Another One Bites the Dust

This is what greeted us at the door when we got home from church on Sunday.

Two eggs for breakfast please

I went out to check for eggs yesterday and found this in the chicken coop. It scared me half to death initially, but then I went running to get the camera and Paul.



We watched him for about 10 minutes. This is his first egg for breakfast. We only filmed for about 30 seconds at a time, so you have to watch all the clips to get the full story.







And this is his second egg.










After the egg got about 4 or 5 inches down, he suddenly contracted his muscles and lunged forward a few inches. This caused the eggshell to crack and the big bulge when away. Unfortunately, we didn't get this on tape.

Here's Paul playing with the snake about a month ago.

Heinous Guineas Part 2

Just some pictures to enjoy.

Their eyes are a nice pretty blue. Can't really say much about the rest of them. You can certainly picture them pecking a hole in a chicken's head. I hope these guineas behave themselves.

Nighttime rituals

While most creatures slow down, get quiet, and settle in for the night, the guineas have quite another nighttime ritual. They eventually do settle down, but before that there is quite a bit of activity and a cacophony of sound. Our neighbor Joe called last night to see if the guineas were all right because he could hear them from his house. They have recently started sleeping in the mesquite trees at night.

Doghouse? I thought this was my private chicken coop!

Every morning this chicken jumps over the fence to get into the backyard and lay her egg in the doghouse. Here is part of the sequence. By this time, she has already walked across the lawn and is circling the doghouse.

After she's done, she goes back across the lawn and jumps back over the fence.



Then we have to get the egg out of the doghouse, which is the hard part for us. The lid, which is a 4 x 8 piece of plywood, lifts up so we can get into the doghouse without crawling in.

I wore this shirt for my beloved sister, Vivian. She hates my shirts with the holes in the sleeves.

Rain

Last night we had a huge rainstorm. It was accompanied by tremendous amounts of lightning and thunder. The storm must have been directly overhead. Findlay was sleeping inside our room as usual, but even being in the same room with us was not enough to keep him calm with all the noise. He kept walking around to Paul's side of the bed. I guess he had to get the real "alpha dog's" reassurance and not just mine. Eventually, I moved his dog bed right beside me so I could keep my hand on him, and every time there was a clap of thunder he would jerk his whole body. I had never seen him so scared before.

When we checked the rain gauge in the morning, we had gotten 2.9 inches of rain. You could see in the backyard that there had been rivers of water flowing from one side of the property to the other.


Our burn pit (which is about 2-1/2 feet deep) was completely full of water.


It looked like there were oil slicks on the water.


When we looked more closely, the oil slicks turned out to be thousands of little bugs floating on top of the water. We have no idea what they were.

Heinous Guineas

Yesterday, my sister wanted to know how the "heinous guineas" were doing. This picture should confirm that they are indeed heinous. The guineas are starting to practice their calls and other vocalizations. I'm not sure what they're so excited about in this clip, but they do this every evening. The distinct two-syllable call is from a female guinea. The males can't make that sound.

Horses and Goats

One of our neighbors is keeping their 4 horses and 1 goat on our property. They are very fun to watch, especially the goat who is quite friendly.


Shortly after the horses were moved over to the property, another neighbor and her 2 kids came over to look at them. We had gone into the house to talk for a while, and the little girl, Lizzy, came running in to tell us that one of the horses was pregnant. We told her that that wasn't the case, but she insisted that not only was one of the horses pregnant but was giving birth at that very moment and one leg was already out. I won't go into any more detail except to say that one of the horses is a male.

Guineas and Chickens

We've been slowly introducing the chickens and the guineas to each other. At first the guineas were very afraid and would go to the top portion of the coop and hide. The chickens seemed to be more interested in eating the grow feed, so they pretty much ignored the guineas and went straight to the food hopper. You can see they are mingling together in this picture.


This is the top half of the coop looking straight down. When we first opened up the cage to the chickens, the guineas would line up next to the stairway and look down at the chickens. They would hang their heads way over, and it was pretty funny to see from below.


We left the cage open one night and Buffy, the alpha chicken at the top of the pecking order, went up there to be with them and show them who was boss.


Last night was the first night the guineas slept outside. Previous to this, the chickens (all 19 of them) were crammed into one coop and the guineas in the other. Guineas naturally sleep out in the open like this, so soon the chickens will be able to use both coops again. Unfortunately, the guineas got quite a scare this morning when some javelina broke into the chicken yard. Two of them flew over the fence to get away from the javelina, and they were making quite a racket this morning trying to get back into the chicken yard. Thankfully, they all survived. Findlay didn't make a peep while all this was going on. He's not a good watchdog. Maybe he's deaf -- or scared!

Guineas

Today we got our guineas in the mail. They are African white guineas.

Here's how they were packed in the box.

This is their setup with the heat lamp and their food and water. One of them drowned in the water bowl within hours, so now we're down to 15 guineas. It looked like he/she fell asleep in the water and drowned.

No fashion sense

Today Paul said, "That's an interesting outfit you're wearing -- Black shorts, extremely white shoes and socks, and white legs."

San Diego 2010

Campsite setup

Becky cooking a delicious shrimp fettuccine dinner

Camping with electricity and internet access - the only way to camp

Jet ski fun

Red Dragon

Paul got a new toy to play with. He bought a Red Dragon propane torch to burn the weeds in the yard.

He was having a wonderful time burning weeds in the backyard. After about half an hour I went outside to see how things were going. I looked around the yard and saw some smoke coming from the corner of the yard by the fence. So I said to Paul, "Should the fence be smoldering over there?" He calmly looked around, didn't seem too alarmed, and said, "Go put it out." I don't think he could tell from where he stood that the fence was on fire. He told me later that he wasn't going to go near the fire because he had a propane tank on his back. I suppose that was wise!

Paul surveying the damage.

McGoon

Goony is 13 years old now. I can't believe that many years have gone by. Over the past year he has been losing weight and now weighs only 11 pounds. He used to weigh about 20 pounds. Last week he got another infection in his head in the same spot where he had one last year after the cat fight, so we decided to take him to the vet -- or I should say I made Paul take him to the vet.


This is what Goony's head looked like last Friday morning. We couldn't really see where an injury was, but his head was all puffy and he suddenly had a bald spot on his head.


The vet drained out the pus and prescribed this combination of antibiotics.


We have to administer it using a plastic syringe. It smells like bubble gum, but Goony is not very fond of having it squirted into his mouth and a lot of it ends up all over my hand and his neck.

While we had him at the veterinary clinic, we decided to find out what was causing his weight loss. The vet said his heart rate was 246 and all signs pointed to an overactive thyroid. So after the blood test came back, that is indeed what he has. This is the medication that we are supposed to give him.


This end of the tube is to be turned 2 times (where the arrows match up). This squirts out a very small glob of medicine that is to be applied to the inside of Goony's ear. There's a foam applicator where the medicine squeezes out from under that yellow cap.


Another strange thing happened to Goony while he was at the vet's office. She said he was dehydrated, so she took him into the back room and administered some kind of subcutaneous fluid under his skin. He came back with his hair all wet, so I'm not sure how much actually made it into his body. He seemed to be okay until the next day when he suddenly was nearly unable to walk at all. It was as if his back legs had no strength or coordination at all. He could barely stand up, take a couple steps, and then squat back down. When he tried to pee in his litter box, he didn't have the strength to squat for long, so he ended up lying down in the litterbox. It was quite sad and distressing.

So I took it upon myself to diagnose the problem. I had watched a TV show that showed a person with severe potassium deficiency who had become paralyzed in a short period of time. Well, I figured that Goony might have a low potassium. We just happened to have potassium pills in the house, so I ground one up and put some of the powder into Goony's food. He got a couple small doses of this, and by the evening he seemed to be a little better and was back to normal by the next day. Of course, I have no idea if I was correct or not in my diagnosis or if the potassium had any effect at all, but Goony is back to his normal self so that's all that matters.