Odds and ends

There's nothing major going on here, but it's time I checked in.  

Shortly after New Year's Day, I mentioned here that a couple of my hens had started laying, which really surprised me, since they usually don't start back to work until late February or early March.  I had no more than put the words in my blog than a couple of weeks of super-cold temperatures hit, and the egg-laying stopped.  Nature knows how to keep animals alive, and I guess they needed all their resources to keep warm.  

Today I went to the chicken house to see if there were any eggs as yet and three of my four chickens were inside on the roost.  Strange indeed!  It's fairly nice outside, and they don't usually venture inside until evening is approaching.  No eggs in the nest yet, but it occurred to me that the white hen a neighbor gave me last fall was missing.  Great.  A hawk or some kind of varmint must have gotten her.  I looked around, keeping an eye open for a bunch of white feathers that would indicate a struggle.  Nothing.  I came inside, but decided if there was something eating chickens, I had better go back out and get them in their pen.  For the last week I've let them roam freely, not even shutting the chicken-house door at night.  Three of the four roost too high for any night-prowling critters to get to them, up on the very rafters of the building.  The other one, I guess, can't fly quite as high and stays on the roost.  

In order to get them back in the pen and into their house, I planned to toss them some chicken scratch:  They'd run in to eat the grain, I'd shut the door to the pen, and they'd be caught.  However, when I called "chick-chick-chick", here came the missing hen out of the corner of the shed beside the chicken house, and at that moment I knew exactly what she had been up to:  Back in the corner were four white eggs in the straw!  So they get to be confined to their pen for awhile until they all figure out where they're supposed to lay.

It's been almost ten years since Cliff had CABG surgery.  He had an appointment with the cardiologist Friday for a routine checkup and got a good report, except for a stern warning to loose weight.  I told the doctor, "We're working on it already.  He's lost over ten pounds since New Year's."

Moving on:  Cliff and I took a wild notion a couple of days ago that it would be nice to have a camper, and began looking on Craigslist.  We don't want another popup; we had fun with the one we had, but all that setting things up and putting things down, sometimes in the rain, got tiresome.  We want as small a pull-type camper as we can find (which seems to be 18 feet long).  If we found a decent used one, it shouldn't be too pricey, right?  

Yeah, right.  We started out thinking about spending $2,000.  Ha!  For that price you get something that leaks, and turns out it's very expensive to fix leaky campers.  OK, so we raised the bar to $4,000, but now we have realized that you could easily find something for that price or more that looked good, bring it home, and find out later that it leaks.  

At our ages we are NOT going to spend a fortune on something that we would only use maybe three times a year at tractor shows and possibly a trip to Colorado once in awhile.  We did find one very nice fellow who has an R.V. sales place in Grain Valley who took our name and said he'd call us if anything came through.  We have a nephew who works for the guy, and he told me this morning that you can get a decent camper for $4,000, they just aren't that easy to find.  

We wouldn't be using a camper until spring anyhow, so there's no hurry.  And we really don't have to have one at all.

So much for today's report.  Cliff has the TV going, gearing up for Super Bowl.  I'll probably retire to the other room and read, or maybe find something to watch on Netflix.  

Over and out.