I Can Has Bugz?

I slept until almost ten this morning which is some sort of record around here. I'd woken up at three-thirty with a severe hay fever attack, wanting to scratch my throat out and so there was nothing for it but to get up and take a Benadryl which is one powerful drug.
When I got back to sleep, still itchy in the throat, I slept like the dead until I forced myself to get up at such an ungodly and slothful hour.

We had such fun last night. I was so glad I went. Even the drive over to Hayvana was sweet and Mr. Moon said again he'd take me to Mexico and I started crying and he was all like, "What's wrong with you? It's okay," so when we got there I was in sort of a blissful state already and then the music was wonderful and when Lon and Lis sang Love Hurts, I thought I'd die from the sheer glory of it.
We didn't get home until after eleven and Lon and Lis came by for a quick stop on their way home. I made them coffee and gave them muffins. I pleaded with them to stay the night in the panther room but they had to get back to their dogs, Daisy and Buck, and I understood that.

And now it's the next day and Mr. Moon has gone to town with a list as long as his arm of things to get done.

I've already done most of what I wanted to do today, which is to clean out the chicks' cage and move it from where it's been sitting in the mud room to out here on the porch and here I am, writing my fifty-eighth blog post of the past 24 hours, listening to them chirp. I'm glad to have them out here because I can interact with them more. This batch of babies has been a different experience than our first. Probably because there are more of them, also poor Miss Precious died, and, well, they smell different.

Is that weird? I know nothing about chickens, let's face it, so I don't know about this smell thing. Maybe it's because there are more of them, the weather is hotter- whatever.
And I haven't interacted with them as often. We stand and admire them, pointing out this one's clever little wing feathers and that one's pretty little face but they aren't used to us as much as the other ones were and even if I just come up with the camera they go a little nuts. But they'll grow to know us more and we them. I have only named one of this batch so far, the little sister to Miss Precious and we are calling her Buttercup because she's so soft and yellow. They all seem very healthy now and eat tremendous amounts of food and drink lots of water and take naps and they also peck, peck, peck, looking for bugs in the straw and in the wood that lines their cage.

When we got our first, original six babies, we had no idea what we were doing. We knew to keep them fed and warm and we did.
But this time around Mr. Moon got an instruction sheet for keeping baby chickens alive from the feed store and it's full of scary advice and words like "EXACTLY 90 DEGREES! DO NOT GUESS!" and "REAR END PASTING UP."

Well, ignorance is bliss and I sort of wish I had never heard of butt pasting.

A few nights ago, Mr. Moon and I happened upon some TV show entitled "The History of the Chicken" or something like that and they did a piece on Mike, the Headless Rooster which made me sort of sick to my stomach and also some gooey, sugary thing wherein some retired pastor had written about a brave little chicken who protected her babies with her very life and all of this was re-enacted on film while the pastor read his story and that made me sort of sick to my stomach too, but in a different way. More like the way your stomach feels when you eat half a batch of Tollhouse Cookie dough before you get any into the oven.

I mean, hey. I love my chickens and I think that probably humans have developed a great sense of appreciation and even affection for the birds who cluck so nicely around the yard and have such pretty feathers and lay eggs and eat bugs but to keep a chicken with no head and make money on him and to imply that any mother in the world who would protect her babies with her life is proof of god sort of goes over the top to my mind.

I mean, mothers are god, in my book but that's just me.

And in more chicken news (and yes, I knew you wanted some) we have determined that every one of our original six are hens. Not one rooster in the bunch. So. Mabel, Suzie, Bob, Dolly P., Betty and Red are all fine gals but they need a man. So if one of these next nine isn't a boy, we're going to have to recruit. I ran into a very old friend of mine at the library the other day and she says she has some beautiful black roosters who love hens and she'd gladly give me one of those. I think I'll wait to see how this current baby batch turns out and wait until the hens are old enough to tolerate a grown-male's advances if you know what I'm saying. I don't want any old rooster messing with my girls until they're ready and willing. Or as willing as chickens get, which I hear is not very.

And there you go. The news from Lloyd on a Saturday in June. It's hot, the crickets are singing in waves that rise and fall, the chickens are chirping, and I'm happy.