chicks, man
Between the sadness at losing one of our hens last weekend and the ever-growing longing for animal companionship shared by many members of our household, it was perhaps inevitable that some chicks are now living in our house. We've never had chicks in consecutive years before, but then again, everything these days is different than it's ever been before. I'm very pleased to see the chicks—because they're super cute, because I like eggs, and because the probable alternative was a hairless cat. (If Leah were still writing in the blog here she could defend her love for the hairless cats, but I'm not really a fan.) In other years our chicks made their first public appearance on the blog, but not in 2020; I haven't even taken any pictures of them yet. No, today's world calls for live video, so yesterday morning I set up a chick cam (over Zoom, natch) and sent the link out to everyone we know. That link isn't up now, because we have limited equipment and because it turns out Zoom isn't actually designed to keep a meeting running indefinitely with nothing happening, but if we figure out how to do a more traditional web-cam setup I'll for sure let you know.
Because this was a sudden decision we didn't order the chicks by mail, like we have in the past. Instead Leah went to the feed store to buy them—and because everybody else in the world wants chickens right now that was harder than it would have been in a normal year. She left the house at 6:00 yesterday morning in order to get to the store and line up before it opened at eight; when she got there at 6:30 she was number ten in line. Luckily she only had to wait in line in the snow—yes, it was also snowing yesterday morning—for an hour and a half before she was able to get out of there, because the kids folks at Erikson Grain Mill got going an hour early in order to avoid a possible riot in their parking lot. And she was glad, because she escaped just as the police were arriving to investigate what was backing up traffic on area roads. I kind of want to know how the situation resolved, but I'm happier to have the chicks.
The new members of our flock are a Black Copper Maran, a Barnevelder, and a Lavender Orpington. They're happily established in the office, where they can keep Leah company during her long days in the video-call mines and amuse (or confuse) her remote coworkers with their cheeping. The boys are desperate to play with them, which makes me nervous. Now we're looking into getting a dog.