Eggs (week ending 1/15): 54And most of them have been frozen. Northeast Ohio has been in a temperature lockdown for a good period of time now, the thermometer registering above freezing only a couple of times in the last few weeks. Still... I tell myself that I could still live in Wyoming. I mostly grew up there, and survived a good share of interesting weather. I've seen snow in September... and in June. I've seen a ten day period where the temperature did not get above zero degrees Fahrenheit. I saw an April blizzard that closed the town I lived in for three days. Compare that to the winter of 02 here in Ohio, where is snowed on thanksgiving and the ground was covered completely until spring, hey... I can do this on my head. Ask me again if we get another winter like '78, where the Ohio River froze over.
Eggs (week ending 1/22): 46
Eggs (year to date): 159
Because of the cold, I've kind of minimized the extent of my Saturday Projects. That's when I do a lot of work in the barnyard on the coop or building goat gates, etc. - the weekend warrior of chooks and goats. So there's not a lot of progress to report.
Still, a couple of things. First of all, on the 15th I let the silkie/cochin crosses out. They were about 10 weeks old, about a third of the size of the rest of the flock, and I figured they could handle themselves. So far they have. In fact, they seem to be more willing to come out of the coop and into the cold than the others. It's either reckless youth or their feathered feet.
Also, Biscuit has disappeared. He/she/it was last seen about a week ago, sounding a little hoarse when meowing for foot. It either succumbed to what made it hoarse, made tracks out of there, or was snatched up by an opportunistic predator. I think it was probably the first, maybe the last. I don't think Biscuit ran away because it was perfectly happy with the goats.
I'm hesitant to write it off, though. For a time, Cleopatra would disappear in the summer and then turn up right around Halloween. She did this like clockwork for a couple of years, until we started feeding her in the barn (which she seems to like more than being fed at the house - she no longer wanders, and we see her every day). Considering youth and inexperience in Biscuit's case, however, I'm not going to get my hopes up.
There may be a redesign coming in The Accidental Farmer's future. A couple of reasons for this. First, I've been thinking about moving the main page from Blogspot to my ISP's web server (so it can all fall under the auspices of my main site). Second, I'm taking a class in HTML, and part of our grade is given for creating a personal web site. Well, I have two, and one of them was just redesigned, so... we'll see what happens.
