Yesterday morning we didn't get a call from the post office. I had hoped that Cheri would still be here, to experience the magic of driving home with a box of cheeping chicks, but the chicks could arrive any day from Thursday to Saturday, and it was just a little hope.
We picked Phil up in the early afternoon. We were driving home, when I listened to a message: the Cville post office called! They had the chicks! And we were, literally, one block from the post office when I listened to the message. We didn't even have to make a special trip for the cheepers.
For all such provisions, small though they may seem, I am so thankful.
Back home, we scrambled to make a pen for the chicks. We planned to use the cattle trailer as their home (when we bought egg layers last year, we had space in the barn, but the barn is packed to the gills now). I needed Phil's strength to subdivide the trailer.
When we last had chicks, we bought wood shavings for their bedding. Yesterday, though, I simply drove the tractor to one of our several wood chip piles and shoveled them in. A little bit of self-sufficiency felt quite delightful!
So we put our 52 broilers, plus one odd-ball into their new home. They will live there for three or four weeks, spend four or five weeks in the field, and then be ready for processing.
Isaiah wants to name the new odd-ball "Different-y," in keeping with "Strange-y," the last odd-ball. Since the baby looks like a penguin, I like "Tux" better, if only because it is easier to say.
The weather has been warm enough, we have been able to forego the heat lamp in the day (they only need 95 degrees, after all). They cheap and eat and drink, and I enjoy thoroughly the Peep stage, since their fluffiness will pass in just a few days, and lingering ugly chicken adolescence will set in.
As I feared, we had no survivors of the two keets who had been trying to hatch, and the abandoned living one we tried to rescue. But the adult guineas proudly marched their six living keets (you can see them all in the photo) to join the chicken harem. Teeny striped babies!
Phil went to finish the K-Mag spreading this morning, to find that the riding mower had a flat tire. He knows about tire repair now, though, and after we bought a tire repair kit, he fixed it up.
He also went to pick up our monstrous refrigerator. It has a 45 cubic foot capacity (or four Lykosh boys) and weighs 521 pounds! Thankfully, the man we bought it from had a skid steer, and Butch let us use his for unloading. I kept worrying that the fridge would tip the skid steer, because it is so oversized (83" tall and four feet wide), but then I remembered that only totes of minerals that weigh 3000 pounds really daunt that little skid steer. It managed the fridge just fine.
Of course, in order to put the fridge where we wanted it, first we had to drive the motor home up the driveway, which meant unleveling it and unattaching it from water and electric. Then Phil backed it back into place. An effort in itself.
I spent the day running errands; some unpleasant ones. One example: for the first time in a decade, we sent off bills without stamps, or return addresses. I assumed that such envelopes ended up in the dead pile, but, sadly, no: they MAY go on to their destination, where the addressee MAY choose to pay the postage. Or MAYBE not. In the dead letter office, they MAY open the letter and send it back. Frustrating that they PROBABLY won't reach their destination, but they MIGHT.
In all this uncertainty, and knowing that, while I can afford both credit card and mortgage bills once in a month, I cannot afford them twice, I had to stop payment on both those checks.
Seriously, people, be smart: either write the return address, or pay your bills online.
However, if a $64 bank charge is the worst financial hit we've had due to miscommunication in a decade of marriage, I must consider myself blessed.
(Lest you wonder at my amazing ability to capture on camera four happy young sons, you are not seeing the 53 other photos that I took, none of which I would be happy to post. What wigglers they are!)
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