Nest in a Mug

I found this mug at a vintage shop and loved the spring colors.  I knew it would make the perfect spot for a little nest.

It's actually a shaving mug; the shelf with holes is where the soap sits.   

I made a spot for the nest with some strips of burlap, paper ribbon and strips of dictionary text.   Then added a little nest, some feathers and the faux robbin eggs.

Pretty sure I'll be drinking out of this mug after the eggs hatch.

Chickens!

 I made this page for last year's family calendar, not expecting that we'd have some hens of our own.  The Captain has talked about getting chickens, but I was most certainly not interested.  I knew a family that had an egg business, which meant they really had a chicken business.  All I remember was the pungent odor  stench and being pecked by some aggressive old biddies.  No chickens for me!  But our local farmers' markets have beautiful blue eggs which I happily buy at over $5.00 a dozen.  So it came about that I agreed to have a few chickens, but only if they laid those lovely blue/green eggs and did not wander all over the lawn. 

 The Captain and our son built this chicken ark out of scrap lumber and chicken wire, then painted it with a mixture of all the off-white/yellow paint dibbles left over from other projects.  There was some pressure to get this done - our granddaughter is coming to visit next month and she is expecting chickens!!

 We found three chickens on Craigslist - two Aracaunas that lay those lovely blue/green eggs and one Polish hen that lays smaller brown eggs.  That's the Polish hen above - we named her Lady Gaga for obvious reasons!  The Aracaunas are Thelma and Louise.  Here's a picture of what those ladies look like because for some reason I don't have a picture of our pair.

 We got our birds last Wednesday and as of this morning and they have settled in nicely.  (Well, there was that one instance of Lady Gaga literally flying the coop ark and wandering about the lawn as pictured above).   We're learning all kinds of things.  I Googled "the best chicken feed" and went to the local feed store where the clerk was less than amused by being asked if the chicken feed had any other whole grains besides corn!  Really, does she just think handing over a bag of nuggets with no label, no information is going to satisfy the Queen of Researching Information on "the Google"??  We're going to find the organic version - geesh, even our cat food lists all the nutritional information in great detail! 

The hens have been very busy.    Seven eggs in less than four days - not bad for "stressed" chickens!   

The color of the inside of the shells is so pretty!







Bright yellow yolks, super-fresh from the ark to our  breakfast!  Eggs from the Aracuana hens have a slightly higher cholesterol content than most eggs because of their higher ratio of yolk to white.  Since we don't really eat that many eggs, I'm not concerned and think the freshness and better quality feed will still make them better for us than commercially farmed ones.  We already have people asking for blue eggs, so I don't expect us to go over our "eggs only on the weekend"  rule.

Just a thought - never say never.  Here I am with chickens in my back yard.  What next?

Well, here it is, blog post number 1 !

New Year resolutions are looming large - making them is easy, keeping them not so much.

One of mine for this year is to eat more responsibly, a la Michael Pollan's recommendations. Practically speaking, our ( since I do most of the cooking, my resolutions for what we eat are also the default resolutions of the Captain as well), resolutions are to eat less, more vegetables and less meat, meat and eggs grown humanely , and less processed food. This last one means I have to give up my "fat-free" half and half , having recently discovered that it's second ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup!!

The Captain sent me this great link:

http://www.wspa-usa.org/pages/2481_eat_humane.cfm

You can enter your grocery store, select a product and find out which are grown humanely. This week my focus is the egg and avoiding eggs from chickens raised in those horrid cages, overfed and over-medicated!

We recently had some very fresh eggs from free-to-roam the Vermont country-side chickens. They had amazingly brilliant yellow yolks, almost orange. No more sad chickens producing eggs for us!

The Captain wants to raise chickens, mostly to amuse our adorable grandaughter. We're investigating some way of containing the birdies while still allowing for wandering about. I've agreed to this chicken venture as long as we get some that produce those beautiful speckled eggs.