NoJoMo #3

It’s cold. Brrrr. lol We bought a little (energy efficient) space heater at the dollar store today. It helps a bit when I can’t get a fire going. I’m also going to apply for energy assistance tomorrow, but that doesn’t come through until sometime in December, so we have at least another month of heating with the fireplace and electric blankets only. Hopefully the weather will level off…last year I made it almost to January before ever having to use heat. This year it’s just gotten cold really early. 

MIL came over again today and we cleaned up some leaves in the yard, mostly. I’m having a problem with the chickens. 🙁 The 2 flocks (ours and the 4 bantams + the sultan) don’t seem to be integrating. They mostly avoid each other. Well, today one of my flock laid an egg (the first!) in the goat shed because the bantam flock wouldn’t let any of the bigger hens into the coop. So I put the egg into the nesting boxes in the coop, hoping it would help the rest of them to start laying where they’re supposed to. Well, the bantams kind of went crazy and were in and out of all the nesting boxes for at least an hour…ended up knocking the egg out, I guess cracking it a bit, so they ate it. 🙁 Apparently egg-eating is contagious and really difficult to stop once they’ve started. I’m not sure if it was a territory thing (which wouldn’t make any sense because the bantams have their own home, so why they were so protective of the nesting boxes, I have no idea) or what, but now it looks like we may have to cull them all. 🙁 I don’t want to…I feel bad enough having to cull the roosters because the family was so excited to have found them a home. But little black rooster and Sultan have become increasingly aggressive lately – the black one chases me down if I turn my back on him. Anyway, so far I’ve gotten a total of 4 eggs – I had the first 2 bantam eggs (Xander broke one), the egg from Barbra (our first hen to lay), and then one of the bantams laid another today. And of course, I only have 2 of those 4 because of the one Xander broke and the one the bantams ate. So frustrating. 🙁 It’s ok, though. We have 13 hens of our own and 2 bantam hens…I’m sure we’ll be up to our ears in eggs soon enough. All of our hens are the same age, so the rest should be following Barbra’s example any day now. 

I bought a new memory card for my camera from Amazon a few days ago and it came today. Get this…I looked and looked for my other one. I checked my backup camera, I checked my computer…it was nowhere. So the new one came (4gb for like, $6…wow), and I go to put it in my camera…and the old one is in it. Really? I can’t believe I never checked the camera. I know I had to have…how I missed it, I have no idea. lol But anyway, I haven’t been able to post many pictures since I THOUGHT I didn’t have a card for a few days. So tomorrow I wanna try to get pics of all the chickens (especially since some of the hens are still nameless because I still can’t tell a few of them apart!) and some of Mal to post. Mal’s going to be a freakin year old in less than 2 weeks. I really can’t believe it…