West Virginia, Chicken Drama, Running and SCUBA... BUSY!

Last weekend we packed up the family and headed down to visit our friends at Snowshoe, WV.

It also happened to be the same weekend as Blues, Brews & BBQ. Perfect timing.

Our friends' daughter Grace was turning 2, so we brought her some books. However, we didn't want her almost 4 year old brother to feel left out, so Jay picked out a book for him.

Blues, Brews, BBQ and... ziplining?

I tried the Nutty Blonde from Morgantown Brewing Company. Oddly delicious!

Grace grew tired of her birthday tutu, so everyone took turns wearing it.

Jay... everyone's favorite uncle.

Double yolker from one of our Anconas

We arrived home to discover that two of our new girls finally started laying... AND one of our roosters was missing. A few feathers were the only clue of his disappearance.

Post-run and filthy from wing clipping. This is Lucky, no worse for the wear after her neck degloving injury when she was two weeks old

Monday morning I received a phone call from one of my girlfriends. A neighbor had posted on my Facebook page that a dog was attacking our chickens. That explains what happened to the rooster!

I'm pretty sure that the dog belongs to one of the neighbors at the end of our village, but of course they don't keep it confined to a yard or tied up. I can't blame the poor dog, it's the people that are the problem. Our neighbor called animal control who caught it and took it to the humane society. The animal control officer said that someone pulled in the driveway after they caught the dog. The person claimed that the dog had been hanging out there and they thought that the previous owners had left it. I don't buy it for a second... I'm sure that the person was just worried about getting in trouble.

The neighbor managed to get the hen away from the dog. It looks like it was my silver laced wyandotte, who is a gorgeous bird. She doesn't appear to have any blood or wounds fortunately. Poor girl.

The flighty hens (Anconas, White Marans, Easter Eggers and Wyandottes) all had their wings clipped when I got home from my run at Adkins Arboretum. No more escaping their run to get into trouble. Only supervised free ranging from here on out!

Running is going well. I'm slow, but I've been sticking with the C25k program. I start Week 6 with my next run. Last night I was supposed to run 20 minutes straight with no stopping. I opted for a lovely wooded path that turned out to be narrow and filled with roots and spiderwebs. So between the arachnoleptic fits and tripping over things, I made it to 11 minutes before I had to walk. However, I only walked for a minute & a half before finishing the rest of the program. Not too shabby.

Our SCUBA class is almost over. It's been a lot of fun and I will miss the regular pool work. I never thought that I would end up being so comfortable underwater - especially considering my fear of deep water. The difficulties that I had doing the skills during Discover SCUBA in Australia are almost laughable to me now. I can now set up my gear, doff and don my SCUBA equipment at depth and the surface, remove & replace my mask and clear it, use an alternate air source, recover my regulator, maintain neutral buoyancy (it's admittedly a work in progress), do a tired diver tow, all sorts of things.

The final exam is on Wednesday and we'll be doing our open water checkout dives on September 28th and 29th at Lake Rawlings. I was hoping to get our Advanced Open Water course completed next... which we really could do by mid-October. However, we are hoping to buy a new car by the end of the year and we need to put any extra cash towards a down payment. Not to mention that we'll probably be spending a lot of money when we get our puppy! No word on a breeding yet, so it looks like we'll be bringing home puppy closer to Christmas or even January.

That's the latest dirt! 

More chickens, more injuries

I’m afraid that some of my new babies are mean little assholes.

I came home from work a few weeks ago to find one of my white marans chicks covered in blood with a degloved neck. She was a little over two weeks old. Her buddies caused this injury by pecking the hell out of her. Poor baby. Apparently once they see blood, they keep at it. It can get pretty nasty.

(BTW, do NOT look at "degloving injuries" under Google images - you'll be sorry!!)

I’m sorry for the graphic images, but I hope that this kind of info might help someone else whose chick ends up with a similar injury.

My first thought was that she was a goner. However, she seemed happy, so I wasn’t going to give up on her.

I separated her from the others and put her in a bin in our tub. I crushed up a tiny amount of aspirin for her water and put some triple antibiotic ointment on the wound. In hindsight, I wish that I had irrigated it with saline or watered-down betadine solution to get out anything that may have been in the wound.

She wasn’t thrilled with the antibiotic ointment and shook her head like a wet dog every time it was applied. I ended up wearing a fair amount of it each time I put it on. She also liked to scratch at the wound with her foot, which was just awful to watch. Ugh. I tried to put some nonstick dressing on it, but getting it to stay was pretty much impossible, so I gave up.

I applied the ointment every morning and evening. The entire time she was eating and drinking normally like nothing had happened. She kept flying out of her bin and pooping everywhere. NBD, just hanging out with this giant hole in my neck. She was also lonely and incredibly sweet. She peeped incessantly until you would hold her. Every time I would pick her up, she would run up my arm and nestle into my neck. 

One day I didn’t get a chance to do the ointment in the morning and by the time I checked on her at night, the wound had started to scab over. It had been 5 or 6 days, so I decided to leave it alone and let it continue the healing process.

The wound continued to scab over and heal. After she’d been separated from her tormentors (who were moved out to the new coop) for about 9 days, I decided to attempt a reintroduction. After all, as I mentioned - she was flying out of her tub and crapping EVERYWHERE. She had become quite the sweet annoyance. So I sprayed BluKote over her wound and the area around the wound to discourage picking and pecking. It didn’t go very well initially. The big meanies started pecking at her again and she made no attempt to get away from them.

So I grabbed a cat carrier and threw her in it inside the coop. That way they could see her, but they couldn’t get to her. Yesterday morning I went in to change her food and water and she flew out. She went up to some of the other chicks and started pecking at them and basically acting a little crazy. They seemed to be leaving her alone, so I crossed my fingers and went to work. When I got home, she was doing great. There were no new marks on her and she seemed like she was getting along with everyone.

So that is the happy story of our little white marans chick Lucky. We hope to have no more misadventures with the new flock of babies, who turned five weeks old yesterday.

New coop and attached run

We are hoping to officially introduce the big girls to the little ones this coming weekend. They have had supervised visitation over the last week and the little ones seem to know to stay out of the way. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we can get everyone into the same living quarters this weekend – before our trip. Although we don’t actually leave for Australia until next Saturday, we are leaving for NJ and a friend’s wedding on Friday.

Fortunately we have a small army to take care of all the critters. A book club friend's daughter is taking care of the critters, and if she can't make it either my friend or her fiance (who is the E.D. for the Humane Society) will stop by. There are a few other friends who have offered to stop by and check on things too. So I know that we're leaving our house and pets in good hands.

I’ve started to pack and have been making good progress. I had been having nightmares about forgetting things for the past few weeks, so I decided that I needed to take some action.

Exercise and diet have still been good - exercise moreso than the diet. I've had a few cheating days with the diet, but I've still been averaging at or under 50-70 net grams of carbs a week. I'm swimming one or two days a week, walking and doing the elliptical one or two days a week, and over the weekend, I used the post hole digger for a few hours. Let me tell you, that is HARD work. I don't think I could cut it if I had to do manual labor. 

My weight is still at a plateau, but I feel like I'm more fit and healthy than I was a month ago when the plateau started. I don't have any good recent pics of me, because I avoided cameras for the latter part of last year. For real. I felt huge and tried to stay behind the camera instead of in front of it. For my Wordless Wednesday post, I'll be posting some of the few recent-ish photos from the last year or two, plus a current mirror self-portrait. They're all the rage on Facebook, you know. Maybe I'll even do the pouty face!