Two chickens

For the last three years, since before my granddaughter came to live with me, she has been begging me to get chickens.  I live in town and until two years ago, we were not allowed to have chickens, but they changed that to allow backyard chickens, but there is a two chicken limit.

This past summer she started in about the chickens so I finally relented and off we go to the farm store to see if they had any chickens.  We can't have roosters so I had to make sure those babies were actually girls. I have no idea how to tell chickens apart but they assured me at the store that these were not roosters.  I was skeptical, but we got two little chicks and brought them home.  My granddaughter said one of them could be for her little cousin and one would be hers.    

So he came over and I told them they had to choose names for the chickens.  She named hers Mrs. Cheep.  My grandson, who can be a bit on the kooky side sat there saying "Um, um, um" but he finally blurts out a name for his chicken-----  Rainbow Cat !!!   😲  Don't ask me where that came from. My granddaughter just looked at me when he said that and laughed.    It was his chicken so I had to abide by that name.

Mrs. Cheep and Rainbow Cat are now grown chickens and laying eggs. We get at least one a day, and sometimes two a day, but I think Rainbow Cat doesn't produce as many as Mrs. Cheep.  Mrs. Cheep lays green eggs and Rainbow Cat lays.........  no, not rainbow colored lol.  She lays blue eggs. These chickens are mutt chickens, or more specifically Easter Eggers.   A cross breed.  They are friendly chickens, though Mrs. Cheep tends to dominate Rainbow Cat because Rainbow Cat is shy and submissive.  I mean what do you expect from a chicken named Rainbow Cat???

Here are a couple of pictures, one when they were babies and one from a couple of months ago. They are both fatter now than what these pictures show.   

Rainbow Cat on the left, Mrs. Cheep on the right.

Oh, when they finally started laying eggs, I told my granddaughter she would have to start eating eggs more often.  She look horrified and said "I am not eating eggs from the chickens!"   I said, "why not".

She replied "because the eggs come out of their butts!"   ( Granted,  I had no idea till I looked it up that they do indeed come from the same orifice as everything else ).    I asked her "well where do you think the eggs come from that are in the store? "   She sat there for a minute then got the funniest look on her face and all she said was "OH".   I still laugh about that, but I am happy to say she got over her aversion to eating the eggs from her chickens.

That is all I have this morning.   

Much Love,

Lia   2/24/2022

Just Dance

 My granddaughter has a Playstation 4 and one of the games is called “Just Dance”. There is a camera that comes with this Playstation and when you play this game the camera records the people who are dancing, which there can be at least 4 people at a time. Each person has an image that they follow along and try to copy the moves that image is making. Everyone gets a name. They gave me the name “Crazy”. Hmmm

The other day, she, my daughter and my six year old grandson were doing this “just dance” in my den. I went in there to watch them and the grandkids were begging me to dance too. Now these dances are pretty fast paced and quite seriously I am not much of a dancer. My dancing involves me and my broom in the kitchen and that is about as far as it goes. I told them “no, Nana can’t dance, at least not those dances”. But they kept begging me, so I gave in. I did tell them to scroll through the songs so I could see if there was anything more familiar to me rather than these “attitude” songs that they were dancing to. I don’t really know how to explain what I mean by that, but the songs remind me of a sassy teenage girl LOL.

I was just hoping to find something a bit slower, something for a 66 year old lady to be able to keep up. So when they came to “These Boots Were Made for Walking” . I told them I would dance to that one. I thought maybe I could keep up with an oldie like that.

Bottom line is, I won that dance. I actually won! But it was not easy because whoever wrote that program has jazzed this song up a good bit and it was NOT slow, nor were the moves easy. But I won.

There was a price to pay for my victory though. I pulled something in my left leg. The same leg where I had the bum knee for a year awhile back when I thought I could climb to the top of Bruneau dunes in Idaho and found out I was not as young and agile as I used to be, though I did make it to just a few feet from the top before I injured myself.

Anyhow, no more Just Dancing for me. I won…. Once. Once is good enough for me and I learned once again, that I am not as young as I used to be.

Have a great week my friends!

Much Love,

Lia 2/23/2022

I have become a hermit !

 At the beginning of 2020, I reset my trip odometer because I like to see how many miles I travel in a year.  Well since it was 2020, there was nowhere to go really. To the store and to the office where I was working which is close by.  I can't remember how many miles exactly, that I put on during 2020, but it was something like 1700 miles ans some change lol.  On January 1, 2021, I reset my trip odometer. I forgot to reset it at the beginning of 2022 , but I just checked and it sits at 2768 miles. I don't work at the office anymore. I actually retired in September of last year so I am home most of the time. I take my granddaughter to school every morning, but the school is on the street that runs behind me and it is only maybe a mile and a half to the school. I pick her up in the afternoon.  

I go to the store but only when I absolutely half to and I take her places she likes to go, but they are all here in town. 

I haven't had a road trip in I don't know when unless you count a short one up to Port Orange to walk the trails at a garden/park up there.  I haven't really even been to the beach this past year except for one time during the summer.

I used to go all over the place, all over the country, this side of the Mississippi anyhow.  The trips to Idaho were always by plane, but I always thought how I wanted to one day drive out there so I could see more of this country.   But that will probably not happen now and I probably won't be doing a whole lot of road trips anymore unless I do one in the summer.   Not even sure I want to do that much driving anymore.  I used to think nothing of riding up to Indiana by myself.  Now I don't even like to go to Orlando by myself. I don't like Orlando anyway, so no big loss, but one of my daughters lives over there so on occasion I meet her for lunch at one of the restaurants on this side of Orlando because I will not get in the middle of that crazy traffic over there. Just to make it clear, it is not that I am afraid to go out.  It's just life, for the last couple of years, that thing called life got in the way.  And I DO love the peacefulness of my home so I am pretty content being here.

But I need to get out of this "hermit" mindset I have gotten myself into because that wanderlust has been creeping in, so maybe this year is the  year for another road trip.

We shall see.

Much love,

Lia 2/17/2022

Cobwebs and other things

 Yesterday I mentioned the cobwebs that my granddaughter pointed out.  I said it disturbed me because I am normally a thorough housekeeper.  But the real reason it disturbed me has to do with the funk I have been in.  Years ago, when I was in that dark place that I mentioned, I went through the motions day by day doing what I had to do and no more.   When that dark could lifted, one of the first things I noticed were cobwebs.  In the corners of the rooms there were cobwebs. In almost every room there were cobwebs. I was horrified.  I couldn't figure out why I never saw them.   Maybe, just maybe because I spent so much time being down, that I never bothered to look up ---- in more ways than one.   Anyway, just thought I would make it clear why those cobwebs the other day disturbed me so much.   Like I said, I am NOT going to get in that place again, but seeing the cobwebs that I didn't notice made me even more determined.  

I am continuing with my spring cleaning each day. This is a four bedroom house with a livingroom, a den, a kitchen, and two bathrooms.  This might take awhile...  

Yesterday I washed the ceiling in the kitchen.  Do you ever do that?  Do you realize how much grease accumulates on the ceiling, at least by the stove?  And the dust that sticks to the grease?   It's been awhile since I scrubbed the ceiling. I do the floors on a regular basis, but the ceiling is kind of a once every so many years, unless I am real motivated and then I might do it at least once a year.  So it is done and all sparkly clean , well maybe not sparkly, but clean at any rate.  So I won't worry about it for awhile, though I may make a point to at least clean right there where the stove is once in awhile.

Has anyone noticed how people coming out of the stores do not look for cars coming as they step off of the curb to go out to the parking lot?   I started noticing this around last year.  People don't look anymore. It has gotten worse this year for some reason.   Now I am not talking about old people (older than me), though they are bad about it too. I am talking young people, 50 and under, even 20 year olds.  They never look both ways. Covid must have made people more trusting so they no longer have to worry about someone running them over.  The thing is, drivers are not cautious anymore either. Everyone is in a hurry and they drive fast even in the parking lots.   Me on the other hand, I am a turtle in a parking lot. I don't want to run be going so fast that I run into someone who is backing out and didn't look, or who is stepping out into the parking lot without looking.  And me, I look both ways, then I look both ways again before stepping out.   I mean I don't want to be the one who gets hit by these cars that are driving 30 miles an  hour in the parking lot!  I value my life and besides, that would hurt to get hit by a car!   

I need to get back to my cleaning but I want to say this one thing----  

GO TRUCKERS!!!!! 

Much love,

Lia 2/11/2022

Random

 I haven't written in a long time, and I don't know how much I will write here, but I just wanted to try to type something so people don't think I went to the land where nobody knows your name (everyone has an idea of the afterlife, so fill in the blank with your own beliefs)  _______________ .   

I'm doing my Spring cleaning which is something my Grandma and my Mom always did right before Easter back in the olden days when I was a kid.  Wayyyy back then in the middle of the last century of the last millenium.   The other day my granddaughter asked me " Nana, when were you born?"  I told her I was born a long time ago in the middle of the last century of the last millenium.  She looked kind of confused so I explained to her about centuries and milleniums and by the look on her face, I think I might just be ancient in her eyes.  Then she said "but what year were you born?"  So I had to tell her that I was born in 1955. Her eyes got real big and she says " you are old Nana".    Thanks kid, don't remind me.  I looked in the mirror the other day and told myself the same thing.  And I don't even know how this happened.  Life is so fleeting...

Well none of that has anything to do with Spring cleaning.  Florida doesn't really have a Spring so my Spring cleaning usually starts at the beginning of January.  But I was sick in January and it took most of the month to get back to normal and then suddenly it was the 10th of February and I realized I had better get started because in the blink of the eye, it will be hot here and I don't do Spring cleaning when it is hot.  Another thing that spurred me on this morning, was when I was reading to my granddaughter, which we do every night. She was laying down on the sofa with her head in my lap and she interrupts me, and says "Nana, we need to save those cobwebs for when  World War 3 starts, because it is going to start soon". She notices cobwebs under a wall shelf because of the way she was lying down and looking up.  Two things disturbed me about her comment.  One, the lesser one, was the fact that I had not seen those cobwebs myself, because I am normally a pretty thorough housekeeper.  But what disturbed me the most was that a ten year old has to even think about WWlll.  What a shitty world we live in...   Oh, the reason she wanted to save the cobwebs for when the war started, was because she had just learned how they would use cobwebs in the Civil War to stop bleeding in wounds. 

For most of last year I have been in a funk for reasons I should not have to explain if anyone has read the couple of posts I put up this year.  Back in 2010 I spent a year or so in a deep depressive state, a really bad one.  I wrote my way out of that state and one of the last things I wrote, was a description of what it felt like and a promise that I would NEVER let that dark cloud overtake me again.  It's not something a person can understand until they have been there, but I am a strong person so it was not a pleasant experience for me to be wallowing in the darkness and I determined to get out of it.   With what has transpired over the last year, I guess I would be justified to just give in and wallow for a year.  But I wasn't going to let that happen.  That depression way back then was because of a situation that I probably could have avoided, but I was stupid and let myself get wrapped up in something that was not in my best interests. I wrote about all of that back on Multiply so I won't go down that silly trail again.  It all seems so ridiculous now and just a blip on the screen of life.   

This year, this situation shook me, but it didn't break me.  It hurts to know your child was in so much pain that she didn't want to live.  But I know, that she would not want me to give up, she would want me to go on living and not to wallow in sadness. And it hurts to lose a young man, an "adopted son" to a bioweapon.  That really hurts. But life has to go on, we have to move forward. And yes the grief is there and it may be there for a long time, but LIFE is worth living and so I go on...

Well that's it for today. I need to get back to my spring cleaning and figure out how to save cobwebs!!

Much love,

Lia 2/10/2022