Birds have always liked to stop and rest on the window unit hanging from the front window. Once they perceive their reflection in the window they usually stay for a while. They’ll chat a bit, posture, make a display with their feathers, and in the case of road runners, even peck at the window in an aggressive manner, as they think they’re having a conversation with and fighting another bird. In the summer i completely miss these interactions because on the A/C function, the blades are always turning and the air is always blowing, whether its just pulling in air from the outside or cooling that air. The A/C unit is so noisy. When i first got one after my dead split unit i had to learn to think with this ear booming background noise constantly going on. I also had to start watching youtube peoples court episodes on my cell phone rather than the laptop because the volume goes up louder. Nowadays i only use my laptop to edit books because the editing software is easier to manage on a laptop screen. All tv, radio, and podcast is consumed from the cell phone and my vhs tapes do very well with the window unit because the box television has a volume range that i have never had to test because the high end of that range would probably burst an eardrum and wake the neighbor 40 acres northeast of my house (proof that older things have always been manufactured better and as we embrace ‘progress’ we are just finding ways to become lazier so that less effort is required for each activity, build things shoddier so that they will break faster and cost more money, and narrow the range of choices with each new ‘upgrade’. Did you know refrigerators used to have turn table shelves and a temperature controlled butter compartment?). In the winter, when the heat is turned on, the blades only spin when the unit detects a drop in temperature in the air in the house and then it warms and funnels in new air. Otherwise it just sits, quietly, until it perceives it is needed. If the temperature is not in the 30s and it is sunny outside, this could result in large periods of time where the house is silent because the window unit blades are not moving. The silence is wonderful, and it allows me to hear when a bird drops in onto the window unit to fight its reflection. You hear all the chirping and the tick tick of its tiny feet against the metal as it hops around and postures at its reflection in the window. During this particular visit Cashew, my australian shepherd, was on house arrest after injuring her leg. She either fractured, sprained, or tore something, as an aging australian shepherd will. They go full send at everything they do in life whether their body can still withstand it or not. My older dog is 10 and spent the day outside because she is my couch potato and does not run, jump, climb, and launch herself into, up, and over things. However, Cashew was spending the day (and the next month) inside with me while her leg heals. She heard the little visitor arrive and followed me to the window as i carefully peeled the curtain back for her and i to look. She got some “bird tv” through the window this morning to keep her entertained during her house rest. The bird never saw us. It just continued to argue with the bird in the glass until it’d had enough and hopped down into the grass to look for bugs.
I bought a hachiya persimmon tree last year. I spent years looking for one but every nursery just wanted to carry fuyu. Fuyu persimmons are great until you have a ripe hachiya. It’s like orange, pudding-consistency sugar in a spoon. If you are patient enough to wait for one….it is a treasure. To eat it early, even by a day, is to get a mouthful of chalk that sticks to everything and will not go away no matter how much water you drink. So you see, only to those who are patient and know what to look for are hachiya persimmons enjoyable. To all those who are impatient or dont know to wait, they appear inedible and terrible. So, people buy the fuyu, dont have to wait, and get mildly sweet apple consistency persimmons. Some people, however, have tasted that spoonful of orange sugar and end up chasing another until they find a nursery willing to buy one. Last year i found a nursery willing to buy a hachiya and i planted it. This year it put out 4 flowers which turned into 4 healthy looking green persimmons.
Each time we had a storm, one fell off the tree. First i had 4, then 3, then 2, and finally 1 persimmon. We were supposed to have 6 straight days of rain related to a tropical storm in the gulf. I decided the last remaining persimmon had to come off. Not only was i worried about it falling off the tree in the storm, grasshoppers had started to chew on it and made a big black spot on the end. It had started to turn orange. I researched and realized i could finish ripening it on the counter in a paper bag of bananas. I picked it and brought it inside the house before the rain started. I immediately put it in a bag with bananas but after two days i took it out because the black spot where it had been bug eaten had started to mold.
I set it on the cardboard on top of the dog crates and let it finish ripening there.
Once it was thoroughly smooshy all throughout i decided it was ripe and safe to eat.
I washed it and opened it to reveal that the black spot did not go all the way through. It was a surface blemish. There was a beautiful chunky mass of persimmon pulp on the inside, just like the ones that arrived in the misfits box last year. I had grown a persimmon on my own tree on my property.
It was a beautiful sight. If it flowered this year and i kept it alive through the winter, it would likely flower again next year.
I took a spoon and loaded some of the orange pudding-like sugar onto it. It did not disappoint. I cleaned every last morsel of the pulp from the skin with that plastic spoon. It was good to the last bit. I still cannot believe i grew a hachiya persimmon on my property. It feels like a dream. It was a dream for many years, and now with this one fruit, its real.
I hadnt used the laundry line i installed 7 years ago for regular laundry in some time but occasionally i used it for one or two things as i did this time for the dog towel, the leash, and the clothes i wore to bathe the dogs because i knew better than to put that laundry in with the rest of the laundry. I’d like to think i learned something from the last time i washed dog laundry in the machine, which i wrote about in a lengthy post titled “the funk”. The towel has been scrapped. The pants and shirt remain an ongoing project.
Update: after trying multiple things i resorted to putting the clothing inside the washer with a “uproot clean” washing machine cleaner turbo fur guard 5 enzyme blend tablet and pressing start on the highest heat setting possible. It did the trick. I then ran 2 back to back cycles with a tablet in the drum each time to defunkify the washer. If you ever find yourself with a pet odor problem in the washer…this stuff works pretty good and it took me a long time to find it. Its septic safe too. Its called “uproot clean”. Dont ask me why. Im sure there were more clever names to choose from but the important thing is: it works, and after my experience with “the funk” years ago where i basically replaced my entire wardrobe and have been putting baking soda in the drum with every load ever since….its really important that it works.
The dogs hadnt had a bath in years and half way through October, i was nearing the end of the days it would be warm enough to bathe the dogs outdoors. If i was going to do it i needed to hurry up and do it.
So unfortunately, this is all i can show you of Cashew’s first bath in years as Cashew is not a dog it would be wise to let go of in the middle of a bath to grab a phone and take a picture. One, the dog wouldnt be in the bath very long if you did so and two, there’s a good chance that the phone would either end up splashed or submerged. No, i gave Cashew her bath with her head trapped between my knees or pressed firmly against my chest throughout the entire thing. She made multiple attempts at escape, soaked me as thoroughly as i soaked her, and performed a convincing rendition of a drowning victim in hyperventilation until released from the bathtub.
Sili was a wee bit more cooperative.
Oh, the inhumanity. I got them wet and forced them to smell of coconut and papaya.
It was at precisely this moment that i realized we had just traded smells. With both dogs clean and smelling beautiful there was now the problem that myself as well as my clothes smelled very thoroughly of years worth of grime. It did seem after several attempts to remedy this problem that the clothes i wore to bathe the dogs may have to be thrown out, but i hadnt given up hope at this point and remained optimistic about the last ditch effort i knew to try…
Ive always had a variety of sizes of chicken, some big, some small, depending on who hogs most of the food and where everybody is on the totem pole, so i may have gotten double yolker eggs in the past and just not known it. However, this time my one americauna, nana pudding, laid a double yolker. So i knew it didnt just come out of the butt of a real big chicken, cuz nana pudding, my one blue egg layer, is the smallest chicken i have. Im not sure how she accomplished this. Her vent looks fine, i checked, but given how small a chicken she is i was immediately worried for her and went to find her and give her rear end an inspection, which she was not enthusiastic about. I am saving her giant egg for the 2.5 year old daughter of my coworker whose favorite color is blue and who is obsessed with nana pudding and her pastel blue eggs. Maybe she can help her mom crack it and see if theres two yolks in there.
Update: My coworker texted me this photograph about a week later with the caption: “Forgot to tell you, it was a double yolk. One was more formed than the other.”
Ever since i got my new older model iphone over a year ago i have been fighting a battle with technology when it comes to photographing color. The camera on this version of iphone is always doing two things: trying to correct night time exposure to look like a daytime sky and trying to correct the color of sunsets and sunrises as if it were erasing rosacea from a face in a portrait. Unable to capture night time or color as i could see it with my eye and not tech savvy enough to figure out how to tell the camera to stop “correcting” conditions i was trying to capture, i quit photographing sunsets, sunrises, and the moon. Why bother? I couldnt capture it as i saw it so what was the point? I just enjoyed the moment and unfortunately did not share those moments on the blog this past year. Now, i have finally taken the time to sit down and research what it is i have to do. There is a “night mode” setting that must be selected for moon photography and a “vibrant” setting that must be selected for sunsets and sunrises. This is annoying because you have to open one drop down menu, then select another, then choose the setting, then click again to select. All that wastes time when the moon is orange and has just risen or a sun is setting…the light conditions can change in mere seconds and you risk missing the shot doing all that nonsense. I liked my old camera…it just assumed you didnt want anything corrected unless you specified otherwise. I only had to click and grab the shot. So, for those who care, the brilliant shot was missed, when it was deep pink and purple and the light blanketed everything, but by the time i figured the settings out, the sunrise was still vibrant, just orange and teal instead. 
A mere 30 feet from where Nakano had made her web i found a female orb weaver nearly identical to her in size and marking and deduced that they must have come from the same egg sac. If they are different sizes i assume they hatched at different times and came from different mothers but these two were of identical size so there is a good chance given the distance between them and the size of both of them that they are sisters. I named Nakano’s sister who had made her web near the extension shed, “Adira”.
Meanwhile, some strange developments were happening above and to the left of Nakano’s massive web. First an egg sac showed up. It was a sizeable egg sac and it was near Nakano’s web so i assumed it was hers. Then what may be a common house spider moved into the webbing right next to the egg sac and never left, but the common house spider was a small one. The egg sac seemed way too big to belong to the common house spider. Why was it in Nakano’s area? Did she not mind it there? Was it hiding behind her as a number of male praying mantises were hunting bugs on the porch near the light? I was not sure how the common house spider factored in or co-existed. Then about a million tiny orb weaver babies seemed to be present climbing all over Nakano’s web, which made me consider that the egg sac was notably brown and weathered and could have been left by a previous orb weaver because in my experience orb weavers die after they make an egg sac and are not around months later to see their babies hatch. Then, another huge egg sac appeared beside the first one, this one white in color. I wondered if Nakano had made two egg sacs, the first one was the common house spider’s, or the first one belonged to a previous orb weaver and the second one was Nakano’s first egg sac.
Part of my lunch: roasted japanese and thai eggplant from my coworker’s garden in italian olive oil with garlic and salt, a little ziploc of brown rice, and a ziploc of grapes. Real food. Good for you. Also tasty. No dish washing needed.
Half of the people i know are struggling to afford to put food in their pantries and on the table. If something is a bit over ripe or about to spoil, we dont throw it out. We make use of it, because food is a huge chunk of our living expense right now. It has doubled in price since the pandemic while our hourly wages have stayed the same. Before the pandemic i lived comfortably. Now i am struggling to stay above that ever present line where i can use my paycheck to pay bills and not have to dip into my savings account because im aware im no longer in a position to “save” ever again so once that account is empty….the ear-marked money for the back end of the adjustable rate mortgage is gone. We ration the days we eat fish and try to hunt wild game instead of buy meat in the grocery because a box of bullets and the time spent is cheaper than filling a chest freezer with beef or chicken from the super market right now. Food is like treasure for myself and this half of the people i know and so showing up at somebody’s house with food or trading food for another resource in barter….its quite a valuable trade or gift given.
The other half of the people i know are on glp-1s, which let me tell you, looks very strange to those of us struggling to eat. We’d give so much to be able to return to a time where food was affordable and widely available. to watch people choose not to eat when they have the money to do so looks pretty near insanity to those of us just trying to eat in a world where doing so is now out of our price range.
There is an element of “this is dumb”, an element of sadness, and an element of “where does this end?”.
Don’t get me started on the commercials for glp-1’s. Im aware that every product sold is now marketed towards users of glp-1’s from gym equipment to yogurt, everything now has “great for people on glp-1s written on the packaging. But the commercials are a step too far. They are using singing dancing animated fluffy animals in clothes created by AI to market glp-1s. The scenarios these animals are acting out are ones in which the characters value is completely based on their outer looks and the entire family abandons them or hates them because they dont look good. Or, the ones where a spouse is cheating with a family member because her body looks good and the wife’s doesnt. Well then they get on glp-1s and depending on which commercial it is, the ending is that they either finally catch the cheating spouse’s attention and live happily ever after because they look good now, or the family finally likes them because they look good, or they realize they never needed the family because they were always holding them back and they set out to conquer the world alone as a smoking bombshell that everyone is paying attention to. So i think the creators of these commercials should be punished financially for what they’ve done, since that is the only language they speak apparently. They should be made to give up all the money they made ending reality as we know it for adults and children alike but i know, people will just continue to worship and further employ them for their excellent ability to make companies more and more money. The problem is this: they are either of the opinion that we as consumers are infantile and our attention span is one of 5 to 10 seconds so we must be sung to by cute little animals in a musical fashion for us to be listening. My intelligence is insulted if so. Or, they are marketing towards children. We are raising a generation of little girls who are going to expect to be left, verbally abused, or cheated on if they dont look like gym time barbie and a generation of little boys that are going to grow up learning that the outer shell of a woman is the only thing we should be paying attention to when selecting a mate and its totally statistically normal to respond with verbal abuse, cheating, or divorce if their significant other does not look like gym time barbie. We are living in a day and age where only a two income household can afford to pay a mortgage and bills so the majority of families do not have a stay at home parent influencing the kids. Television, after school programs, babysitters, and daycare are raising them. Television being the primary babysitter i know of for the families i know where both parents work. That screen is teaching them about the world more than we are and somebody has to tell these kids that the scenarios acted out by those cute little singing fluffy animals on screen is not right, not biblical, and why. I believe that these peddlers of glp-1s will be the death of young people looking for substance when choosing a life partner. They will be the death of the concept of a life partner because these kids will grow up thinking that if their significant other missteps in some way, they’ll just dump them and get another better one. I have a visceral soul level negative reaction to the singing animals with emotions written all over their faces as they are abandoned or cheated on for not looking nice. And its icing on the cake that the creators add warts, green eye makeup, and pimples to many of the characters just to make sure we know how gross the overweight woman is.
So first i will begin by telling you why this is dumb. When they say “oh, its okay, my insurance is paying for all this.” Thats not entirely true. Its paying for the glp-1 but its not buying all the things you have to take to supplement what you’re now deficient in if you’re taking a glp-1. You have to buy that stuff out of pocket. And, the insurance only pays for things if they are making enough money to do so. When i cancelled my health insurance years ago it was because i made just a few hundred dollars too much to receive a credit from the government to cover my health insurance cost. So, i owed them $10,000 a year for health insurance even though i only had two regular physical checkups in a 12 month span. Meanwhile, some people are paying 35 dollars a month for insurance because they make $10 an hour. It is the middle class with their credit revoked that pays in enough money to this system for the government to be able to afford to offer $35 a month plans to those on minimum wage. The insurance is buying most of your glp-1 for you because they are taking enough from the middle class that they may lose their houses to afford to keep paying that insurance. And they conveniently only tell those with revoked credits that they are revoked because they “made just at too much money” after the whole year of insurance has been had and the bill is due. Tax time. You can cancel for next year but you have to find a way to pay them for what you now know you already owe. Insurance is now priced above my and many of my friends’ heads. I no longer ride horses because i cant afford to break anything. But i digress. The reason this is dumb is because for centuries humans have consumed food for the purposes of survival, of building muscle mass so they can hunt and for nourishment so their organs will continue functioning. Now, humans are on glp-1s to prevent them from wanting to consume food. People think they’re being so discreet. They’re not discreet. Once healthy friends and coworkers start showing up looking like holocaust victims with pencil thin arms, hollowed out faces, and visible collar bones, replace their wardrobe with xs everything and show up to the lunch table with a clear pink protein water drink talking about their lunch tastes so good and has caffeine in it and gives them energy….you’re not being discreet. I know you’re on glp-1’s when your whole lunch is a see-through pink drink where you added protein caffeine powder to water and put a fancy straw in it. The other clue would be the brown paper bags in the mini fridge with peoples names on the outside containing glass vials of glp-1s. There used to be sandwiches and bags of grapes, yogurt cups in the mini fridge and now its empty except for these tiny brown paper bags with vials of clear liquid in them. Try as i might, i cant change the minds of these people. They drank the koolaid and they love their little vials of “delete the food noise”. Okay, what is being labeled “food noise” is hunger. Hunger has been there evolutionarily for hundreds of years to let our bodies know when its time to hunt or gather in order to sustain the body’s longevity and continue existing. Hunger has a purpose. Its a good thing. A necessary, normal thing. Its not “food noise”. To delete it is not a good thing. Its a natural process that we are meant to have and be a part of. Scientists took advantage of this feedback loop and started engineering processed foods to be addictive and tell the brain that we need “‘more” at all times. If you just eat fruit, veg, meat, seafood, nuts, seeds, legumes, and grains, you will not have an OVERACTIVE hunger feedback loop unless you have a specific disorder. The average person, when not eating processed scientifically engineered food, only gets hungry when the previous fuel is being used up and its time to input more. I have food allergies and a budget so everything i consume is made from scratch and comes from fish, wild game, gluten free grains, seeds, nuts, vegetables, fruit, or legumes. I do not eat processed foods save for dairy free sugar free chocolate once in a while. On the weekends i only eat twice a day, not because of glp-1s but because when i dont have to work, thats all i get hungry for. If processed foods ruined peoples feedback loop surrounding food, the answer is not more human control but less. Quit fiddling with something nature designed and go back to the original. Eat real clean basic ingredients. Dont buy from the frozen or prepared section at the grocery. Make food from scratch. When you are full you will be full. Processed food has way more calories than we need in one sitting. From scratch natural hunter/gatherer food does not. Go back to a paleo diet for God’s sake. Why are we injecting ourselves with needles at work here? It doesnt make sense to me. I havent even gotten into the insanity of the whole concept yet. You inject yourself with a clear liquid to make you not hungry so you wont eat the food that gives you vitamins, protein, and the nourishment you need to build and maintain muscle mass and grow and maintain hair, instead of just eating a paleo diet and exercising at least twice a week. Well, then the glp-1 will not only delete fat but muscle as well so now you need protein and a vigorous 6 day a week workout routine to maintain that shrinking muscle mass. But, we dont like eating remember? Eating food is the enemy. So we’ll get protein in the form of a gummy. Now you have to take a protein gummy, a hair loss gummy, a greens gummy, a vitamin d gummy, a vitamin c gummy, a magnesium gummy, a calcium gummy…. So we’re working out 6 times a week just trying to not lose the muscle mass we have already whereas off the glp-1 working out twice a week would add muscle mass to what you already have. We’re eating a regiment if gummies instead of food, and injecting ourselves with diabetes drugs to delete a natural life-preserving phenomena called hunger that every other animal on the planet has and benefits from. If you have a capuchin monkey you have to take him or her to the wildlife vet each year to maintain your license to keep him or her and part of the requirement for keeping that monkey is keeping their weight within a healthy normal range. And you do that not by injecting the monkey with glp-1s but by feeding the monkey foods it would find in its natural habitat rather than pup cups, potato chips, and cup cakes. Im watching the people around me engage in idiocy and i cant stop them…all i can do is refuse to join them. I enjoy food. Im 105 lbs with a thyroid disorder that can cause weight gain. My weight is absolutely due to the foods i choose to put in my body. I would challenge anyone to eat what i eat for a year and see if they dont weigh what they desire to weigh. There’s literally no processed food in my diet besides the occasional square of sugar free dairy free chocolate or a box of oat milk for a fruit smoothie, but budget dictates oat milk must happen sparingly. I enjoy the taste of the foods i do put in my mouth and i refuse to give the “food noise” up because i understand its necessary and beneficial place in my life and i would like to continue enjoying good seafood, good deer meat, good quail, good chocolate, and good lemon pepper broccoli and good fresh persimmons from my tree, good roasted zucchini, garlic mushrooms, peanut butter on apples…. Its tasty. Why give that up?
The sad aspect of this is that i am watching people who were vibrant, thriving, beautiful women, at a healthy weight, who maybe thought they needed to lose the 5 extra they had hanging around their belly button to be bikini ready or something, go from looking healthy, fit, and beautiful in their uniform to looking like a holocaust victim with a uniform draped over them. Their cheeks are sunken in. Their face is boney and hollowed out. The veins are visible at their temples. Their hair is thinning. Their arms and legs are pencil thin. Their collar bones are visible and pronounced and the skin is draped over and clings to them. They look starved. My family members generations ago died in concentration camps and i can imagine they would also not be able to make sense of this. They did not have a choice in their starvation but these people are not held in camps behind razor wire. These people are starving themselves by choice. Ive kept my mouth shut thus far and just watched them do it as everyone has a right to make their own choice and if that is their choice, it is not my place to try and sway them from it, but the sing song animal commercials was a step too far. I will say my peace now and if it falls on deaf ears so be it, but i will have said my peace and my soul will know it. The people i am watching whither are mothers. I wonder what their children think of the frail figure that now stands where a healthy mother used to. I used to admire the figure of one of them so much. She was beautiful. For the life of me i dont know why she thought she needed to lose weight. She looked amazing. Now her face is sunken in, her hair is falling out, and i can see her veins and collar bones. She’s “swimsuit ready” if you want to see a skeleton with skin stretched over it in a bikini. I dont understand this insanity. But i was alive in the 90s. I remember a time when people were institutionalized and treated for eating disorders for this kind of body in the 90s. The children growing up right now think this is normal…a thing to shoot for, and we’re teaching them that the outside is the only important thing. Where are the speeches about how its whats on the inside that matters…who you are as a person? We forget that those young people missed our past and all they know is the present and the future and they dont have any of that grounded stuff to draw on later…its our job to teach them morals, ethics, logic, and truth……not this.
As far as “where does this end?”……if we keep going like this for 10 years it ends with a generation that doesnt know what it is to value someone for anything other than what they look like. That’s where it ends.
We made it 6 days. We did not make it 41 days. On the morning of the sixth day Cashew had come to my bed and barked every hour on the hour since 10 pm the night before. I never hit deep sleep, ever, because every hour on the hour cashew was there barking in my face. It was as if she said, “well if the rules dont apply to him, they dont apply to me neither. Im gonna try barking whenever i feel like it in the house and we’ll see if you care as little as you do when he does it!” Buddy wasnt even crowing. He was under his towel, but he was screaming as soon as cashew was barking, so every hour on the hour i had to get up and sing soft kitty to a ballistic rooster. Then at 6:00 am he started with all that “cock-a-doodle-doo” stuff and cashew went over to bark at him and i told her to shut up and buddy thought i was yelling at him and i looked over to see trash all over the kitchen floor. An entire full bag of trash had been spread all over the kitchen floor because cashew had raided it for rooster tootsie rolls. Cue the waterfall of diarrhea. I looked at the floor around the rooster crate and found it spotless, as in vacuumed by dog. Not only had she eaten the rooster shit and left the evidence of her crime for me to clean up, she had also ingested several raw grains, protein pellets, and seeds that Buddy had flung out of his crate when ballistic. By 7 am she was whimpering and pacing, scratching on the door. I had to get up at 7:05. I had wanted to try for 7:30 but i had no choice. She was about to be violently ill in the house. I let her outside in the dog run and as she squatted and shook i muttered, “i cant do this anymore. I cant do this anymore! I cant do this anymore! I cant spend one more day, one more hour, one more minute with everybody making extremely poor life decisions in my one room house with me! I dont even know what im saying! Ive got to get some sleep! I have to sleep! I have to have quiet! I have to sleep! I cannot spend the whole weekend with crowing every thirty seconds…i cant watch the dogs while i sleep, i cant deal with whatevers coming out of her! I cant deal with any of this! Generations of chickens are just gonna have to be fine. He’s just gonna have to be healthy! We came, we tried, its just not possible. Its humanly impossible. What human could live like this? They cant. Its impossible. The military uses shit like this as an interrogation technique on terrorists for God’s sake. Im only one person…..im only human…..” As i was muttering to myself in my sleep deprivation psychosis, i had walked into the house, opened the rooster crate, removed the water bowl, removed the food bowl, tackled Buddy, lifted him into my arms, and was now carrying him around the outside of the pullet pen like a football. I said, “Okay guys, look here, here’s your nice new boyfriend and here’s your nice new hens and yall can just be nice to each other and like each other and assimilate and such cuz here’s the deal here, i need you to give me babies in february and we’re gonna make some reese’s peanut butter cup chickens in february and march okay but we need the rooster here to do it and see, you’re not gonna find a more friendly gentlemanly rooster i mean, 99.9 percent of them are homicidal maniacs that will rip out your feathers and mush your face in the dirt so yall just go ahead and like him cuz if you kill him im gonna have to get you a meaner rooster cuz there aint another nice one to choose from. And you can go ahead and enjoy your life with these ladies cuz it sure beats getting culled in a kill pen in mason, right? Yeah, theres ladies here for you, so everybody just be nice and like each other, okay?” I carried Buddy around inside the pen and let him look at the ladies. Then i put him down and left. The lead hen fought Buddy fiercely for about 30 seconds before she realized he’s much bigger and fights like a rooster. The seller had kindly removed his spurs for the moment. Im sure they’ll grow back but i appreciated that detail during the assimilation fight with the main hen. When the lead hen called uncle the rooster let her up and went about his business eating. Nobody challenged him again. They all ate and hung out together and Buddy crowed every 30 seconds all throughout the day until 7 pm. Im wondering if he can be heard on neighboring ranches. Im also wondering if the prolific non stop crowing is part of the reason he was about to be culled. Its not a reason for me to cull him. He’s nice to the hens, pretty, healthy, and he runs from me rather than at me when i come to give them more food or collect eggs. Thats rare to find so if he wants to crow every 30 seconds im not going to try to stop him. I am somewhat worried a neighbor will get fed up and try to stop him. I dont remember ira crowing every thirty seconds. I think that frequency may be specific to Buddy. But, its a small price to pay for a non-homicidal rooster. I cant guarantee he’ll stay that way. Sometimes roosters become possessive and protective once they have hens they perceive as their own. However, no matter what happens, i need him to make reese’s chickens next spring. I just hope my neighbors’ houses are far enough away that they cant really hear him like i can. And i hope raccoons are threatened by that noise rather than drawn to it.
As you’ll hear in this audio clip, beginning at 4 am, Buddy crows once every 30 seconds until around 7 pm. I became acutely aware of this because Buddy was sharing a 1 room 384 square foot house with a tin roof with me and both dogs, one of which has always possessed a strong sense of social justice. My aussie knows the rules i hold for her and her sister. You can bark as much as you want outdoors. In fact, i encourage it, because there are different barks for porcupine, deer, coyote, fox, raccoon/possum/armadillo and human….they’re like a doorbell with customized rings for each intruder showing up uninvited. Its a very useful and appreciated alert system for the homestead. However, once you are in the house there are really only 4 acceptable reasons to bark under that tin roof. One: you’ve eaten something you really shouldnt have, are regretting all recent life choices, and need to be let outside to attend to the urgent business of projectile shitting and puking green for miles where mom doesnt have to use 10 thousand paper towels on cleanup. Two: there is a dangerous intruder in the yard that could potentially pose a violent threat to the chickens, yourself, or mom. Three: the sun is fully up on a weekday and mom is showing no sign of going to work which means she’s probably slept through all 40 alarms as well as the one plugged into the wall and needs your help keeping her career. Four: something is on fire. If cashew barks in the house it is absolutely ear booming under that tin ceiling. I calmly rise from bed, turn on the light, and run through the check list. I check to see if anyone is pacing and holding their legs together as if the biggest shit is coming down the pipes and they’re not sure how much longer they can hold it in. I watch for whimpering or scratching at the door behavior. If there is none and theres no stomach gurgling, i cross that one off the list. I put my head lamp on, get the rifle, leave them in the house, and go do a sweep of the immediate area near the chicken pens, dog run, house, and sheds. I check to make sure the sun is not up and the time is still before dawn. Then i walk around the interior and exterior of the house smelling for smoke and looking for flame. Lastly, i check all 4 stove burners and the oven to make sure all cooking surfaces are turned to “off”. Then i walk directly back over to Cashew and give her a good swat on the butt, usually accompanied with a stern verbal scolding and i go back to bed. In this house we dont bark because of the wind. We dont bark because we heard a car or motorcycle up the road. We dont bark because a song bird tweeted. Not simply because the echo on the tin hurts my ears but because if you have a dog that barks at everything, you’ll never know when they’re barking at something you should act on. I cant use them as an effective doorbell if they’re ringing 24/7. So, ive trained them that there are 4 acceptable reasons to bark while in the house and with the exception of thunder, both dogs adhere to the criteria pretty religiously. And in return i take them seriously when they bark and go thoroughly through the checklist of 4 things to investigate. Its a good system. A system Buddy was not familiar with, which became wildly apparent to Cashew when Buddy began to crow once every 30 seconds beginning at 5 am. I heard the crowing begin. How could i not? I was sleeping 2 feet away from him in my zip up mosquito net tent bed with a tin ceiling. I also heard the jingle of at least one dog’s tags. I cracked open an eyelid to observe Cashew standing nose to beak with the rooster in front of his crate, only the metal bars separating them. She seemed to be willing him to be quiet. Roosters crow. Thats what they do. I didnt think we’d have much luck stopping him so i didnt try. I heard Cashew’s “im about to bark in the house” warning growl ans i piped up sternly, “Don’t you dare.” I knew what would happen if Cashew barked at Buddy. It wouldnt result in Buddy seeing the error of his ways and vowing to live a reformed noise free existence. I thought at least if she didnt bark at him, maybe i could catch a minute of shut eye here or there between crows. I dreamed that maybe he’d wait five minutes once or twice but no…..starting at 5 am he crowed religiously every 30 seconds until i left for work and wasnt home to hear it any longer. That first night, Cashew heeded my warning but then i left them all crated in the house together and Cashew and Sili probably had to hear Buddy crow every 30 seconds for upwards of 8 hours before i came back and let them outside. Going into that second night, neither dog slept right by Buddy’s pen. They both curled up together near the front door in front of the oven. On the second day Buddy began crowing every 30 seconds at 4 in the morning. I heard Cashew’s tags jingle. When i opened my eyes, to my surprise, she was not standing in front of Buddy’s crate. She was standing in front of me, at my bed. She had her lip curled and her head cocked, looking at me like, “Are you going to do something about this or should i?” In her eyes, Buddy wasnt following the house rules. She could not understand why in tarnation this creature was allowed to bark when none of the 4 disasters that rendered barking in the house acceptable were happening. She stood beside my bed and blew air out through her nose. I zipped the mosquito net tent shut in response. I was very sleep deprived and drained from work. I was trying to get just a few minutes of sleep here and there between his every 30 to 60 second crows. It vaguely registered that Cashew wanted something done here but i was basically conscious but asleep. I tried to go back to sleep. And then it happened. Cashew barked. She stood directly in front of Buddy’s crate and gave her loudest most intimidating bark she could muster to put this new strange looking dog in its place. Within seconds i heard the frantic squawking of a ballistic rooster flapping about the crate and knocking everything over. He was screaming bloody murder like someone was after him with a butcher knife. Crowing was one noise but screaming was another entirely. More long winded. Crowing went like: “cock-a-doodle-doo” or more realistically “er-er-er-er-errrrrrr.” Screaming was a noise like “BAWCK!!!!!!!!! Bck….bck…….bck…….bck…..bck….bck……BAWCK!!!!…bck…bck….BAWCK!!!!’ BAWCK!!!!! BAWCK!!!!!!” Complete with attempted flight and less than graceful acrobatics resulting in the flinging of both seed and poop in any and all directions. I tried shooshing him like a baby, “shhhhhh…..shhhhh…..shhhhhhh….shhhhhh, you’re okay….” I tried getting down on his level on the floor and speaking in a soothing voice….you know what the only thing that would soothe him was? Me singing Sheldon Cooper’s comfort song from the show BIG BANG THEORY: “soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur…..happy kitty…sleepy kitty…purr purr purr”. So there i am “shhhhh shhhh-ing a rooster at 4 in the morning and singing “soft kitty” to a giant orange bird in my best “miss rachel” voice and he’s settled down and unpoofed himself and is beginning to close that big golden eye of his when guess who barks for the hell of it, just to let him know that she better not hear another peep out of him…….just guess…. Rouuuuuuufgh! And he immediately starts up again with the “BAWCK!!!!!!…bck….bck…..BAWCK!!!!! BAWCK!!!!!…bck…BAWCK!!!!! And the flapping and flailing about, the flinging of both seed, poop, and now the spilling of the water….. i stand up and look at her, “Why?”. She looks at me as if to say, “hey, i gave you a chance to handle it. You wanted to sleep. So i’ll train the new weird dog you brought home.” I yell at her which the rooster then cant differentiate between yelling at her and yelling at him and then more screaming and flailing and flinging of seed and shit in all directions. I get in the bed and put the pillow over my head and try to drown them all out, but it continues. So, i get up again. I get down on his level. I make eye contact. I shhhh shhhh him. I sing soft kitty in my best miss rachel voice. He unpoofs himself and his little head droops towards the floor. His eyes close. I tip toe back to bed. My eyes are closed no more than 4 minutes when i hear at Max volume, “cock-a-doodle-doo!” Cashew goes, “That’s it! He didnt get the message! I will tell him again.” Barking…..screaming and thrashing…..which leads to more barking, indicating that she would like him to stop that at once, which leads to more hysteria from the rooster, more disciplinary barking, and more absolute hysteria from the rooster…..For two hours i laid there willing it to stop, occasionally getting up to sing soft kitty to no avail because he’d always crow in a few minutes which would activate nurse ratchet/prison guard at rikers in a fur suit over there and if she thought she wasnt being listened to she’d get right up to his crate and scream at him inches from his face to quit screaming, cuz that had proved so effective a tactic for the past 1 hour and 45 minutes……
After two hours i rose from bed and through gritted teeth said, “Stay away from me…..for your own good.” Both dogs went to the door and sat, then laid down warily. I put food in their bowls and put them in the crates to eat it before letting them out. Both dogs refused to eat. The rooster continued his eternal song, “cock-a-doodle-doo.” Cashew began her “im gonna bark” growl. I pointed a finger in her face and with crazy woman danger eyes i said in my best psycho voice, “ZIP IT!” Both dogs sat down quietly but refused to eat. I said, “fine. We’re all on hunger strike! Great! Go outside!” I opened the door and let both dogs out to the dog run. I said “stay here.” I returned to the house. “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Sixty seconds later, “cock-a-doodle-doo!” I calmly refilled Buddy’s water dish and Buddy’s food dish. I picked up all the rooster poop and seed he had flung around the house. I put that in the trash. We’ll come back to this later.
I was pretty good at ignoring Buddy. Sili was pretty good at ignoring Buddy. He was annoying as heck when it came to volume level and frequency of crowing but Sili and i seemed to just know that he was a bird biologically wired to crow and there was nothing we could do but try to endure it. The life cycle of a stick tight flea was 41 days from baby to whats considered adulthood. So, we just needed to survive 41 days of sharing the one room tiny house with an excessively vocal rooster. Cashew was not as good at ignoring Buddy and his vocalizations. She engaged in nightly bark offs with Buddy and i began to worry about whether she would give him a heart attack and this would be all for nothing. Nevermind that the racket of their bark offs was worse than the crowing and resulted in seed and poo everywhere. My friend suggested i put a towel over his crate at night like a parakeet and see if that quieted him down and convinced him it was time to sleep. It worked in that it got him to sleep till 6 am instead of starting up his warning that the sun was near at 4 am. However, at 6 am on the dot every morning he would start clucking and moving around…..within 1 minute he’d make his first crow, and then every 30 seconds after.
