Good morning.

We are sick. Again. Last night was rough, and we finally threw in the towel at 4:00, and just got up. Dishes half done, three loads of laundry, and we got an enclosed area for the ducks done. I took pictures, but I don't know where they went. Does anyone else have a Polaroid PDC 5080? We seem to have lots of troubles with it---things stop working, then miraculously start working again... pictures disappear, and reappear weeks (or years!) later.

Anyway, I kicked the broilers out yesterday--literally forced them to go out the hole into the big outside. (It's all enclosed now!) They don't seem to like it too much. They'd much rather stay sitting, thank you very much. Then, at the end of the day, I had to herd them back in. Yea, that's fun; chicken herding. I would like to go on record here. We will not be getting broilers again. I'm thinkin' the end-of-the-year chickens for $.50/piece, then butcher in Jan. you know, those nice days we seem to always get. You'll know if that's what we did, if it doesn't get nice in January ;).

The big chickens do not seem to tolerate the little ones as well as we would have thought. Ben has been 'training' Amelia to sit on his arm. She is very good at it. The picture below was taken about 8:00 this morning--none of the other chickens were out (they all came out at 6:30) so, I'm a-thinkin' the big ones kicked the little ones out. Ben can sympathize; it's rough being the little one. Now that the crested breed is big, I kind of think of them as either classical musicians or part of a Big-hair band. What do you think?