed to see if she would be interested in them.  She wasn't...however she offered to let me use her incubator to hatch out some.  So...I got 3 dozen from the lady that had them and filled the empty spots with my own eggs.  I don't know how many there are in there...I"m guessing 42ish.  Granted, not all of them will hatch, but it always seems that when you don't particularly want a ton to hatch, they all do.  So I very well may have the following flock:

13 hens

1 rooster

12 chicks that I purchased from TSC

and 71 possible babies from the incubator!! 

YIKES.

The good news is that I can take the extras to the auction and get decent money for them this time of year.  The bad news is that's a lot of chicken beaks to feed!  And that's a LOT of poop!  What have I gotten myself into?  I've become a chicken hoarder.

What else have I been doing?  Well, a few weeks ago I moved our raspberry patch from the backyard (where the goats did a great job of munching every leave off of them) to WAAAAY out to the other end of our property on a triangular piece of land that we have only every mowed and it's really good for anything else.  It's far enough away from the goats and the chickens...but far enough away that other wildlife may consume them...but time will tell.  I have a friend who has beautiful red raspberry bushes that produce a ton of berries each year.  And she offered some plant starts to me and I eagerly accepted!  So hubby tilled up a long patch (maybe 15 ft long by 4 ft wide?) and I planted them.  They don't seem to be growing as well as I'd liked, but our weather has been cold one week, warm the next so they are probably in shock like the rest of us!  I also dug up all the strawberry plants from my patch in the backyard (the chickens love to dust themselves in the dirt there...and in the process uproot my plants) to one long row in my garden.  They seem to be doing pretty well there and I think I will get a better yield because they will get more sunshine.  Hopefully later this year I will be up to my ears in raspberries and strawberries!  (I'll be sure to get a pic if that's the case!!)

I also was able to spend some time in the flowerbeds pulling weeds, taking out the dead leaves and such from my perennials, and mulching.  This week I finished up cutting down all the dead leaves from my many bunches of ornamental grasses I have planted around our yard.  That is a big job!  But things look really nice!

I probably haven't mentioned her on here, but last spring we got a puppy.  She is part Blue Tick Houndog and Chocolate Lab..and she is awesome.  She is so lazy and laid-back and loving.  But 2 weeks ago she came into heat.  This was our first experience with a female dog...and what a nightmare!  First of all I didn't realize that they are in heat for 3 WEEKS!  And that she would need to be penned up for that long.  Long story short, she escaped from ALL of the containment measures we took to keep her from becoming a victim of the many male dogs roaming around our neighborhood.  So that was a daily struggle and stressor!  But luckily she is now done (or will be in the next couple of days)..and she will promptly be going to the vet to get fixed asap!  And I thought having a period for 5-7 days was bad!!

I just realized another reason I haven't been blogging!!!  My sister loaned me her Kindle to try out because she upgraded to a Kindle Fire.  I was hesitant because I didn't think I'd like it at all.  Then I came in contact with a trilogy she had on it called The Hunger Games.  Yeah, it's good.  So most of my downtime was spent plowing through those three books!  Now that I'm finished, I have a life again!  

I am still going to the gym 3 days a week and running.  We only have a month left of training before race day!  I think I'm getting burned out from it all.  I haven't noticed much change in my body recently even though I'm busting my tail and I'm starting to lose hope that this weight will ever leave my body.  It's so frustrating.  I am guessing my eating is the culprit, so this week I picked up a protein powder to have after my workouts or in place of a meal a day.  Hopefully that will help.  I just so badly want this extra weight off of my body!!

This week has been weird.  Mainly just the way I've been feeling.  I think I'm hormonal or something.  I'm happy but could totally cry at the same time.  It's just too much.  I'm reading a book right now (that I will post a review of soon!) and the very first chapter has rocked my world and opened my eyes to my life and how I'm living it.  I guess it confirmed what my thoughts were already.  It's hard to explain, but all I can say is that I need to spend lots of time in prayer and that God seems to be doing something sort of big in my life right now.  So today I felt the need to escape the real world and have me some retail therapy time...just me, myself, and I.  And it felt great.  Sometimes I feel as if my life is full of noise.  Phone noise, kid noise, hubby noise, etc.  It felt good to not talk and to just have some quiet time.  I shopped, but didn't spend a ton of money and came back feeling refreshed.  

With that being said, I need to get off of this computer, change into my workout clothes, and hit the road for a 3 mile training run.  I really want to just take a nap.  I know I will feel a ton better when I'm done though and that's what keeps me going.  

So there you have it...the last month of my life in a nutshell.  I told you it was exciting!  NOT.

Until next time, my friend!