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Wing and a Prayer

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new year greetings

16 Sunday Jan 2022

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Happy New Year!
(From Sue, and Joanne) If you receive our New Year’s letter, this is just a duplicate. It’s me being lazy because I am still recovering from my after Holiday bout of Bronchitis with a side of Sinusitis. So… for those who haven’t already read this… enjoy!

After 2020’s slowdown 2021 caught me by surprise. Now it is after the Christmas season and we are still playing catch-up. I had several plans for this holiday time, many centered around baking, but like most years, we were overcome by events  and thus – here we are getting our cards and letters out at what could be considered a very tardy pace.  

These are the highlights, I suppose. We had a steady stream of chicks this past year, some layers and 4 batches of meat birds, so it was a busy spring and summer. We butchered over 100 birds this summer!!! We sold all those that were marked for sale, and still had people wanting more. We had a frank discussion about the viability of continuing at this pace, did some financial  investigations, and decided it just isn’t worth the amount of money, time, and wear on us. We’d have to charge an outrageous amount per pound to make it worth our while. So, we’ll only be doing enough for us – and maybe some presents – this year. We also raised the cost of our eggs to help adjust for the increase in organic feed prices, and reinstated our .50/dozen delivery fee. Our gas prices are climbing higher and higher, like everyone’s I suppose. We had a very nice monsoon season this year and everything turned green, beautiful, and LONG!  It was a year of weekly lawn mowing and tractor mowing in addition to the normal chores that come with almost 100 chickens. We worked on several projects, but the biggest one was to dig a ditch and install piping for irrigation to the swales in the west field.  We want to plant a bunch of trees to make a ‘food forest’ eventually.  This is step two, first the swales, second the water and finally next year planting the trees.  I am looking forward to the completion of this project this year.

Normal afternoon monsoon scene.

About midsummer our church moved from streaming weekend services to live services and suddenly things got busy.  Choir rehearsals, band rehearsals and organ practice time started to cause the week’s schedule to become very crowded!  It seems that from September to December time just flew by and Christmas was here before I was ready for it!  Sue continues to be the church organist and often fills in as either the choir accompanist or the choir director, depending on who is on vacation any given week. She is the keyboardist for the praise band, does backup vocals, and sometimes plays acoustic guitar for them as well. She continues to sing in the chancel choir, I join occasionally. Sue and our accompanist, Dorothy, played several great four hand pieces throughout the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons – I never tire of hearing them together!

We lost Sweet Pea last year to a kidney disease and adopted Chase a German shepherd mix .  He was abused and after a year is just now starting to get comfortable.  We tried to adopt another dog, Layla, but she was very prey driven and just couldn’t pass the chickens or Katie the cat without trying to jump them.  So, despite her wonderful personality with us, we had to give her up. We’d been trying to adopt for over four months, and just had not been getting any response from rescues, we were so hopeful that Layla would work out. We were able to get her back with her Foster family and they’ve let us know that she continues to thrive and improve.

Joanne’s parents came at Easter and Thanksgiving to visit.  It is always such a pleasure to have them come.  It is like a mini vacation for me, and the food is always extra special!

Irie (Sue’s Granddaughter), Dustin and Alexis’ daughter started pre-school this year and had fun.  Dustin also took her camping and fishing it seems like every month.  She even got her own sit on top kayak and went all over the lake with Dustin, fishing.

Joanne has been working lots this year. She finally quit working at the church as the bookkeeper and started working ¾ time at the ‘2nd Amendment Family Gun Shop.’  There she does sales of guns but now also of properties as she received her real estate license.  She is also busy with “Real  Wishes” a charity that is run by the local real estate offices. OK – here’s my input on this. I work “out of” the gun shop because that’s where my boss, David Greenberg, keeps an office for me. I am his Licensed Assistant; I can sell you a house and the firearm to go along with it! I did receive my Real Estate license in July of last year, so David has been prepping me to take over for him when he retires… not sure that I really want him to retire. I am the Treasurer of the Real Wishes Foundation which is the charitable arm of our local Realtor® Association. When I was still the CEO of said Association, we received the State Level award for our Charitable work through Real Wishes, so I am happy that I am able to continue my relationship with this foundation in my current capacity. The people on this board have the most generous hearts, and the Realtors® continually step up to support their good works. In 2022, the parent Board of our Association (WeSERV) is taking our Foundation model to all their chapters and creating a network of Real Wishes throughout Arizona; we are all very proud to be a part of this expansion.

For this coming year, I’m hoping that we are able to do more of what we love here on the farm. For me, I hope that I can find that elusive “work/life balance” and be able to work more here than out selling property or guns. It’s a means to an end, real estate, it’s not a passion. That  passion is here for me and I’m working on working it out.  My hope for Sue, for this year, is to get her out on a vacation… or several vacations. We are actively looking for someone who could take care of everything – for short weekends to start, then branch up to maybe a week – ten days. If you know of someone who might be interested in doing that, please let us know.

Nothing much else has been happening here.  If you follow our blog (https://wingandaprayer.live) you’ll notice that I’ve been noticeably less active this year. It’s been an odd year. We are always busy, even though we often say that there’s not much going on. Sue continues to collect bottles for her bottle wall. We have plans for that, together with a patio, pizza oven and outdoor kitchen area. We keep working on our orchard, but lost several chestnut trees in the over 80mph winds we experienced this year. Sometimes it’s difficult to see what we’ve accomplished as we look back at the end of the day/week/month/year. Then someone will visit and we take them around and show them what’s been going on, and we say – hey – we’ve done some things!  This year we had a first time visit from Dinah and Paul who were interested in visiting Bisbee and came along for the farm tour.  They met some of the characters that make appearances in our blog and seemed to enjoy themselves. They helped us to see what changes have been made over the years. We always look forward to visitors, so if you are thinking of coming out this way, please stop by! Maeve would love to make your acquaintance.

Blessings of peace to you and yours this year.

sadness

05 Sunday Dec 2021

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Look, sometimes things are really difficult here on the farm. We had to make one of the most difficult decisions recently. I’m writing about it because we’ve already introduced the topic to you and I just want to share the rest of the story.

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new family member

14 Sunday Nov 2021

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Guess what? We have a new family member. It’s been about four months since we lost Sweet Pea. Chase has been a little down all that time. Now he has a playmate and she is a great girl.

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happy halloween

31 Sunday Oct 2021

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Nope. We do not dress up our chickens. But I thought this was a pretty good chicken costume, as chicken costumes go. Did we dress up? Sorta. Sue left this morning at 5:45 a.m. dressed as a church organist. She was really committing to the part. Even played an amazing prelude this morning 🙂 . I, on the other hand simply wore my Dia de los Muertos leggings and sugar skull earrings, natural witchy hair compliments of the windy morning. Hope your costumes were more original.

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free at last

24 Sunday Oct 2021

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Yep. W have chickens celebrating their liberation from 1) hospital Brooder and 2) Baby Brooder. They were pushing for freedom for about a week and we finally gave in yesterday.

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hei hei

17 Sunday Oct 2021

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If you haven’t seen Disney’s “Moana”, I truly recommend it. It’s a fun story about courage and self discovery. Plus Moana, the main character, has an amazing side-kick named “Hei Hei.” Hei Hei means “chicken” in the Mauri language – which, if you’re a fan, you probably already know. The movie portrays him as an idiot – basically; a supposed symbol of the islanders. I don’t know if I buy that, but he is portrayed as doing some really stupid chicken stuff. I’m here to tell you that I have seen most of his silliness play out here on the farm. Currently, we have one chicken that actually has a Hei Hei eye. We’ve been calling her Pirate Chicken.

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chickie babies!

03 Sunday Oct 2021

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We have new chickie babies…. but not the kind you see here. We had one Buff Orpington that refused to leave a nest, so we shut her in the brooder and made sure she had food and water. Some days later, we were putting the banty hen, that had been injured by the bob cat, in the other half of the duplex and we heard all this peeping! Sure enough. Four little chicks had hatched. So cute.

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huh.

19 Sunday Sep 2021

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So… we had a Bobcat try to get at the pond banties Saturday morning. Huh. We don’t see that every day. THANKFULLY!

Sue heard a ruckus about 5:00 a.m. Saturday and went to investigate. She took her flashlight and saw a bob cat in the light working really hard to get into the bottom of the pond banties’ little coop. Sue said it wasn’t bothered at all by being in the limelight. She had to throw rocks at him to get him to move! Finally he jumped the fence.

We thought everyone got away ok, but we found that one of the little chickens must have gotten hooked by a claw. There was quite a bit of blood on one of them. Later the others started to pick on her, so we moved her to the ER brooder. She’s doing ok today.

Sue was concerned that one of the reason the Bob Cat felt emboldened was because we had let the millet grow all monsoon, thinking that the chickens would really like them when they went to seed. The photo at right shows a couple of the plants. The entire enclosure was covered. So, we grabbed a couple of shovels, a weed whacker, and some gloves.

By the end of the afternoon, we had an open area around the coop. Plus we uprooted the fence and stretched it out nice and tight, also making the fence taller and – hopefully – a bit more difficult to jump over.

So far it has worked – for one day. We hope that’s a good sign. Never a dull moment. I’ll being working on getting you updated on the happenings for the last few weeks. That’ll be for another night. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

price hike

18 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by Wing and a Prayer in Co-workers, Uncategorized

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Over the last six months, we have been struggling with the decision to raise our egg prices; hoping that things would settle down after the COVID madness was over. It seems that this will not be happening any time soon. During the last year and a half we have seen Organic Layer Food, Organic Scratch, and Organic Fresh Vegetables continue to rise in price. This, coupled with the fact that gas has gone up quite a bit too, (in my egg delivery travels I rack up approximately 60 miles – or more if I make special deliveries – each week) has prompted us to begin the difficult task of informing our customers that we are raising our prices.

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WeJob

08 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by Wing and a Prayer in Projects

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So, we’ve been watching quite a bit of spy and war shows and/or movies – you know – NCIS, Seal Team, Jason Bourne, etc. You know how the military or other Alphabet agencies shorten everything, like “SitRep”? Well, I’m getting in the groove with our title. Stands for Weekend Job. We’ve had a couple.

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← Older posts

Hereford in Photos

When morning guilds the skies
When morning guilds the skies
Bits of Fall
Bits of Fall
Blues, Greys, Greens, and Browns
Blues, Greys, Greens, and Browns
Getting ready for fall
Getting ready for fall
Horizons
Horizons
Creek Action
Creek Action
Weather is made in Sonoita
Weather is made in Sonoita
Fallen Foliage
Fallen Foliage
Fall Water
Fall Water
Rain clouds held off by the cross
Rain clouds held off by the cross

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