Just blowin' in the wind

Sunny skies today, hardly any wind.  The weekend was very different.  We had up to 80km winds here battering on side of an old house.  We managed to come out the other end unscathed except for the lid off the chimney which took flight on a south eastern trajectory.  There were reports from the chook yard of a flying saucer nearby but nothing confirmed as yet.  And whilst the wind smashed us all from the west, a new batch of babies arrived safely. Er, like we need more chickens!!!  There's many predators around that take them before they get much of a chance so we've locked them up this time with mother for safe keeping.  Gulls and Butcher Birds are known thieves of chicks and I've seen both hovering around.  Yesterday I heard the Guinea Fowl screeching their most alarming of sounds when I noticed a cheeky Butcher Bird up a tree considering a swift move.  It was interesting to see the Guinea Fowl being protective of someone else's chicks even though they don't have much time for them themselves.  Come feed time the Guinea Fowl

will chase all chooks away until they've finished eating.  No manners, but pecking order rules.  So as the sun comes out today we've got some clean up to do as the 100 year old Oak tree out the front throws branches back at the wind and all over the front yard.  The hardest hit are the poor roses.  They're leaves are shredded as the wind tears through them and the flower buds hang on for dear life.  I'm sure it somehow makes them stronger but they're looking like they've been in a fight, and lost at the moment.  I'll try to keep the watering up (it seems like it never rains here) and give them some food to boost them up a little.  That's Autumn for you.  A selection of fabulous mild sunny days with a gentle breeze, then all hell breaks lose.  Never dull anyway.

Last in line has its advantages

Roosters get a bad rap around here. Whenever we try to sell or give away any of our chicks, it's always the same 'no roosters, please'.  We've had to take a few back when little Henrietta hen lets on she's actually Henry.  We've got way too many of course and it's not that we don't love them it's just that in the morning it gets kinda noisy around here.  Fortunately being on property and not so close to neighbours we can see into their kitchen as in our previous life, we can indulge a few of the early morning crowers.  Whomever implied that roosters only crow at sunrise obviously didn't stick around long.  They crow all day long.  It's a method of communicating.  If you listen, you realise they crow in response to another rooster who's sent up the call.  And not necessarily on your property either.  Crossbeak (pictured left) is a perfect example of bucking the trend though.  He's been to the vet and returned with a less protruding beak, and he's managed to accommodate his disfigurement to great advantage.  Quite frankly he knows he's special.  Roosters will generally scratch around for food and alert the hens to their findings.  They'll point out cake crumbs with great excitement and break up the bigger pieces to distribute amongst the girls, without eating any themselves.  However as Crossbeak is never entrusted to a group of hens (they're so judgemental) he pulls out that disabled sticker faster than you can say 'now who likes bacon rind?'  He'll shove any hen aside to get face first into whatever meal is on the go and ignore the protests from rule following roosters in the pack.  He's able to get away with this as he's so far down in line to the throne of head rooster he knows there's no point trying to impress anyone, male or female.  He knows he's special and follows me around the garden.  He'll eat out of my hand and cry blue murder when he's forced to eat with the others.  He's a lucky little fellow as our vet advised us, he was lucky to survive given the way his top beak crosses over the bottom.  He'll always be a special little guy for us.  Even if he'll never be king.

Does anyone have a chicken bandaid?

There's a cold front heading our way, expected to arrive some time tonight.  This is then to be followed by another cold front.  I'm not sure if that cold front makes the effects of the first cold front colder or just backs it up with a bit more cold front support.  Either way, the gentle breeze and slightly warmish sun peeking through thinly dispersed cloud will disappear by tomorrow under grey skies, wind and hopefully rain.  And so my opportunity to be in the garden will end very soon.  Whenever I head out in the garden I'm always accompanied by my feathered friends.  Yesterday, after a quick check on Narla our guest sheep who is eating her way through our weed paddock I headed back towards the courtyard.  At that point I heard a loud chook scream, nothing unusual.  There are often many chook screams and protests about many things in chook land but this time it was Doris (pictured left on the chair).  Doris is a popular character in the chook family.  She's named after Doris Day and has a 1960 hair do to match.  She's deserved of her own facebook page but I'm unable to find the time to manage it for her.  Today she came running towards me screaming.  I looked down and the front of her chest feathers had blood on them.  She was standing on one leg with her beak open, as if in shock.  I wondered if she'd been attacked but there were no likely predators in the yard and Bennie our Cocker Spaniel has no interest.  For a minute I even thought she might have lost a leg but realised that she did in fact run over to me and not hopped.  I got a bit closer and her foot was bleeding.  She appeared to be in a bit of shock and just stood there looking at me.  I wanted to help but didn't really know what to do.  With no likely predator, no motive and no evidence, there wasn't much to conclude.  I gave her a water bowl and she had a few sips and slowly recovered.  She stayed next to me for a while and then commenced limping off into the yard.  It's a bit difficult when they don't know why we can't understand them.  They try so hard to communicate with us but we're just dumb humans that don't understand chicken speak.  I'm sure she'll be ok, she's been known to over dramatize the situation.  But for now I really must get on and utilise this small window of outside weather before it's gone.  And according to Doris I need to look out for invisible leg mutilating monsters of some sort.

I said no parties...

The highly anticipated night away in a cabin over the Easter period restored the senses.  We sat fireside and ate slow cooked lamb and wondered what our two feline home residents were up to in our absence.  It's unfortunate that when you do go away for a night you can only take the dog with you as the option of having a banshee wailing cat in cage on the back seat of the car just kind of ruins the moment.  Let alone the stress you cause them every time they go anywhere, so best if they're well stocked with food and water and left to wonder if we ever even left.  We returned with our bags dumped inside the door to find the television blaring.  It wasn't on when we left.  We also very soon became aware of a live bird sitting in the chandelier in the dining room. Boy, talk about Home Alone!  The fireplaces are all blocked up and the working ones have glass doors that were all closed.  The not so home alone Starling had evidently flung itself throughout the entire house leaving a trail of destruction on the carpets, wallpaper, windows, you name it, it crapped there.  As for the two felines...sound asleep.  Or at least pretending to be.  I thought I said no parties!  One of them must have stood on the remote control although the On button is a teeny tiny dot on the end of a keyboard mouse size remote.  How they managed to do this is beyond me.  And as for the bird, I opened a window and it gratefully took off to the skies vowing never to visit ever again.  I did wonder what I might do if the next time we come home and there is a DVD playing and the electric blanket switched on.  Bazaar.

Wanted - Chief Clock Winder on no pay

Old houses and old things require time.  This was a stark reminder as the cold wind whipped up the leaves from under the back door to gather them up in the hallway.  Autumn is here and it suddenly got cold.  This means fires to keep warm.  We do have electric wall heaters but they are quite expensive to run and you can't really whack a modern dual air conditioning unit into the wall of an 140 year old Victorian homestead.  Well you can...but I personally wouldn't.  So without wanting an electricity bill that requires the both of us to sell a kidney or two, we use the wood fire to stay warm.  And if you have wood heaters, you know they take time, kindling, and constant attention.  It means you all congregate in the one living room.  And it's a popular spot in front of the fire, where we try to accommodate drying clothes, rising bread dough, two cats, a dog and us.  We're a close family in winter.  The other labour of love would have to be our clock.  We toyed with the idea of getting a grandfather clock as I've always loved their imposing presence in a room.  It reminds you that you are in fact, just taking up time.  We decided on something more manageable and less likely to wake us up on the hour every hour, so we adopted an Ansonia kitchen clock (pictured).  It chimes on the hour and once on the half.  And it don't come with batteries.  Which means that someone needs to wind both the clock and chimes at least once a week or else silence.  The job of clock winding also requires a clock reset which means you must go through the clock cycle to pick up the correct chimes.  She's a bit fiddly and doesn't like to be forced backwards.  I suspect she detests Daylight Savings/Summertime as I do because it just throws everything out of sync.  Old houses used to employ people to wind clocks and attend to wood fires.  That would be perfect (dream on sister) but not likely and our house isn't exactly a castle and I possess no crown jewels to pay someone.  So while a cold westerly reminds us that winter is coming, we'll chop wood and put on extra clothing - and eat chocolate as well.  Happy Easter if celebrating.

Breakfast cereal with no added animation

I think sometimes we like to read the headlines of a favourite topic so we can quietly say to ourselves 'I knew that' or even better, 'hah, I was awake to this all along...!!!'  Fake food is one of my favourite aha topics.  Having long turned into one of those mad muttering people at the stores with the bright lights and trolley aisles, I feel a sense of pleasure when I read something suspect about manufactured foods that provide more nutrition in their packaging than the product itself, or at least the box may be less harmful.  Commercial breakfast cereals and I parted ways many years ago having gleefully read somewhere that one of the most famous of them contained as much salt as a packet of crisps.  I didn't want to know if it was entirely accurate or not, I just wanted to have my quiet aha moment.  Leaving my quality nutritious breakfast in the hands of food manufacturers was a risky route given they have shelf life to consider and wages to pay.  A lot of popular breakfast cereals now are so targeted at children they just look like an ad for the latest kid's movies - so rather than shoving a tiny Fred Flinstone in my mouth at 5:30am, I figured best if I do my own.  And geez, it's not hard.  You could fill a grain silo with the amount of granola recipes out there but depending on how much stuff you want to chuck in, it's mostly up to you.  Mine's pretty basic with no sugar.  Yes, no sugar needed as I don't need to keep it in storage for a year.  I use locally produced honey to toast with the oats and then add coconut and dehydrated fruits afterwards.  We're really lucky here in Tasmania to also have access to loads of fruit and also left over local harvests that are freeze dried with nothing added.  They do apple pieces dusted in dried blueberry or raspberry.  Just perfect for this.  And then I also add whatever nuts I've got in the cupboard.  We had a bumper crop off our almond trees this year and I managed to get most of them off faster than the green squeaky parrots.  These parrots make a noise similar to someone squeezing a rubber toy.  And boy, can they strip an almond tree fast so I get in quick, with me on one side of the tree with secateurs in hand, and parrots on the other side munching away at a rapid rate.  Once dried, I roast them (the nuts, not the parrots).  Fresh nuts are a treat as I'm convinced the ones in commercial muesli are a bit old, perhaps even had a birthday or two.  Your own granola or muesli (call it anything you like, just not anything that's copyrighted or about to be released into a blockbuster animation movie) it won't stay fresh forever so eat it on top of your poached fruit and yoghurt, and when you want to replace it, the chooks will be happy to help you out.  Oh, and by the way...Wikipedia states that a bag of potato crisps will be 1% sodium.  And a cupful of Cornflakes will be 8%.  Aha! No wonder they keep so well.

Bunny boiler alert

It's so dry.  No rain.  We've put in the oats with the hope that they'll manage to struggle up to the top with some tiny green shoots.  On my walk with Bennie yesterday along the farm lanes in between crunchy dry paddocks you could see the wide cracks in the earth along the side of the road.  It's been so very dry.  And even though we've got politicians in the media every day promising just about everything for everybody if we let them wear the biggest hat in town, I'd hate to rely on them.  Far away from the steering committees and policy advisory boards people are digging holes and putting the seeds of food in the ground for our survival.  My trip to the big shop with the bright lights, trolleys and long double sided aisles gave me a sense that real food was disappearing off the shelves.  I'm not talking about empty shelves.  No they're stacked full of bright, shiny packets with images of cooked food on the front and a list of unheard of ingredients on the back.  All very instant.  In the 70's they called it 'convenience' food.  Now it's called snacks.  Snacks seem to be replacing ingredients.  The choices are getting smaller and smaller and what was once a shelf with three or four brands of the same product, is now a choice of the house brand being the cheaper option and one other.  And when no one buys the house brand, the other seems to magically disappear somewhere.  Unfortunately this is occurring more and more as our purchasing is directed and monitored through the data available to these giants.  It's clever.  But it still smells.  And whilst they react instantly to trends and customer feedback, at the end of the day their shop is about profit.  Not our nutrition. So if the Easter Bunny dares rock up to my house with anything dairy free or soy based, he'll be conveniently crock potted.

The big dipper

Boy!  Talk about ungrateful.  We get high winds here.  Living on an island you see.  And when you're on a small hill on an island with no protection from a giant hunking mountain like Wellington, we cop it pretty hard sometimes.  Where we are the westerlies get us the most.  It leaves our front verandah with old and slightly rotted palings flapping in the wind like a lose baby tooth needing to be yanked.  The winds lift off anything unsecured and whip it around the paddocks.  Your if left on the line could quite easily be wrapped around next door's cows and your underwear found somewhere near the airport.  Our chimney cover has taken flight on the odd occasion even we thought it was secure.  It was found a few months later lodged high up in a tree looking like some sort of small lost space ship.  Well that's what the chooks thought it was.  We're yet to put it back (see long list of jobs to do) and as a result the starlings find hours of entertainment pushing each other down our chimney.  You'd think word would have got around starling circles that it's a bit risky.  Bennie, our ever vigilant Cocker Spaniel is right onto this one.  He checks the fire places every morning.  He hears them scratching around at the top and goes bananas.  As he did this morning.  I have to open the glass door of the unlit fireplace to prove to him that there is nothing there.  And so I did.  And so I was wrong.  Bloody starling comes belting out throwing itself at all and sundry.  By this stage both Max the ragdoll cat and Bennie are on the chase.  Bennie won't kill a bird, it's not his breeding, he's a retrieval dog and Max, well unless it comes in a pouch or a tin with a picture of a cat on it, he's just not interested.  I've tried feeding him cooked and raw meat in the past and the look of disgust on his face was disturbing.  So starling disappears within seconds.  Gone.  Big house and one loose starling.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the other outdoor cat who's sound asleep on our bed upstairs.  Yes, ahem, outdoors!  So after a small slightly interested search and about ready to leave it to some of the more interested parties, I discover a starling lying beside the fireplace, dazed.  I swiftly pick it up in a clean tea towel (you're not getting the good ones), and as I do this it instantly wakes up and starts squealing like a stuck pig.  I take it outside and release it.  Still screaming blue murder, it swiftly takes flight upwards.  Then I look up to see a few more lined up to do exactly the same thing.  Guy's it's not a theme park you know!