Weekend Roundup: L and M

I didn't do my usual blog last week and I'm pretty late doing it this weekend, too.  Just very busy and I haven't been taking many pictures at all.  I feel like there isn't much of interest to photograph - just more ice, snow, ice, snow, rinse and repeat...

I'll do the prompts for last week and this week together.

Starts with L
My goat is named Lucky Nickel. I've told the story before, but for newer readers, I'll tell it again.  Her mom was having a lot of trouble during the birth and I had to call the vet.  The first baby was too big to come out, and the vet was unable to save it - in fact, it had to be decapitated to remove it from the mother, which was very distressing.  It took a long time, and the vet, Dr. Nicholson, had said that any other babies would likely be dead because of the difficulties.  He then pulled out the second baby - a doe who lay on the straw looking dead, but then suddenly coughed and we realized she was alive.  So, she was lucky to be alive, and also lucky that Dr. Nicholson was there, so she became Lucky Nickel (also a bit of a play on lucky penny).  Lucky Nickel's mom died shortly after the birth, which was really sad, so LN was raised in the house on bottles, and was spoiled to bits, which is probably why she remains a spoiled, bratty goat to this day!  On April 19th, she will be 8 years old.

Starts with M
This is a picture of my chicken, Maple.  She is a cross between a Swedish Flower and an Isbar, both fairly uncommon breeds of chicken.  She's just about reaching laying age. 

Maple is often found with her friend, Star, who is an Isbar-Icelandic cross hen.

And here's Marble, who is a Maran crossbred hen, having some melon for a snack.

Long
I've been trying to get out for some walks lately, since the weather is slightly less frigid and the snow and ice on the road is not as dangerous for walking.  This is a view back down the road having walked up the long hill that is part of my 1-hour walk circuit, and I'm about to head down the other side.  I do this part at the beginning of the walk because it is the harder part and I don't want to do the climb at the end.

You can see there is still a fair amount of snow here, and our house is surrounded by woods (and thus shade) so the snow in our yard is still over a foot deep throughout.  The fields in this picture get full sun all day on sunny days but they have a way to go before they will be clear of snow.  It is always a LONG winter here.

Middle
Back to Lucky Nickel for a moment - you can see that her horns have grown long enough that they now meet in the middle - just at the tips.  This can be troublesome in a young animal if the horns rub against each other too much, but since Lucky Nickel is older, her horns only grow a tiny bit each year, so this won't be a problem for her.

Favourites (2 of them, one for each week)
Our rabbits spend a lot of time in mutual grooming sessions.  Here's Epinette patting Pippin on the head, which she sometimes does during grooming. 

Here's my second favourite photo for this week - our cat, Mitten (bonus M) on the middle shelf of my cookbook shelf unit.  He seems to like this spot!

The Weekend Roundup: E

This weekend's prompts from Tom the Backroads Traveller are: Starts with E, Evening, and Favourite.

Starts with E

Eggs start with E.  We had a scarcity of eggs over December and January, despite having nearly 20 hens of laying age.  I choose not to provide supplemental lighting in the coop, believing that my hens' bodies deserve a rest that nature orchestrated for them.  The past week or so has seen a small uptick in egg production though, as the winter day length slowly starts to increase.  This week, we actually had a 4-egg day, which is quite egg-citing!  

I am charmed by the daily experience of going to the coop to collect eggs.  The range of egg colours provided by the hens is quite lovely.  At the moment, we have a very dark brown egg coming from one of the maran breed hens (not sure which one).  You can see one of them on my counter-top "egg skelter" below, which keeps my eggs in order of collection so we always use the oldest ones first.

The small pale cream coloured eggs are from a silkie hen, and then there are eggs in various shades of brown ranging from pale tan to an almost pinkish-brown.  The silkie eggs are about 1.4 oz, whereas the larger pinkish-brown eggs are 2.7 oz.  

Favourite

Well, sticking with the egg theme, I'm always particularly fond of the speckled eggs.  I do have a couple of hens that may be blue-egg layers, and those are a competitor for favourite egg.

Evening

I don't often take pictures in the evening....I suppose because most of my pictures are of birds and other things in nature, which aren't easily photographed in low light.  In addition, at this time of year, it's far too cold (in my opinion) to spend time outdoors photographing in the evening.  At the moment, for example, it's -24 Celsius with the wind chill...that's -12 Fahrenheit.  I just don't enjoy being out in those temperatures.  I thought about using a photograph from an evening at another time of year, but looking at them just made me grumpy because it's such a contrast to now, and spring is so far away...at least another 2.5 to 3 months.  At least the day is getting a little longer, as the chickens can attest, and so here is a picture from my living room window, at 5:18 pm, today.  I'd call that early evening.  It's just bleak and cold and everything is white or grey.  I don't even get pretty sky views because the house is surrounded by trees.  I look forward to the weather change when I can once again sit out in the screened porch in the evening.  Until then, I'm stuck with this.  Winter evenings are for knitting on the couch instead of taking photographs!

The Weekend Roundup: C

Today's Weekend Roundup from Tom the Backroads Traveller has the following prompts:  Starts with C, Week's Favourite, and Clouds.

Starts with C
We had a snowfall earlier this week and it accumulated quite a bit, so there was a lot of clean-up required.  This was my car:

Here's the chicken coop (double C!), with the path that I dug to it so I could easily get out there to fill the feeder and waterer!  The chickens don't like to come out of the coop at all in this weather.

I found some crab-apples still on the branch, wearing snowy hats:

Week's Favourite
I had a slightly less crazy work schedule this week, which allowed me to take a few minutes to work on a craft project - I wanted something small and easy that I could complete quickly.  Thus, I knitted this cute little hedgehog.  That was my favourite part of the week!  (Bonus letter c:  The back of the hedgehog is knitted with chenille yarn).

Clouds
After the snow, there was some blue sky, but as usual at this time of year, there were also clouds, and within about 20 minutes of this photograph being taken, there was no blue sky to be seen at all. 

At this time of year, I get rather tired of grey, dismal, cloudy days.  Today is actually sunny, although very cold, but that's better than gloomy.  The long term forecast for the coming months suggests that by mid-February, we are going to head into a period of lower-than-normal temperatures which will persist throughout the month of March.  I'm not looking forward to that.

The Weekend Roundup

Now that Eden Hills has passed the torch on a weekly blog link to Tom the Backroads Traveller, I will still try to participate, although it's tricky with my crazy busy life at the moment.  Today's blog is brief because I have a lot on the "to do" list at the moment!

This week's prompts from Tom are:  Starts with A, Week's Favourite, and Art.

Starts with A
Here's a picture of Twilight, my sheep, adorned with hay after getting into the new bale that I put out for them.  Perhaps she looks a little abashed?  But still adorable.

Week's Favourite
I didn't have time to take many pictures this week.  In fact, the only pictures I took were a few last Monday of a pheasant in my backyard, under the bird feeder.  This one is my favourite because you can see the action of the snow flying as he was digging for seeds.

Art
I liked this painting of a cow, which I took a few weeks ago at the conference centre in Ottawa when I was there for a meeting.  I'm always fond of animal-themed art.