Of Four Leaf Clovers and Luck

On the fourth of July we were at Kevin's Dad house and one of the kids ran up and showed me a four leaf clover that their cousin had found. Of course I had to inspect it and it was indeed, a real life, four leaf clover. Their cousin, who is in their upper teens, walked up behind them and casually said "Oh, I find them all the time".

I have, all my life since I was a kid, looked for four leafed clovers and have NEVER found one! I grew up in the country and have always played outside and spent many hours sitting in the grass and looked and looked for them. I have always envied the kids who have found them, knowing I was missing out on a lot of good luck.

Well, Friday I was sitting on my new swing all by myself, over by the pond watching Flipper and Buddy swimming. Kevin was running an errand or something, I don't remember. I was looking at the clover at my feet and wishing I could find a four leafed one and all of a sudden I said "Wait a minute...", reached down and picked a suspicious looking clover and there it was!!

A FOUR LEAF CLOVER! MY LUCK DAY!!!!!!

I ran in to get my cell phoneto take a picture, because my camera has been broken for MONTHS and I happily snapped away, thoroughly enjoying what would be my next post, explaining how lucky I was and how the tide had turned, good luck for me from now on!

Then, I looked down and low and behold...THERE WAS ANOTHER ONE!!! Oh my gosh, it doesn't get any better that this I thought! I grabbed my phone and snapped away again, carefully choosing how to get both clovers in the shot. Holding them up in the air, with the sky as the background, then holding them lower, with the pond as the backdrop, hoping you could see each leaf really well.

Then I continued taking pictures, a few of the pond and our new bubbler in action (more on that later) and some of our really beautiful yellow day lilies blooming by the beach. I could not wait to go in and upload these awesome photos. I took the clovers into the house and put them in one of my favorite books to press them so I could save them.

I got my camera and went to my computer and this is when my luck ran out. No pictures anywhere in my camera. None in the "phone memory area and none in the "memory card" area. The memory card had been acting funny, I should have known. Earlier in the week I wanted to download some pictures. At the time I had over 180 on the memory card. All of a sudden, poof they were gone. There were still a few but most were gone. I had already copied them to my computer so it was no big deal. It was kind of good because it was really tedious to delete pictures from my phone cause I had to do it one by one (that was why I had 180 on there, never wanted to sit and go through 20 steps to delete each one).

The pictures were gone because the camera was not set to save them. It had somehow been set to save the pictures to an "external memory". What the heck was that! I could not find them anywhere. I finally figured out how to reset it to save the pictures to the phone memory but they will not transfer to the memory card and so I have no way to download them to my computer. I guess I need a USB cord for that. I looked in Walmart the other day and they had nothing. CRAP!

Anyway, back to my "good luck"clovers. I had already squished them in my book and I had no way to recreate those shots even if i could save them and download them. I even thought about faking it (seriously, I did) and using three leafed ones, holding them far away so you couldn't tell but I couldn't do it. I was starting to think that the second clover had cancelled out the first. I was back in the "no luck" category.

We had finished most of the house painting and the baby turkeys had hatched out in the pasture, we had gotten sand for the beach and our new bubbler and no way to take pictures. I have been whining to Kevin about a new camera for a month now and he is not picking up on it. I will have to wait for Christmas or my birthday or something I guess. I do not like to post without pictures because I think it is kinda boring so my blogging days would be over with no way to upload pictures. I am seriously having withdrawal and panic attacks. I love to take pictures. Always have. My sister in Cleveland checks everyday to see if there is a new blog with pictures of what has happened next at our house. She even makes requests.

I have been using my Canon for years and loved it but it has gone bad again. I sent it to them to have them fix it a year ago but it has done the same thing again. Some electronic problem. They fixed it before, no charge but what a hassle. Emailing them back and forth, mailing it in, waiting for it to get back and on and on. I have no patience for all that.

So, in desperation I got out my camera just to check if maybe it would work and HAPPY DAYS, it was working. I didn't dare turn it off, I just hurried up, put on a jacket cause it had just stopped raining and ran out to try to get some pictures of all the new stuff. No way to recreate the clover shot so I had to take one of them squished in my book. Check it out!

Can you find the new turkey babies in the grass? There are seven of them. These are the moms, they shared sitting on the eggs for a month.

Look closer......

And closer.....

And closer.....

And really closer....at first did you see all three?

Above is a crop of the previous picture. Look how adorable! I am so worried about them. They are soooo tiny. Kevin had to tell me to leave them alone. I wanted to take a chair out there and keep an eye on them. I think I would even pitch a tent out there and bring them in the tent with me for the night if they would come. (I just snuck out there and peeked at them without Kevin knowing, they are hiding in the back of the pasture, probably from me.)

Here is our new bubbler in the next picture. It took a while for Kevin to decide on how he wanted to manage the ponds aeration. He had considered a windmill but the price was high and our wind is iffy. He even bought the turbine blades. This seems the best route. It works really well and when he first turned it on you could smell all the rotten water being moved up from the bottom. Now it smells fine. The kids love to swim through the bubbles.

Here is a close-up of the water moving. This is probably boring if you don't see it in person. The bubbles are really strong though.
Before and after of our house again only this time the bottom is painted and the porch is almost done.

We still have to attach the hand rail, add ballasters or whatever you call them, paint the door, put up the new screen door and make a cover for the awful looking air conditioner. We are going to make some kind of arbor or something and get something to grow up it.

Here is our new sand pile. The kids love it. I talked Kevin into leaving it in a pile so the kids can play in it. He really wanted to smooth it out so it would look better.

And the birdhouse I belatedly got Kevin for his birthday. We are hoping the Purple Martins like it as much as we do.
Closer up.

So, that is what has been happening here. Oh... as far as my luck getting better, the batteries in my camera died before I could take all the pictures that I wanted to.

Here's hoping the camera fairy makes a stop at my house soon. I'm not putting all my money on the clovers.

Beth

.

We Found the Missing Eggs!

Our Bronze turkeys abruptly stopped laying so we thought they were done for the year. Usually turkeys stop laying, I thought, around June so it was no surprise. But then one day we noticed the hens staying back in the long grass so we checked it out and we found this!

There are two separate piles so each hen is sitting on her own bunch. I think they should hatch (if they do) around the end of July. That would be indescribably awesome!

We put all the young turkeys and chickens out in the chicken house because I was tired of cleaning up after them. Here they are, very happy. The only problem is 50 meat birds arrived in the mail Monday and they are now in my living room. Yuck...we have to build a brooder out in the barn, quick! I also got 10 Cuckoo Marans (they are dark egg laying chickens, also called chocolate eggers), and they will stay in the house a little while longer.

Kevin took last week off and painted the house. Here it is before and below is after.

It looks much better in person than it does in the picture. We need to tidy up the deck and put some better rails. We have come up with a different way to finish the block at the bottom, I will take some pictures when we finish it this weekend.

As you can see, the block is not very pretty. We would like to put stone around it but the price is too much for us right now. I have never seen anyone finish their block the way we are going to do it so it will either be pretty cool or not, we'll see.

There is so much to do but most nights we take Flipper and Buddy and go and sit by the pond and watch them swim. Flipper loves to swim with the kids. He swims underwater at full speed right at them and then pops up right in front of them. It freaks them out a little so it's pretty fun to watch. I will take a movie and post it soon.

This weekend it will be all painting and work. Next weekend we are going to a big swap meet at Mt. Hope Auction in the Amish area. They have all kind of cool stuff there. Even baby foxes and all kinds of chickens, goats, eggs and whatever for sale. I'm hoping to stop and pick up some cheese and spices at one of the bulk food stores there. I really want to go to Lehman's Hardware too. I love that place!

See ya everyone,

(Hi Mike! I loved hearing you tell stories at the bonfire on the 4th)

Beth

Happy Birthday Amy!

My sister's birthday was yesterday, July 1st. and I should have posted this then... sorry Amy!

Amy just born.

Amy and me a little while after she was born...like a year or so.

Amy at the beach. I think that is her, maybe it's me...not sure.

Amy in a school picture.

Amy in another school picture.

Another beach picture of Amy with her best friend growing up, our cousin Denny.

Another of Amy and Denny. She'll kill me for this one.

A picture of Amy and her horse...oh wait, that's me but it is Amy's horse.

A picture of us looking all crappy after moving the chickens around, she fell while carrying a box full of chickens and hurt her leg but she was a trooper and didn't drop the chickens.

A picture of us looking better.

A funny picture she took of her dog Sebastion.

A picture of Amy and her husband and her other dog, Sobe.

A really nice picture of her!

Happy Birthday sister. I love ya!

More Chicken Coop Details

I took some more pictures of the movable pen that Kevin made so you could see a few details that weren't finished when I posted about it. We put flight netting over the top and added a pole so that we could walk around in it. Zip ties made the whole thing very quick to assemble. There is not a nail or screw anywhere in the pen. We were going to make it 6' tall but changed it to 4' to accommodate the fencing we had left over from a previous project. Every time I go in there to put feed in the feeders I wished we had gone with the 6' because I usually have my hair up in a clip and it invariably gets snagged in the netting as I am walking bent over. Nice!



I slid a shovel through the fencing to make a fat perch so that Missy, our little handicapped poult, could roost. Her foot was injured, I think from big, fat Flipper stepping on her from when she was tiny and in the pen with him. We kept two poults in with Flipper for company when he hatched so he wouldn't get lonely. Now they are inseparable. Her foot has gotten better and she can perch normally although she has a funny rolling gate and cannot run very fast.



Buddy is attached to the little chicks that were in with him too. When the chicks roost at night Buddy sleeps right below them as close as he can get cause he cannot get up on the roost to be next to them.

Here is a closeup of the gate detail. Kevin used a chain link fence gate hinge for the door. He had to modify it a little cause the plastic pipe was too large.

The top hinge, pretty handy huh.

At work we got something delivered in this huge wooden box so I asked if I could have it and we brought it home. It made a find little chicken house. My attempt at making a ramp is a little rickety but it worked. Flipper looks like a goose now. He is only seven and a half weeks old. Amazingly the turkeys that are older than him are small in comparison. I feel guilty saying this but if you wanted a bird strictly for meat an Ebdon goose would be it. They grow so fast and eat tons of grass and weeds and would need minimal feed once they were a few months old. I guess they reach mature size at like three or four monthe old. (Sorry Flipper and Buddy for saying that)

Speaking of turkeys, here they are and boy do we have a problem. We do not want to put them in with the older birds yet so we have left them roaming the yard close to the house so we could keep an eye on them. (We have a Coopers Hawk that visits our pond looking for frogs. I got to see him swoop down and catch one a couple weeks ago, really cool!) But then the turkeys discovered that the deck rail is a really nice place to roost. Well you can imagine! Eight turkeys walking all over the table and lots and lots of mess under the rail so now they have a little fenced area off by themselves. I loved watching them run all over the yard though. They looked like the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park.

See ya next time,

Beth

New Chicken/Goose/Turkey Pen and New Door

It has been such a busy month that I will have to update with pictures, not much explanation. We have peaches! Really exciting but the only problem is that we did not spray them soon enough. We were not sure what we wanted to use so we got nothing. Consequently, we have infiltrators. We wanted to stick with an organic something but could find nothing, later tried a spray from the local store but we were told that we need to spray in April. Oh well, it's fun seeing the peaches grow even if they will be buggy.

We also have nectarines and pears too. I did not get a picture of the pears but you all know what pears look like.


Here is Buddy and Flipper. They are getting so huge! We take them to the pond every nite for a swim. Look at Flipper, he has the life all stretched out, hanging out by the pond, munching on grass.

The only problem is that, as you can see from the picture below, Flipper would rather lay on the raft with us than swim by himself! He is one lazy goose. He even flops down by his food so he can eat laying down.

Buddy (that is the name we decided on for the younger, grayer gosling) loves to swim. He is so fun to watch, I will try to get a video soon, he swims four or five feet under water at a time.

My new phone is pretty cool. It is a Razor V9, I think. Ever since my camera broke I have been using my phone for my blog pictures. As you can see from the above picture, it even has a frame feature. Kinda cheesy frame choice on my part but awesome anyway.

Our clematis is blooming, a close-up below.

This weekend we decided to finally install our new sliding glass door. BLAH! Way too much work. It is still not done. We worked all weekend, besides having to go to a last minute going away party and all day at our Father's houses for Fathers day, at 9:00pm Sunday with work looming in the morning I said "We will finish it tomorrow!" (It's tomorrow and here I am blogging and he is out there waiting for me.)

Here is the old rotten sill, now all new and not rotten!

Our new door.

Cleo helping us put it together.

The big, huge hole and rain outside!

Here is our new pen. It's made from PVC drain pipe. It is really easy to put together but we cannot put a tarp over it cause it would blow away so they have a house inside of it.

I wrapped the fencing at the bottom with wire to hold it tight.

Here is the door frame and below are the happy chicks to be out of the house and we are glad they are out too.
Here they are running around through the daylilys behaving like little chicks should!

Yay!! It's SUMMER!

Beth

Gosling Update

It seems as if I have a strange gosling. The gentleman that gave me the egg said that they were mostly Ebden, a little bit something else but they would look like an Ebden. Ebdens are all white. Well Flipper is all Ebden looking but the second one is definitly not. The first difference that I noticed was that he seeemed darker, Flipper's newly growing down is snow white but the younger one is darker. Then I noticed some definite dark tail feathers. Very grey, some white but mostly grey. And then it was strange because the baby feathers on top of his head in one spot were alwalys messed up. Well look at him now.

How funny is his head! I guess he must be a tufted variety. Below is a picture of some tufted geese that I found on the web...(sorry if they are copyrighted, believe me I'm not making any profit from these and I would be glad to give you credit if I knew where I found them)...His head looks just like theirs.

You can really see his little fluffy bump in this next picture.

Here he is next to Flipper and you can see how much darker he is. I am so glad they are going to be different. I can't wait til they get bigger and grow all their feathers.

Flipper is Growing!

I can't believe how fast a gosling grows. When compared to our turkeys, the turkeys look like they haven't grown at all!

Check out the before and after photos.

April 30th

May 22nd

We took him with us to my mom's house for the Memorial Day picnic and at first no one was very happy. You see, it was supposed to be a work day and they always think I do really crazy stuff so you can imagine. They were very surprised at how good he was.

They expected him to run all over and that we would have to try and catch him but that is the opposite of a goslings behavior. He never moved farther than 10 feet away at any time. If any one in the group walked away he would follow them crying because either he didn't want them to leave or he thought he should follow them. My cousin's 3 year old really loved him, it's great because he will go up to anyone and let them pet him.

During our picnic he just sat quietly on Kevin's lap while we ate, sleeping for a while and then waking up but really calm and quiet.

I got in touch with the "Goose Mother". She is the nicest lady and gave me all kinds of good advice for an indoor goose. She makes and sells diapers and harnesses for geese. There is a link to her website under the picture below. She takes her geese to Renaissance Fairs where she dresses up as Mother Goose. She also takes them to nursing homes to visit. She has one beautiful Sebastopol Goose named Maggie that actually hugs people with her neck (she wraps it around their neck and hugs tight), when she meets them.

http://www.thegoosesmother.com/index.html

This is a picture from her site, I hope she doesn't mind me posting it. How cute is this little baby with his diaper harness!

Kevin caught a really nice largemouth and a couple crappies but the pictures are really small. My sister sent them to me from her camera but I do not know how to make them bigger or even if I can. I hope you can see them. My Mom and Dad live on a really nice private lake. I was really lucky to have grown up there. We swam, fished with our cane poles and played in the woods all day. I never caught a fish like this though!

Flipper really enjoyed my Moms lake and went in swimming with the kids. All in all we had a great time and everyone loved Flipper and I ended up not have to wash windows!

Happy Memorial Day everyone!

Beth