The Weekend Roundup: H

I'm quite late doing the weekend roundup this weekend.  It seems to have been a bit busy lately and I am just catching up with things today.  The prompts from Tom the Backroads Traveller are: Starts with H, House, and Favourite.

Starts with H
Words that start with H include huge, or hefty, which are good words to describe one of today's eggs from the chicken flock.  Normal "large" size eggs from the grocery store weigh approximately 2 oz, or 56 grams, and extra-large weigh 2.25 oz, or about 64 grams.  Here's a fairly normal egg from our flock.

The tiny eggs we get from our silkies weigh about 1.2-1.4 oz (35-43 grams) which is classified as a "small" or "peewee" egg for commercial sizing (based on the USDA egg weights, which are similar to the Canadian egg sizing charts). 

Today's huge, hefty egg came in at an amazing 3.1 oz (87.8 grams) making it the largest yet from our flock.  I feel a bit sorry for the hen who had to push this one out!

Holy cow!  errr....egg!

House
We still have quite a bit of snow around our house, as you can see in this picture.  This is a view of our house through the grove of trees in the front yard.  Although we've had some warmer days and some sunshine, it takes a long time for the snow to melt because we get a lot of shade from the trees.  Some areas near us that have sun all day have no snow, which is weird for this time of year here.

Here's the path to the chicken "house" or coop.  The path is VERY icy right now because we've had several freezing rain events and then melting, with freezing again, making the path a very compacted, icy spot.  I have put some straw down in the front of the coop to stop me from falling on the ice. 

The deck still has a lot of snow on it, as you can see on the steps in the left of this picture, and all the flower beds are still well covered with snow, although it's only about 6 or 8 inches now, compared to the 2-3 feet we might normally have in February.

Favourite
One of my favourite new additions to my house that I assembled and installed a couple of weeks ago is a new bookshelf in the kitchen to hold all my cookbooks.  Now my cookbooks are all close at hand when I am actually cooking, rather than being in the home office.  I have organized the cookbooks by category.

I am very fond of the rabbit and mouse bookends that I am able to use on the bookshelf.  They are longtime favourites of mine as well!

A bonus favourite shot:  Here is "mama" hen Whisp, a splash silkie, with her two young ones, who have grown into lovely little chickens.  The little hen on the left is Buttercream, and the little rooster on the right is Willoughby.  Whisp didn't lay the eggs, but she did incubate them, and the rooster (Wellington) to the left of Whisp is definitely the father.  I suspect that the hen you can just see in the far left (her back and tail are visible) is the one who laid the eggs, since she is the palest of my red hens, and the eggs were definitely from one of the red production hens.  The pale colour of the little ones leads me to suspect the eggs were hers, but I'm not sure.  In any case, they have integrated quite well into the flock and are permanently outdoors now, rather than in the rabbit cage in my home office!  Hooray for that!

The Weekend Roundup (B)

Today's weekend roundup, brought to you by Tom the Backroads Traveller, has given us the following prompts: Starts with B, Week's Favourite, and New Beginning.

Starts with B
Baby starts with B, and we currently have a baby chick in the house.

This baby chick is from an egg that Whisp was sitting on - I showed Whisp in my blog a couple of weeks ago.  As I mentioned in that post, this wasn't planned - it was a result of my being away for a week and Marc not collecting the eggs on a daily basis.  I wasn't sure if Whisp's eggs were developing, but candling suggested they might be, so I kept her with her eggs but brought her inside because of the extreme cold we were having here, which was affecting temperatures in the chicken coop.  This little one came into the world on Monday, which was earlier than I'd expected.

Whisp seems to have taken motherhood in stride (even though these are not her eggs - they were eggs from one of our brown layers).

Week's Favourite
I know this category is supposed to be a week's favourite picture, but I'm never good at week's favourite picture, so for my own twist on this topic, I'm going to start including a brief discussion of my favourite thing about the past week, whether I have a picture or not.  And I might add a picture that is unrelated.  So this week, my favourite thing was the fact that I completed some major projects, and all the BIG project deadlines have been met.  This week (after Wednesday) was my first week in many months that I was able to look at my work "to do" list and say "Wow, I am all caught up!"  This was a tremendously good feeling for me.  I still have ongoing projects, but they are not enough to require me to work late nights and I might not even have to work this weekend, which would be amazing. 

Here's a picture from a couple of weeks ago that I rather like.  It is moss and lichen growing on a tree in our yard. I enjoy the variation in textures and colours.

New Beginning
There is a new beginning occurring in my home office at this very moment. As I said up in the "starts with B" section, earlier this week, Whisp's first egg (of 4) hatched. With no further signs of hatching, I thought the rest were not going to hatch, since they usually hatch at about the same time.  This morning I was cleaning the cage and I decided it was time to get rid of the other eggs since she was not sitting on them reliably any more, being more focused on her new chick.  As I picked up the bag of cage waste material to take to the garbage, I heard a noise from in the bag.  I rushed to get the eggs back out of the bag and realized that one of them had a tiny hole (a "pip") and that there was a chick that was in the process of starting to hatch.  I'm so glad it made that tiny noise when it did!

Here is the current new beginning at the moment (around 3 pm this afternoon).

I set up the incubator and put all 3 of the eggs in there because Whisp was too focused on her little one and she was not sitting on these eggs very consistently.  This is actually normal because, as I said, the eggs tend to hatch at the same time, and the mother hen typically only waits a day or two after the first one hatches and then abandons any remaining eggs.  What I think happened here was that Whisp started sitting on one or two eggs the day that I left, but other hens kept laying their eggs in the same nest box while I was gone.  Thus, the first egg was ahead in its development.  The one that is now pipped is carrying on in its hatching process. 

Around 4:30 pm, the chick began the "unzipping" process in which they begin to open the eggshell completely by creating a break that goes all the way around.  Here was that process underway:


The other two are not yet pipped and may not ever hatch, but I need to give them a day or two more just in case. 

I then went out to pick up our sustainable local fish delivery for the week, and by the time I got home, about 20 minutes later, the chick was out.  I have put it in with Whisp and her first little one.  I had to get it out from underneath her for the photo.  It is still drying off and fluffing up.


Tomorrow it will look like its sibling!

Friday's Hunt v 4.25 and 4.26

I missed last week's Friday's Hunt due to being busy with preparing for the holidays, so I'm doing two in one to make up for it.

The prompts from last week were:  Starts with Y, Tree, and Shadows.

The prompts from this week are: Starts with Z, Reflection, and The End.

Starts with Y
Yard starts with y.  This is our front yard.  As you can see, we do have some snow, although not a lot, yet.  I like the setting of our house with all the trees around it, although I like it even more in the more pleasant seasons of the year.

Starts with Z
This is Whisp, one of our silkie hens.  She is sitting on some zygotes. 

A zygote is a biological term for a fertilized egg cell.  When I was away the week before last, the eggs didn't get collected and I came home to a broody silkie (i.e. a hen sitting on a clutch of eggs that she was incubating).  Not having the heart to separate her from the eggs and throw them out, I brought her inside with her eggs.  It appears that 4 of the 5 are fertile and showing signs of development.  She is really quite young - only about 8 months old at most, but she seems quite dedicated to her egg sitting duties and hopefully she will be a good mom to her little ones if they hatch successfully. 

Tree
The week before last, I was in Ottawa with another consultant to run a workshop for Agriculture Canada.  I took the train for that trip, giving myself some time to work on the train and avoiding the stress that flying causes for me.  At the Montreal train station, the holiday displays included this rather dazzling tree decorated in pink - not exactly traditional, but very effective in my opinion. 

Reflection
For my train trip, I booked a sleeper cabin for the portion of the journey from Moncton to Montreal.  It's about 18 hours long, through the night, so a good sleep is necessary when one needs to work the next day.  This is my little sleeper cabin window, with a reflection of me taking the picture in it.  You can see a pillow at the other end of the seat area on the left side of the reflection.  On the right side of the reflection, you can just see the door to the bathroom that is part of the cabin.  The seat folds down and becomes a bed for the night.  It was very comfortable and cozy.

Here's a slightly better picture with less reflection, showing the seating area and my ever-present knitting bag.

Shadows
At the conference location, which was one of the buildings of the Agricultural Museum in Ottawa, there were some interesting bee-themed decorations being installed in the hallway.  They look like stained glass, although they are actually a kind of plexiglass or similar substance.  I presume real stained glass would be too costly, too heavy, and too dangerous for a public space in case it broke.  It was tricky to get good pictures of the panels due to the shadows on the panels.  Here is an installed panel with shadow on it, and you can also see the shadow of the ladder. 

Here's a yet-to-be-installed panel to show more of the detail.

The End
I've enjoyed participating in Friday's Hunt for the past 3 rounds.  It helped me blog once a week in times when I didn't feel like blogging or didn't have anything to blog about.  Sometimes I feel that it is what kept  my blog going.  Since Friday's Hunt is coming to an end, I'm hoping that in 2018, I will try to make time to keep up with the blog in other ways. 

As the saying goes, when one door closes, another one opens.  Maybe the end of Friday's Hunt will open the door for other blog opportunities.  I will try to keep writing.  Things are so busy for me these days.  Although I've tried to take some time off in the past week, work is breathing down my neck like a dragon with halitosis, and the first few weeks of January are already super booked and busy.  I'm hoping to learn to do a better job of balancing work and home life this coming year.  We'll see how well I manage with that.  I'm also trying to improve my fitness level this year.  My new sit-stand desk should arrive in early January, and I have plans to sign up for an online yoga site that will allow me to choose from various beginner level lessons that I can incorporate into my day.  I am also getting new orthotics soon, which will go into my shoes and hopefully alleviate some foot pain that I have been experiencing when walking.  So, perhaps I will have some things to write about, if I can just make myself take the time to do so.

To illustrate this concept of endings being beginnings, here is a pinecone in the snow.  It fell off the tree, and is thus the "end" of one phase of the tree's development, but the pinecone has seeds inside that will feed squirrels and possibly find their way into the soil and start a new tree.  For me, this also says that even when things are bleak and cold and kind of depressing, spring will return and with it, the joy of green leaves and sunshine.