Day 18

I went to take the egg turner out of the incubator and put it on lockdown. I candled the eggs one last time.

None of them made it.

Status Report

Things I'm doing in my life right now:

* Incubating eggs. It's been mildly frustrating as the eggs I got were definitely sub-par, but I've got at least one little chick in there thriving. If it ends up being my $114 chicken, so be it.

* Planning a garden and gathering supplies/seeds. Probably going to get started on seedlings near the end of the month :)

* Researching sheep and alpacas and making plans to purchase some in the near future. Sheep sooner than alpacas due to both $$ and ease of care.

* Protesting.

* Sleeping. A lot.

* Got some fillings done yesterday, so trying to get used to the new way my mouth feels. Might need to go in again if this left side keeps bothering me, but we'll see.

* Crying. A lot.

* Trying to stay up to date on the goings on in the world. There's a lot to keep up with. Making informed decisions is hard and kind of scary, but a necessary part of life, especially in today's political climate.

* Making more of an effort to get involved in the community.

* Making more of an effort to hang out with friends. I have a hard time balancing friend time and me time.

* Thinking about babies. Idk if the biological clock theory rings true for all, but it's ringing on my ovaries something fierce.

* Regretting the time I don't spend drawing, but then being scared to death to spend time drawing. I've been writing and editing a webcomic a lot since November (nano), but whenever I get to the point where I need to start character design, I wig myself out.

* Struggling. A lot.

* Questioning my faith. Or maybe moreso questioning what I thought my faith was, or what other people expect my faith to look like. Worrying about this all the time.

* Probs getting more bunnies too :3 Emailing breeders and getting info on some fuzzy friends.

* Trying to balance all this and way more.

Candling 1 Week In

I candled the eggs today and found both good and bad. Most of them, I'm pretty sure, are duds. (The only experience I have with this was when Margot went broody and took over a nest of eggs. At 1 week, they all showed much more obvious signs of development, like one of the eggs pictured below.)

None of the Lavender Orpingtons are fertile from what I can tell.

This one has weird bubbles going on inside it.

Not sure what that blob is, but it looks more like a blood spot than a developing chick.

One of the Ameraucana eggs was fertile, but has the red ring of death inside. 

Red Ring of Death - Not just for Xbox.

I think a total of 5 are fertile and developing, 3 Ameraucanas and possibly 2 Marans. Though really, only two of these look like they're doing really well.

Not super convinced by this one, but maybe?

Another possibility?

Yes, go baby! Keep growing! This is what Margot's eggs looked like.

I super hope this is a chick and not just a super dark shell.

Dubious at best about this one.

So. I guess we'll see. Overall still pretty disappointed in my "fertile" hatching eggs. I think from now on, I'll stick to buying chicks, then try incubating from my own flock.

A Lesson in Forced Optimism

Well, I've decided to dust off the old blog for a potential exercise in futility. After writing draft 1 complete with bile and vitriol, I've decided to dial it back and hope for the best. I've never actually hatched eggs before. (Which is what I'm doing. Have I mentioned that? I guess now I have.) I've only ever read about it, and books tend to involve more cautionary advice than real life tends to warrant. Maybe things will be just fine.

SO. Here's day #1* of my hatching adventure.

I'd like to say I left this moring giddy at the prospect of retrieving my purchased hatching eggs from a local-ish hatchery/breeder 4 hours south of where we currently live. The truth is, even though I went to sleep early, I was barely able to drag myself out of bed and get out the door on time. Maybe it's post-election depression, or maybe it was a vague precognition of the anxiety I would be facing hours from then when I would discover the less-than-stellar condition of my hatching eggs.

Did I say I was done with the vitriol? Yeesh.

Maybe it's because I've spent years building up to this point, finally got myself an incubator for Christmas and ordered purebred hatching eggs, a less expensive option than ordering live purebred chicks, but still not cheap. My whole money-saving theory is built around the idea that the eggs will hatch. And going to a local breeder, driving instead of having them shipped, will give me the best chances for success, right?

I guess we'll see.

Anyway, I get there (ok, yes, at this point having squealed with excitement as I approached the final freeway exit) and prepare myself to meet my eggs. Disappointment does not begin to cover how I felt. As the owner came outside and gave me the eggs, she opened them up and showed them to me. I could see from the cartons that they were smaller than an average chicken egg, which my book studies explicitly state can result in sickly hatchlings due to stunted growth.

Ok yes, my hands are big, but not THAT big...

But hey, I've never hatched my own eggs before, so what was I to know? Maybe that was fine. Then I saw the dirt/poo smears. SHE also saw the dirt/poo smears and seemed surprised. Was this the first time she'd seen the eggs too? She then proceeded to tell me to just wash them off with a wet paper towel and they would be fine. Every book I've read on the subject says not to incubate dirty eggs.

But again. I've never done it before. Maybe that was an overly restrictive view and they'd actually be fine. How was I supposed to know? That's the entire reason why I decided to buy from a local breeder. I thought I could trust a higher standard of care than I would get from a commercial hatchery. So, not knowing if or how to confront any of this due to my lack of experience, I just took them and left. Then about a mile away, pulled over and called my husband to complain while I inspected them more closely. Almost all of them are half the size of a normal chicken egg.

Seriously! Look at the size difference!!

And I also noticed that some of them were almost as round as a ping pong ball. Another hatching no-no I came across while reading.

"Too Round" Oh, you mean like this almost identical example from real life? Great.

Even that big brown one pictured above next to the small one looks eerily similar to the oblong egg pictured in the book.

SO.

I'm letting them rest, blunt side up, in a cooler area of the house for a few hours. Then, I'm going to mix up a warm, very diluted bleach mixture (internet** says 1/2 tsp of bleach per 2 quarts of water at 100 degrees) and gently remove the ick from the dirty eggs. Then I'm going to put them in the incubator and hope for the best. Because I haven't done this before, and maybe this is all just my anxieties getting the best of me.

Guess we'll find out in 3 weeks.


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*If you don't include the years of planning, dreaming, researching, and gradual implementation that led us up to this point...and also led to my deep sense of disappointment.

** Yes, I frantically googled all of my issues the minute I got home to either confirm or discredit my fears. It's about 50/50, as it usually is with anecdotal evidence on the internet.

Fun With Fluff

Last week, I got rid of some spinning stuff I never used that was just taking up room in my closet (for the curious, it was a flyer for a wheel I didn't have and, sadly, will not be getting anytime soon). I was able to make a trade with someone on Ravelry for some old carders and a bunch of lovely dyed fiber! I got a beautiful assortment of Merino, Corriedale, Alpaca, Mohair, and even some silk!

After I opened the package, stopped drooling, and watched a few tutorials on Youtube, I got to work with my new-to-me hand carders! I blended some of the red mohair with Ellie's white hair at about a 70/30 ratio and got this:

Guys, it is SO SOFT. I made about 5 rolags of it and found an appropriate home for the delectable fiber. It even smells like chocolate now!:

Since then, I've spun two rolags onto one of my drop spindles. At first I was terrified to mess up, but you know what? I've got a renewable source of fluff in my back yard. If I mess up, I mess up, and I'll learn from it and move on. Here is what I've got so far:

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it as I don't really know what qualities these two fibers have (memory, drape, etc.), but whatever I make, it is going to be SOFT! I'm thinking probably fingerless gloves. Easy first project for my first hand-carded fiber :)

Also, for anyone interested, the person who traded with me has an Etsy shop. You should go check it out!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/Taneliearth

Have a good Monday, everyone! :)

Gardening Woes

I love gardening. Where I grew up in the middle-of-nowhere Michigan, we had beautiful black soil, and our yearly gardens flourished. I always helped my dad plant and care for our gardens. My favorites were always the tomatoes. There's nothing better than a plump red tomato, straight from the vine, still slightly warm from the sun. A close second would be the root vegetables because I loved pulling them up at harvest time. I think  I enjoyed the surprise. You have no idea just how big that carrot is going to be until you pull it out of the ground.

Maybe it's because of the poor soil, maybe the heat, and maybe it's because my dad's not here to help me weed and water (let's face it; he probably did most of the work anyway), but I have had the worst luck with gardening in Arkansas. The soil is hard clay, and the summer heat is much, much hotter than I'm used to. I've tried planting in the raised bed garden that came with our rental, I've tried container gardens out of 5 gallon buckets, and I've tried hanging plants. Everything I've ever planted has died horribly, save for the herbs in the pots on my back porch. But still, no sun-ripened tomatoes for this girl. I had all but decided to give up when my bunny gave me an idea.

Oh that's right, I haven't introduced her yet! Meet Eleanor:

I call her Ellie :)

So, Ellie and I have this idea to turn that garden spot into a little run for her, like what I used to have with Neville, only bigger and with bunny-safe plants sown into the soil. My plan is to till it up and plant stuff like strawberries, dandelions, grass, timothy hay, wheat seeds, oats, carrots, and other various bunny-safe herbs (that aren't used for specific medicinal purposes). Hopefully planting mostly grasses and herbs will make it easier to keep alive. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

So, while I may not have the pleasure of plucking tomatoes off the vine or pulling up giant carrots this summer, I will have something growing in my back yard, and that will be enough.

Sep, Oct, & Nov

These are projects from September, October, and November. There are some doodles, sketches, digital work, and an oil painting.