Did you ever watch Sesame Street? I loved The Count. I hated math later on, but I like The Count. As an adult, when you watch these kids shows, funny questions always creep up on you. Like, how hard was it for The Count to work in a base 10 numbering system, when he only had 8 fingers. Did he have to re-learn all his mathematics? I was half remembering the pose in this photo for the number 5, but that wouldn’t work – would it? Well, be that as it may – The Count, here, is our mascot for today because we are going to tally some things around here. The magic number is 7. Ready?
0. The number of snakes I want to encounter for the rest of the year! (I had to force my numbering system to begin with zero, so this first paragraph is going to have wonky formatting.)
- I’m trying to think of a “one” count; around here there isn’t much that is a “one”. Maybe we’ve had one day, in the last week, that we haven’t had to open then house up to air it out from the off gassing of the Grey-Water system. Sue’s thinking of having a plumber out next month to see if he can tell us what the issue is. Seems to get really bad when the winds come from the south, just before a rain.
- The number of chickens still on the DL. Wheezy did not take well to the antibiotics, so we had to stop giving them to her… and then I lost the ointment we were using on her eye. Currently, she’s not getting any treatment. Leggs has almost finished the antibiotics and her foot is a bit better, but not nearly as good as we were hoping. The vet comes back on Sunday and will probably excise the infection from her foot. That’s bee interesting – and I’m sure you can look forward to that report on Tuesday.
- The number of times that Scooby (one of the goat boys) has jumped the fence in the last 10 days. I never see him actually do it, I only ever hear him rattle the fence and see him scampering about with the “Yep, I did it!” swagger. We’ll figure it out soon.
…how many times the Palominas Fire Department has been here to remove Mojave Rattlers from the property. #4 just a few minutes ago. This time it was a really young one. It had found itself a good sleeping place inside the Goat Boys’ chickens’ coop. Couldn’t just let it stay because it would then be shut up with the chickens for the night, which would not bode well for the morning. The fireman who came said we were the 5th call he’d had this evening. Dang – it is a snake year.- This is how many duck eggs we usually get when we finally find their hiding place. Except that you won’t see that reflected in the numbers below as, lately, they’ve been laying in plain sight. Go figure.
- Storms that have passed us by so far this week. Many times it rains all around us, but not on us. Today we actually did have a couple storms pass over and actually rain!
This is our snake sighting tally for the year so far. 5 Mojave Rattlers (one was killed by Dustin at the very start of the season, and one slithered away out of reach before the Fire dudes could get here), and the rest were various “good” snakes that we simply let be.
We’ve hit our magic number! This is really where I wanted to be headed with the post today. We’ve had 7 snakes this year, and last year we had 1. Albeit, it was a rattler, on the deck, by the baby chicks that had just hatched… so in some ways, that one was worth about 10! This year we’ve just had to be extra vigilant! That’s it for our counting post today. Hope it’s made you think about your mathematics and how difficult it would be for you to teach yourself all over again in base eight; come on – feel for The Count! This is Tuesday, our next post will be Thursday (hopefully). Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!
Today’s Weather: Started of quite nice. Was in the low 70°s when I left for work. My phone weather app says that the high was 89° today. Currently at 8:34 p.m., it is 70°, 83% humidity, winds out of the east at 4mph, 30% chance of rain. Sunrise today was at 5:35 and sunset was at 7:16. Really getting dark earlier now.
Egg Report: Sunday – 31 chicken, 3 ducks Monday – 25 egg, 3 ducks. Tuesday – 31 eggs, 2 ducks.
Wing and a Prayer 