Raine came to visit for a few days which went great, even though she had to work more than she had hoped. She and the dogs got along well, and she also got to see her friend, Nicole, who lives in Austin. Raine painted me a painting of the chickens while she was here too!!
During Raine’s visit my brother was driving through Texas so we met him on his actual birthday at a restaurant in San Marcos! That was cool to catch up and give him a couple of little gifts.
Zsa Zsa is no longer broody…but Sisi is! What a pain! Right away I tried putting Sisi in an ice bath, like 3 times in one day, but it didn’t stop her. So I just take her out of the coop a few times a day. And I gather once they are broody it takes awhile before they lay eggs again. So currently, only Matt and Isis are laying eggs!
Brought Sisi in for a quick pick on one of my many trips to remove her from the coop.
Once we were 100% certain that Nessa’s eggs were infertile and LONG past any chance of hatching, we threw them out. Nessa still lives in the yard, though, and has reverted back to her original lifestyle which involved a lot of honking noises and dominating a bit over the chickens. Mostly it’s fine, but I do guard the coop for a few minutes in the morning so the chickens can eat breakfast before Nessa barges in for her meal.
Nessa paces around the run while she waits for the chickens to finish eating in the morning.
Rob built a structure atop Pangea’s habitat with PVC pipes and plastic and we added a reptile humidifier, so that her space now has much higher humidity. Seems to be working pretty well. I also feel pretty good about the foods I’m feeding her which include grasses and dandelion from yard, tortoise grasses I’m growing inside, occasional piece of lettuce or kale, African hibiscus leaves, and moistened tortoise pellets. In fact, I just weighed her this week and she has grown about 35% over the last month! Seems pretty good to me.
And after 3 trips to the vet, we finally have got an OK way to give her daily shots of calcium. Rob sets up the needle for me, and I stick the needle under one of her scales on her forearm. She hates it and usually pees, and I feel AWFUL, but I usually succeed. We can’t wait to be done with this. We still probably have another month to go though.
Sean invited us to see Dwight Yokum with him and his son, Noah, which was very fun. It was an outdoor concert right down the street from us at Nutty Brown.
We also hosted Sean and Regi over for dinner and it was great, and we also went to their place for dinner. Their house is more remote-feeling as it is surrounded by nature rather than lots of yard. They have cool plants and also frogs that hang out around their pool. My favorite part about their place were the two secret doors in the walls!
I’m pretty sure I gasped loudly at this point!!
I feel like I look goofy in this but tough luck I guess.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I finally upgraded my iphone from a 7 to the very newest model! Normally I wouldn’t get the newest but since the camera is completely upgraded and it is important to me, I went for it. And on top of that I recently got two new apps to go to the next level: CinemagraphPro to make cinemagraphs which I LOVE and also Halide to make macros even better! Still getting up to speed on these.
In writing this blog post, all my pics taken with new iphone are appearing warped in this blog post! Not sure what’s going on and I haven’t gotten help yet from Squarespace so I’m just going to post all this even if the images seem warped. Who knows, maybe on your device they will look OK. It’s frustrating me! NOTE: I just fixed them using a workaround they gave me. Hopefully in future they can make this easier :)
Paige informed me that the Grahams, friends from Minneapolis, have moved to Austin! So we invited them over for dinner and it was a lot of fun. Sorry I guess we didn’t take pics. It was fun showing them our place and all the animals!
This weekend we planted veggies in 4 of the raised beds. Some already started and some seeds. Rob cleared out the remains of last year’s garden in preparation, and threw it all behind our fence in the trail cam’s area. So deer are basically in all my trail cam shots lol for the last couple of days. Literally had over 4,000 images to go through yesterday :) Also, rabbits simply do not eat carrots in my experience.
The dogs are obsessed with a couple of baby rabbits that live under the deck. The constant sniffing is one thing, but digging around the edge and/or scratching at the wood is quite another!
