The Wayfaring Wordhack

 I cannot believe I have not posted since the end of April.  I keep meaning to make a post. I keep thinking, "Oh, I can this..." and I just don't do it.

Well, at least in my case, no is harmed by my not following through. ;)

What we have been up to in a very small nutshell:

We've been back in France for over a month now.  Can't say that too loud because the kids are NOT ready to go back to Lebanon and they don't want to talk about the return creeping up on us.  J, however, has been back in Lebanon for 3 weeks now, and of course we miss him.  But, we are loving being home.

I have been doing art.  Finished the first painting module and am studiously practicing all I learned while waiting for the second painting course to start in September.

We have had the misfortune of momma bats thinking our house is a good place to have babies.  I say misfortune because with windows getting shut resulting in mommas and babies getting separated, bats getting trapped in the sink, etc. we have found several babies dead. :( I have an infant bat graveyard in a large flowerpot by my door.

I currently have three juveniles--too small to take care of themselves--in a box on my kitchen table. :(

In happier news, though we can't expect anything from an annual garden, we had a glut of strawberries, then raspberries, and this is the first year that our currant bushes and gooseberries have produced well.  If the weather doesn't get crazy we will have a lot of peaches, too.  And it turns out that two of the trees we have grown from seed are nectarines.  Each tree only has one fruit, but hey, we are happy to know what they are.  It is not a good year for apples though.  The grapes are going to produce a bumper crop, though, but we might miss those too since they usually ripen in September.  Maybe next year we will come a little later in the summer and stay longer...

Here is a painting of the Gavarnie in the French Pyrenées that I did.  I am making progress.

Doesn't that sound better than Procrastination?  Well, maybe. If you take off the "stress" part.

With the kids, I have been re-watching some videos I found years ago when we lived Egypt, The Forger's Masterclass.  The kids (the two older ones anyhow) have been very interested in seeing different artists, even if they don't agree with the styles.

 Sadly, my super macro lens is having technical difficulties, which prevented me from getting good photos of our feathered visitors.  I had to content myself with photographing the birds through the kitchen window and front door window, respectively, zoomed in to the max.

Rougegorge (English Robin) :

Mésange Charbonnière (Great Tit) :

Mésange bleue (Eurasian blue tit) :

Sitelle Torchepot (Eurasian nuthatch or wood nuthatch) :


We usually have skads of tits at this time of the year, but so far they are rare and sparrows are our most common visitors to the birdfeeders. :-/

The broody duck broke open and kicked out her last duck egg. It was a beautiful duckiling, so I have no idea why she killed it. I took the remaining 2 goose eggs away from her and put them in the hated incubator. That is better than losing them to the duck's craziness.

In other duck news, our second female is laying agin, so she will go broody in about 2 weeks. We'll try to source some true Khaki Campbell eggs before then. Of  the new mystery hatchlings, two are doing great but the third is rather weak and we don't know if it will make it. *sigh*

Now for some happier news: Our potager pond is coming along nicely.  If not for the all the spates of rain and the need to scrounge up stones that go well, we could be done by now.

Cutting the liner down to size and then pegging down with soil:

 Two years ago today, we were holding baby ducklings:


Today, one of our hens, Lacey, is hatching out her second clutch of eggs this year:

ETA: Just after posting this, while cleaning the kitchen, I watched this video.  Yes, yes, yes. It spoke to a lot of what I feel and have experienced.


 In a comment to asakiyume  in one of my posts, I had said I might expand on what has been going on with my flock, but up until now, I haven't really had the heart to do it.

This winter, one of my hens, Winona, started acting a bit scared/depressed. She stayed inside the coop, barely venturing out, and as a result, lost quite a bit of weight. I thought most of it was caused by the fact that we had two roosters who were constantly fighting over the hens, often dismounting them roughly when chased off by the other male. I figured Winona didn't want to have any part of it and didn't worry too much at that point.

I finally separated the flock into two when we got the infrastructure into place, but one of the roosters got really agressive with the hens. They were so scared they wouldn't come out to eat or drink (moveable coop without the necessary room to put in victuals). So, we harvested the rooster and replaced him with Lucky Fluffypants.  Then one day, one of my hens died in my arms (from the other flock). I thought she was egg-bound, but we didn't find anything to suggest that when we cut her open. She was FAT, though. She was a meat bird that I had decided to breed (as was the mean rooster). However, we also found (post-boiling for the cats) a tumor between her breast and her thigh.  

Exactly one week later, I had another hen acting like the first (purplish comb, sleeping in the nesting box, a general air of straining), so I called the vet and made an appointment for the afternoon. When we went to catch her to take her to the vet, she died in my arms, too. Ruptured vessel. I decided to go through with the autopsy, and we found her intestines completely covered in lesions and her cavity bursting with fluid. The vet had never seen the like, and the lab said the tissue was too old when they got it to be sure of a diagnosis. They suspected Marek's disease, however. I wasn't sure because my animals hadn't exhibited any of the more classic symptoms.

Then we had another hen (one of those meat birds) start eating our eggs, despite having calcium available. Considering her a ticking time bomb, we harvested her, too, and despite being really fat like the other and having a yellowish liver, she seemed OK.  Having three less hens meant the others were being sorely used by the roosters, so we bought in three cou-nu hens who were ready to lay  (naked necks; yes, they are very ugly).

However, Winona kept getting weaker and weaker, so I took her to the vet. He suggested a fecal analysis to look for parasites. Found out we had a very serious infestation of roundworms, invisible to the naked eye. I started treating the flocks, moved them to new pens, scoured out the old coops (with help from a friend), but two days before the treatment ended, Winona died. This time, I did notice her irises had begun to change color, and she was paralyzed when I found her early in the morning.  I thought she was dead and prepared to bury her, not wanting to go through the labs, etc. again since I was sure of myself, but then I moved her leg and saw that she was still alive.

I was all alone and knew that I could sit with her until she died or put her out of her misery myself. I opted to kill her humanely, but by time I had sharpened the knife, she had died.

So now we have a disease on our farm that is basically impossible to get rid of. It can be vaccinated against, with no guarantee that our birds will not get one of the three strains of it--and the strains are mutating in response to the vaccinations, of course. We can stop raising chickens. Or we can try to breed resistant stock. I just had a hen hatch five chicks. The problem? The dad is the son of the one who died from a confirmed Marek's disease victim.  Logic and protocol say not to breed animals that have shown a susceptibility to the disease. And Lucky's dad was Lila, the one who was so sickly last year. Lila survived, however, when no one thought he would. And this time around, with Lucky, we had the best hatch rate ever. We would have had 7 out of 9 if not for my own carelessness, which really hurts.

The conundrum, the conundrum.   

And to complete my heartbreak, I effectively killed 15 ducklings in the egg by moving the mother duck off her nest to relocate her and her clutch to the new pen we built for our ducks. It was stupid and ill-planned on my part. I didn't want to leave her confined as she was in the dark, with no access to fresh air, greenery, etc., but I should have tried moving her under different conditions. "Live and learn," is all well and good, but when it becomes, "Kill and learn," it is devastating. As our neighbor says, When you work with life, you work with death. But the pointlessness of this loss guts me. I won't allow the duck to sit another clutch this year because we don't want to feed birds through the winter or have to harvest them then, either. :( So there goes a lot of the meat production we were counting on.

Anyhow, this is a large part of why I have been absent of late. That and the garden, of course.

What have you been up to?

 I thought I would share that Banjo found a new home a couple of weeks ago. He now lives with a family who has a fenced-in yard and a female dog in need of companionship. I am so happy, grateful, and relieved. 

For asakiyume, who wanted to see dogs sleeping on cars.

Not just our feline friends who enjoy a nice perch.

A scene-setting photo of the special spot, a panorama to try to capture some of its geologically-crazy glory:


( All the stuff in between )



Sourdough, surf, sand, swimming, sunsets...a very satisfying Sunday all around.

Clearing space on my hard drive, so here are some photos that I'm saying bye-bye to. 


( clicky for piccies )