This was an interesting week – the Fourth of July Holiday rather put an interesting twist on the schedule. We passed a quiet Fourth, simply enjoying time with Dustin, Alexis, and the baby. Dustin cook some wonderful ribs on the BBQ! We didn’t leave for the fireworks because we weren’t sure how the dogs and cats would do. Hope your celebrations were fun and safe. The rest of the week has been relatively quiet as well. Here’s just a few samples from this week’s photo opportunities.

I guess I hadn’t been checking the comments very well on the blog, and I missed one from Bernadette expressing concern for the Goat Boys in this hot weather. So, I took some photos of them just to reassure her that they are doing fine. We do make sure they have plenty of water, we give them minerals to help them stay healthy, and the do have shade somewhere in their pasture every part of the day.  If it rains, they go into their little house. They are still happy and playful. We like them a whole lot and are trying to make sure they get the opportunity to try new things – for the 4th, they were given the husks from the corn, and they really loved that! Thanks for asking about them, Bernadette, they send their love!

The other thing we’ve been working on, of course, are the bumblefeet. Poor little guys. They are improving though. Sue was able to remove the infection from 3 of 4 feet, but one of Maeve’s feet still shows some small sign of having an infection. We soaked, cleaned, and wrapped her feet yesterday and again today. Yesterday we only put antiseptic on her afterwards – today they looked better, just a little swollen and hot on the one foot. She’s been favoring it quite a bit too. Today, after soaking and cleaning, we used more Prid to see if we could coax the rest of the infection out. We’ll see how well it worked tomorrow. The EE’s feet are doing well. Her large scabs came off with a very shallow infection core attached… now we’re just keeping them clean and covering them with antiseptic cream so they heal well.  She’s doing great and not favoring either of her feet – she’s out scratching around and running everywhere. I think we’re doing a pretty good job of this. So far, we haven’t found any other chickens with this problem.

The other fun thing that happened was a visit by our friends Mary and Richard. Mary is a regular reader of the blog and she said it was fun to see all the things that we talk about in the blog. She was able to witness our ministrations on Maeve yesterday. She said she had never looked that closely at a chicken foot before. You know, they are quite fascinating… they do look like little dinosaur feet; miniature Velociraptors! Mary and Richard were simply passing through on their way across the Southwest and we are so glad that spent a couple of nights with us. They have a wonderful Air-stream and a huge flatbed truck to haul it! Good thing too, because they carted over 500 wine bottles to us (thank you Caylor and Matt, as well); Sue is contemplating using them in a wall, or perhaps creating a greenhouse with them.  That’s a subject for another day though. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

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Today’s Weather: HOT!  It was 73° when I looked at 6am this morning. Right now, at 6:08 p.m., it is 94°.  We’re supposed to be like this for the weekend, with some rain coming towards the beginning of the week.

Egg Report: Yesterday we had 10 eggs, today we had 8. We have a new Easter Egger laying – over on the misfits’ side of the coop. She is one that we received from our friend Lily. So that is two of her’s that are now laying! In a month or so, we’ll have close to 40 hens laying. At that point we’ll begin selling eggs.  Please contact me if you wish to be on that distribution list!