A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I can never see deer running without imagining an accompanying "Boing boing boing."

When I moved out of my apartment in LA and into a cabin on my parents' property in Mariposa, my original plan was to spend the winter looking for a new place, then move in spring, in time to start a garden and get some chicks.

The way things are going, especially due to the new, more contagious covid strains, that is clearly not happening. I was bummed about the gardening (I figured I could still do pots, but I'd been looking forward to a larger scale) and the chicks, which seemed impossible.

Last night I had a long talk with Kebi and got her full and enthusiastic permission to plant anything I liked around the cabin, including growing vegetables in the orchard next to the cabin and covering the orchard fence and gazebo with morning glories. She also...

[drum roll]

said I could put a hen house for four hens in the orchard! (There's only enough open space there for one big enough for four, and that's also of a size that I could pack up and move with me. I know four is not a lucky number, but we defy augury.)

CHICKS AHOY!

The place that got Kebi her chickens (mypetchicken.com) is sold out of almost everything and is mostly only shipping eight chicks at a time. I'm also nervous about getting mail chicks due to problems with the post office. But I called the local feed store, and they said they can order most kinds of day-old chicks for me.

If possible, I want one Buff Orpington (light brown eggs) and one Easter Egger (blue-green eggs) for sure. They're friendly, cute, and good layers. I'd ideally like a rainbow of eggs. Maybe a Wyandotte (extremely pretty, cream or tan eggs), or an Olive Egger (friendly, olive green eggs) or a Maran (dark brown eggs) or an Austra White (friendly, white eggs)...

Soon the chicks will be mine!

I have a small ice pack balanced on my head right now.

I'm still working on getting photos on DW, but if you can see Facebook, I put some chick pics there.

When we got them, the Americauna (they lay blue eggs) was half the size of the others and had splay-leg. The poor thing could barely walk, kept getting knocked over by the others (unintentionally, but still), seemed depressed, and mostly lurked under the incubator, not eating or drinking.

We treated her with a hobble to strengthen her legs, but we were worried she'd die - birds are delicate and baby birds even more so. (We tried other things too, but suffice it to say they were all wretched failures and the hobble was the only thing that seemed to do anything but stress her out even more.) Kebi named her Beauty to encourage her.

After a week, in which she kept seeming to be hanging on by a thread, we took the hobble off. Two days later, she was zipping around the pen. We moved them all to a big horse trough, since they were too big for the original box. And now, at three weeks old, Beauty is the same size as the smallest of the other chicks, and by far the fastest!

It's hilarious to watch her go for mealworms. She's a spherical ball of black feathers with a fuzzy white butt, and she zig-zags madly around, twice as fast as any of the others, moving like a character from an 80s video game. Kebi says she looks like Pac Man, but much faster.

The chicks all have distinct personalities. Dotty and Wanda like to perch on my hand, and Whiskers (who has muttonchops) made me realize the origin of the word "peckish" because she gobbles so much that at times you can watch her visibly get fatter.

In conclusion, I now want chicks of my own. It's impossible with my current apartment, but I've been thinking of getting a place with a yard for a while now - I want to garden more, I need a generator for medical reasons (refrigerated meds) and it's impossible in my current situation, and now I want chickens.

I have long had a dream of living an at least partly self-sufficient life, ever since I was a kid reading the Little House books. (The Ingalls were also only partly self-sustaining - very few humans have ever lived entirely without the help of others. The only one I can think of offhand is Juana Maria, the inspiration for Island of the Blue Dolphins. Modern-day hermits don't make ALL their own stuff like she did.)

So this last year, I learned to garden and bake bread. My ambition is to garden, eat my own vegetables, feed the chickens some scraps and compost the rest, and eat their eggs. And, of course, enjoy their twittering company and pretend I'm a Disney princess when they flock to perch on my outstretched arms, which has now literally happened. See photo proof!

Raspberry bushes.



My lunch yesterday. Eggs from Kebi's chickens, raspberries I picked myself 10 minutes before I put the whole thing together.

I am at my parents' place in Mariposa, near Yosemite, which is 100 degrees today. We decided against hiking and in favor of reading in the swamp-cooled house.

I finished Karen Healey's The Shattering (excellent, to be reviewed later) and Louis L'Amour's memoir Education of a Wandering Man, which is mostly about all the books he read in his lifetime, many of which I am hoping are now available free online. Kebi (step-mom) is reading A Dance with Dragons, and Dad is reading It Will Live Forever : Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation. He bought the latter from its author at the fair yesterda, after being inspired by the accounts of acorn preparation in Walking Where We Lived : Memoirs of a Mono Indian Family, and is planning to use its very detailed instructions to make acorn. I've told him I want to be here when he tries it. I have been dying to try acorn for ages.

The fair had some moderately large vegetables, excellent fry bread but a sad lack of other actual traditional/local food, and dachshund races, run on a track adorned by a black cow skull on a pedestal, which were won by a non-dachshund ringer, I suspect a labrador puppy. Fixed!

When we went to a local restaurant, we discovered that it was dinner theatre night, and we subjected to a peculiar act which I can only describe as "Time-traveling Catskills drag queens."

"Would you like to touch my pussy?" (Drag queen hands hapless old guy in audience a stuffed cat.)

"But no fondling my ass!" (Sidekick holds up photo of donkey.)

Later, we got the dance of the seven veils: "I am Salome! A vision came on me... I mean, came TO me..."

Some drunks in the back started yelling, "Take it ALL off!" The food, however, was excellent, and due to Kebi's entree arriving late, we got free beer. It turns out that two bottles of Snowiesen are insufficient to make me laugh at double-entendres about cucumbers. We fled at intermission.