every walk is a sort of crusade
Keeneland yesterday was awesome.
Also, happy Boston Marathon day! Good luck to everyone running.
To get in the spirit, nice interview here with Shalane Flanagan (of whom I am a big fan) from this weekend. Really interesting commentary on the physical and emotional toll of having a bad race, and kind of impressive that she’s able to talk like this a few days out of her first big race back. Cheering her on from my desk.
Go ahead and add the Spring Game to chicken livers, mudding, frog giggin, and everything else on the growing list of Things In Kentucky That Don’t Make Sense To Me.
This Saturday was the Spring Game, or the football team’s first intramural scrimmage of the year. This is how it works: people start tailgaiting around 9am. Then, at 7pm, 50,000 people file into the stadium to watch UK play…itself. And when there is a first down, or a touchdown, everyone cheers. Even though we are also defense, and just got scored on.
It makes no sense to me at all. And every time someone dropped a pass, everyone was like, “Whelp, good thing they’ve got another 7 months of practice before the first game.”
Whatever. I guess the life lesson here is: never turn down an opportunity to tailgate.
Go Cats.
Happy first day of spring from my office window. And yes, that is snow.
You may have noticed a certain topic that kind of dominated this blog last spring has been conspicuously absent this year (see: here, here, here…)
Kentucky got off to kind of a rough start this year, but by mid-season had really started to pull themselves together and play like rockstars. Then, in one unfortunate incident, things came crashing down.
Because about a month ago, Nerlens…
(this Nerlens, not
that Nerlens)…did this:
I know, that is so gross, I almost didn’t post it. But for those of you out there who are unfamiliar with basic human anatomy, he really messed up his knee. Tore his ACL. And at the same time, the soul of Kentucky. Right in half.
I love the camera man’s face in that picture.
And last week, it was finalized. Kentucky didn’t even make the tournament this year.
(I have no idea where that picture came from).
And so, while UK sits in mourning, and Louisville continues onto the tourney as the #1 overall seed (which is absolutely KILLING Paul), and the people of Lexington drown their sorrows in bourbon, talk of next year’s recruiting classes for both basketball AND football (?!?) is already flitting through the air giving the Wildcat Nation a thread of hope to cling to in this time of dire straits.
There’s always next year.
This picture is so creepy. Yes, we are the weird neighbors that the kids dare each other to ring the doorbell.
The girls have had a change of heart the past 2 weeks. I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ve been consistently getting big, beautiful, fully-shelled eggs. It’s wonderful. This one had a few calcium deposits on the shell, maybe they don’t need all of those oyster shells? Whatever.
Helping Paul get his work done. Always.
Dammit. My pretty blue shoes. That mudhole just looked like dirt.
Sunday morning pancakes. I haven’t made pancakes in forever, I never think to. They were delicious. I ate 4.
So yes, things here are HAPPENING.
I have spent this past week daydreaming about the day that the outdoor pools open. I can’t help it.
We actually had some warm weather this week. 70 degrees on Tuesday…70!…which meant a nice after work run with Paul in SHORT SLEEVES…followed by this:
Of course. Complete with tornado warnings and severe weather sirens. Thursday was back in the single digits, and Friday we woke up to a light dusting of snow, and 8 degrees outside with a wind chill at -4. Hurrah.
Saturday morning we woke up to some pow-pow. First real snow of the season. Some were HAAAAPPPYYYYYYYYY.
Others were not.
Did not want to come out of the coop…and pretty much didn’t all weekend. (I didn’t know this, but in the winter time a lot of chickens can actually get cabin fever from never wanting to come out of the coop. They do not like snow.)
I was scheduled to do my long(er) run of the week Saturday morning. Woke up to way too much snow and ice on the sidewalks. Which meant this.
9 miles on the treadmill at the Y. Baaaaaaaaaaarf.
I usually limit my runs on the treadmill to an hour/7ish miles. Max.
But with snow predicted all weekend and limited options, I sucked it up and JMFDIGDI. Broke the run up into: 2 mile warm up, followed by 2 x 3-mile efforts at a faster pace with a half mile jog in between the efforts and again at the end as a sort of warm down. So much easier to digest mentally.
And 1.5 episodes of Real Housewives of Atlanta later, I was done.
The rest of the weekend was hijacked by Gone Girl, which I started reading on Thursday and just finished this afternoon. So now I have my life back.
I won’t lie, I’m not too sad to see January gone. If it hasn’t been obvious, things here have been very slow. And cold. I’m ready for sun and gardens and thunderstorms and spring. One step closer.
Let me tell you what I dream of. I dream of a better world where chickens just lay their eggs, with shells, and don’t take part in cannibalistic infanticide.
The past few weeks we’ve seen a few more rubber eggs, which had me concerned, followed by…nothing. We’ve actually had a few days where no eggs have been laid, and many days with just one egg.
I was starting to freak, thinking dammit, it’s over, we’re going to have to send Romy to the big freezer in the sky…when I came across this:
It’s the middle of winter. You’re getting very few eggs from your flock, if any at all. They’re still in the stages of molting, or they’re just finishing up their last molt. …
Many chickens cease laying during molting as they need to channel all that energy — and all available protein — into growing out their feathers, which are almost purely protein (keratin fiber, to be exact).
Oh, Garden Betty. You’re good for more than just Xmas presents. Though, in addition to putting our coop to shame, she also makes me feel like a negligent chicken owner.
Our chickens are molting?
I’ve maybe seen a few extra feathers lying around, but no piles of discarded down or balding spots on the ladies or “crazed porcupine” necks. Nothing freakish.
This change did coincide with a few weeks of no sun, meaning it stayed dark until well past 8am, and a pretty extreme drop in temps (I went running the other morning–17 degrees out, felt like 3.) So it is possible.
Paul spoke with the woman at Southern States, who assured us that the feed we’re buying is infused with plenty of protein for winter. So…fingers crossed that I am just unobservant and this is what’s going on.
P.S. Thanks goes out to Uncle Joe for the opening picture.
Because of where we sit geographically, Kentucky is prone to ice storms. Last night they were predicting nasty weather, so of course that’s all anyone was talking about in the office. I started saying that I thought the ice storm I experienced the first winter we moved here (2010) was the most beautiful thing ever. My co-workers were like, uh, we haven’t had an ice storm since 2009 (and it was bad, people lost electricity for over a week, trees were falling on houses…). Apparently what I had experienced was just freezing rain (which, btw, is different than sleet). Stupid Californian.
Anyway, we had more freezing rain last night. Despite that, the roads and sidewalks weren’t too icy, and the air actually wasn’t too cold (in the 30s), so this morning I headed out for a run into a glass wonderland. Everything is covered in a perfect layer of ice. In the dark, with the street lights illuminating the twinkling trees, it’s kind of magical.
I’ll tell you who doesn’t think it’s magical.
And they let us know by laying another rubber egg this morning. Eff. We need to figure out what’s going on.
And, totally off topic, I’ve been watching this video over and over and over this week.
For reals.
More chicken drama.
A few days ago, after a week of successes with the new penthouse, I went out back to let the chickens out and found one of them pecking at something inside the coop. At first I thought she was just eating her own turds (weird and gross), but upon further inspection realized that it was actually an egg. With no shell.
What.
I scooped up the gelatinous lump with a very obvious yolk in the middle with my little shovel and, after a lot of gagging, threw it in the trash. I then got online to make sure that what I had found was actually what I thought it was.
During this process I learned way more about the chicken reproductive system than I ever really wanted to know.
But I also found out that these shell-less eggs, aka “rubber eggs”, do in fact exist.
There were numerous reports of shell-less eggs showing up in both chickens that are beginning their laying cycle (younger chickens) and those who are ending it (older chickens). It can also be caused by stress, poor nutrition, or a calcium, phosophorous, or vitamin D deficiency.
I also learned that some people EAT THESE COAGULATED BLOBS. They’re like, “Oh yeah, just throw it in some boiling water and let it boil like a normal egg.”
Um, no.
While I’m really hoping our chickens aren’t getting towards the end of their laying cycle, the general consensus across chicken forums seemed to be: don’t freak if it only happens occasionally, because sometimes it just happens. And so far, for us, it’s only happened once.
So I’m not freaking. Yet.
Rambulatory Ambulatory 