Occasionally i would have accidentally good timing and happen upon a chicken egg in the nesting box that was still warm. None of my hens were broody so i could only assume it had been laid recently. There was something about a perfectly smooth warm chicken egg that felt infinitely more special than the refrigerated …
Tag Archives: hill country
The Last of the Satsumas
I was surrounded by 3 different types of carpenter ants. They all thought my walls looked like a safe place to store their babies when it rained heavily and their tunnels flooded. it was necessary to have pesticides sprayed twice a year if i wanted to keep them from eating the place out from under …
Bud the Armadillo
There were two armadillos that frequented our property. One was a small armadillo; quick and very people shy. The other one was a large armadillo with a signature puncture in the side of its shell that seemed to have healed long ago. He had something like a keloid hanging out of it but there was …
3 Days Off
I ended up with 3 consecutive days off. I felt like i should really make use of it; since i wasn’t contributing any income during these three days, i ought at least to be productive. I began with a long overdue project; cleaning the chicken coop. I couldn’t imagine how my arthritis riddled body was …
Winter
This morning i broke a fairly thick layer of ice laying on top of the rain water that had collected in my glass dishes placed in the fire pit. I had emptied the mail bin at the fence into the rain water collection container in the orchard and put the plywood back over it the …
Sneaking up on an Armadillo (not hard to do)
“I’ll be in the car.”
There’s a really pissed off bee in my 384 square foot 1 room house. I guess he didn’t like being blown around by the gusts outside. A front is rolling in. I took a look at it, assessed its temperament and identified it was not a wasp, hornet, or fly. That was all i needed …
The Early Morning Shift
I woke up with a start. The alarm was not on. I must have turned it off. Exhausted in a way i had never known by my very physical new job, my actions couldn’t be trusted. I couldn’t for sure say that i hadn’t hit the snooze button all 13 times and slept many extra …
A Cold Winter Ahead
It was 36 degrees outside. The windshield of the suv was frosted over with ice. i slept with the space heater pointed towards my legs from across the room and it seemed to keep the chill off just enough for comfort. However, now that i was awake, the space heater had to be moved into …
A Long-Overdue Cleaning
When i injured my foot i realized that my ankle was probably not going to tolerate fifteen to twenty minutes of squatting in cramped conditions underneath roosting bars while i wore gloves and a mask to scoop shavings into a trash bag with my hands. The tray was meant to slide in and out from …
