It’s a good thing I don’t get emotionally attached to poultry, because we haven’t had a good year for them. I’m guessing it’s bird flu; we lost one of the red hens in July, then the turkey on the 1st, then one of the young white hens on the 10th. They always go the same way: they’re extremely sluggish and keeping to themselves one day, then the next day I find them dead, away from the others and facing into a corner. I am guessing the behavior is an instinctive one, designed by evolution to keep the disease from spreading to other members of the flock. Once I discover the dead bird, I put on gloves and remove it immediately. I am guessing they’re getting it from wild birds that land in the coop; I recently found a dead Steller’s jay not far from there. So far it looks like isolated cases of infection rather than a full-blown poultry epidemic, but I’m keeping my eyes on them, and I sincerely hope we’ve seen the last of it because I really don’t want to have to deal with figuring out how to vaccinate them when the vaccine isn’t readily available in the US.
Posts Tagged ‘Sunset’
Diary #794
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, disease, Sunset, vaccines on September 16, 2025| 1 Comment »
Diary #792
Posted in Diary, tagged recipes, Sunset on September 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »
While I keep very close track of the traditional holidays, I tend to ignore the civil holidays, so when someone says something about “the holiday” or “the long weekend” around Labor Day or Memorial Day or whatever, I often have to ask “What holiday?” because I honestly don’t remember. So when Chekhov texted me late last week proposing he and Yellowbird come by on Sunday to spend the afternoon and grill some burgers, it did not at first occur to me that there was a holiday adjacent to that. Not that it really mattered one way or the other; one nice thing about everyone in our little circle being retired is that we needn’t wait for permission to have a cookout. I had two pie crusts left from making a batch of crust last week, so it was simplicity itself to walk outside, pick a bowl of plums, wash them, pit them, combine 5 cups of them them with 3/4 cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup flour, 1/2 tsp allspice and 1/4 cup of apple cider, mix all that up and put it in the crust, and bake it at 375o for 50 minutes. And boom, plum pie; there’s something extra-satisfying about a pie when the fruit was still on the tree 15 minutes before it went into the oven. As I’ve said before, presentation isn’t my strong point; I probably put just a little too much fruit in, and the crust broke where it boiled out. But what it lacked in looks, it made up for in taste.
Diary #791
Posted in Diary, tagged Sunset on August 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Unfortunately, the lighting strips we used in the atrium were not very durable, so the process of arranging and rearranging them eventually wore their internal connections down, resulting in entire sections going dark and other sections becoming very limited in their color selections. That meant we used them less often and were less happy with them when we did. After a while, this annoyed Jae sufficiently that she bought some more of them, and has been bugging me to put them up since spring. Well, I finally decided to do so on Friday, using a simpler pattern than last time and being careful not to damage the strips. So here’s what they look like now, which I fully admit is much better than they’ve looked in quite a while; I just wish it weren’t so difficult to get myself motivated to do this sort of task nowadays.
Diary #790
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset on August 19, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Early last week, Chekhov was available to help me expand the chicken coop and replace the roof of the henhouse. Given that I’ve been putting the latter chore off for several years now despite the fact that it probably should’ve been done the first year we were here, I accepted the help despite the fact that the three days it took were also the three hottest of the year. But now it’s done; despite fairly constant rain from Thursday to Saturday, the inside of the henhouse stayed nice and dry, and as you can see the flock is enjoying being able to hunt for bugs in the grass they can now get to. As you can also see, our turkey turned out to be a tom rather than a hen; turkey chicks aren’t routinely sexed, so we had no idea what we had until he developed those distinctive head features and started displaying his tail. I’m not sure what Yellowbird will want to do with him, but the experience has led me to wonder if there’s a butcher hereabouts who’d pay enough for small flocks of turkeys to make the investment in time, money, and effort worthwhile. But in any case, it won’t be long before those four white pullets are laying full-sized eggs, which is why I keep them in the first place!
Diary #788
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset on August 5, 2025| 1 Comment »
Usually, I see the first pullet eggs early in July, but because we got our chicks so late this year I assumed they’d start in August this time. Sure enough, on Friday (August 1st) I found this with several full-sized eggs in the nest (my chickens generally share one nest). So if things go as usual, we should start seeing a surge in the number of these over the next few weeks, and by October they should be getting up to full size. The weather has been strangely cool; we’re more than halfway through summer and have only had a handful of days that would even qualify as “very warm”, and only one I’d call “hot” (over 30o C). It’s also been much drier than usual; though we had a lot of rainy days, the actual amount of rainfall has been well below average. So I’m not sure what our fruit crop will look like this year; even the tomato plants seem sluggish (only one small tomato visible so far). But with four new white leghorns, at least we should have plenty of eggs.
Diary #786
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset, video on July 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »
As you can see, our turkey has grown quite a bit! She isn’t nearly as skittish as the chickens, which is quite annoying when I come to throw out scratch for them early every afternoon; she will get up right behind me while I’m getting the corn from its bin, which means when I back out of the corner I often step on her toes because she’s directly behind me (and being a literal bird-brain, she never learns it’s a bad idea to stand there). I hope it’ll be better when we expand the coop in the next few weeks, and it’ll be interesting to try her eggs when she finally starts laying. We’re actually not getting as many eggs as usual right now, but that should change once the four white pullets start laying; normally that starts in July, but remember we got these later than usual, so I expect it’ll be a couple more weeks before we start seeing those.
Diary #785
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, language, Sunset on July 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »
For most of the year, this is the perfect place for the animals’ water trough; it’s directly below the highest-volume downspout, not far from the stable, and it’s low enough that the pigs can drink from it as easily as the llama can. But from the beginning of June until mid-September, there isn’t enough rain to keep it full at all times, so earlier this year I hooked up a battered old hose to the faucet directly below the water tank in the utility room, and ran it through the basement to the trough. I check it two or three times a day, and when I find the water level low I turn on the spigot and fill it. But Louie has learned that on hot days, he can actually put his front feet in it and splash water all over his face and back; if the level is low enough or he’s persistent enough, he can actually empty the whole thing and invert it onto his back! I have seen him out there, looking like a tortoise with a rubber shell, but I never have my phone handy when he starts doing it. What all this means is that on hot days, I need to check it even more often because it can go from completely full to bone-dry in a relatively short time, should he decide to have a wade. And that may help those of y’all who have never lived around pigs to understand why we have given the word “pig” the metaphorical meanings we all recognize.
Diary #784
Posted in Diary, tagged Grace, psychology, Sunset on July 8, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Those who follow me on Bluesky or Twitter know that every day, I do a short thread with links to my posts from one, two, and three years before that day. Well, a week ago today this was one of the links, and when I saw it I started crying. That may seem strange to you; after all, there’s nothing sad or moving about the column, which merely describes
the process of tearing the nasty old roof off of what was originally the wellhouse and is now the utility room in the center of my atrium. But I remember that day well; it was one of those days which, when described concisely, seems not to have anything especially memorable about it, and yet are etched indelibly in memory. From the dates of pictures and text in my Annex columns, it appears to have been Thursday, June 9, 2022; I had only recently finished the atrium roof, and I asked Grace to come out and supervise while I tore off the old wellhouse roof and replaced it with a clean, flat surface. It was raining heavily (“a toad drowner”, Grace used to call such rains), but I had done a good enough job on the roof that there were no leaks. I think we played music while I worked, but whether we did or not, we certainly joked around and teased each other as we always did in such circumstances. Even though I had to do all the physical labor, I relied on her advice about the best way to do such things so I didn’t injure myself or work harder than necessary to accomplish the task at hand. That’s really all there was to it; just a work day like any other, made lighter and more pleasant by the company of a dear friend. But now that she’s gone, there will never be another day like it again; that makes it a precious thing, to be treasured in memory. And perhaps one day, I’ll be able to look back at it (and others like it) fondly, and it will evoke only a poignant nostalgia rather than sorrow and tears.
Diary #783
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset on July 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »
In Oklahoma, my chicken coop was huge; I did it that way on purpose to keep the chickens from being able to kill all of the grass with their scratching. So when Jae recently suggested expanding our current coop, I didn’t really need a lot of convincing to agree to it, especially now that the turkey is starting to get big. So last week, Chekhov came over and we set up posts for another gate on the opposite side of the coop from the existing one, plus T-posts to hold up the fence (it only needs to be strong enough to contain chickens on the inside and withstand pig scratching from the outside). I’m not sure I have enough spare fencing lying around, so I may need to get some more welded wire to finish up. Then in August I’m going to put a new roof on the henhouse, and we should be good for another few years unless I decide I really like raising larger fowl (which, to be honest, seems unlikely at this time).
Diary #782
Posted in Diary, Fiction, Philosophy, tagged Grace, imaginative fiction, Lost Angels, psychology, recipes, Sunset, Who in Review on June 24, 2025| 1 Comment »
We had another unusually-chilly spring this year, so I didn’t trust my tomato plants outside until this past weekend; if they can’t survive in the first week of summer, I’ll just have to throw up my hands in despair. But though the temperatures haven’t been quite summery, even by Olympic peninsula standards, the days are as long as they’re going to get, and that means my seasonal anxiety is back. As I’ve noted in the past, it isn’t nearly as bad since I moved to Sunset as it was in Seattle, probably because the quiet of the countryside counteracts some of it, while the noise and commotion of the city aggravates it. But this year, it sneaked up on me because I’ve been attributing my emotional stress to grief. It wasn’t until a week or so ago that I asked myself why that should be worse now than it was immediately after Grace’s death, or in the first few months afterward; I only just realized that as is typical for me, the anxiety runs under the surface and breaks out at weak points. Expressed another way, the anxiety is acting as fuel for my grief, making it just as intense as it was in January and February, and more intense than it was in March and April. But now that I’m done with Who in Review (and have even set up my store to sell autographed copies), I have time and space in my life to do some creative writing again. I’ve already written two new stories for Lost Angels, with a third probably coming this week; it’s percolating through my brain, going through the alchemy by which grief, loss, and pain are transmuted into art, much like a compost heap transmutes organic garbage into humus for growing new plants. When the tomatoes are ready, I’ll use some of them to make salsa from the recipe Grace and I developed late last summer. And when Lost Angels is published, the pain I’m enduring now will have given rise to beauty I can share with the world.
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