At home

The working from home thing has gotten off to a good start.
I worked on a few ongoing jobs and got a surprising call on another. So I’ve got that going on.
I actually got a lot more done than I had expected as this week is Spring Break at the school, so Maddie is at home. She usually needs to be entertained when we’re at home, so I really didn’t know how today would go. However,
we’re having our roof worked on this week and the roofer brought his daughter (who is also out of school) and a couple of her friends along. They are all about the same age and I hardly heard a peep out of them all day. (Well, except for the howling. I don’t know what the game was, but they were howling like a pack of coyotes most of the day.)
The weather was really nice today so they played out in the woods and pasture and barn. Maddie got wore out and a little bit of a sunburn. They had a great time.
It made me think about playing outside in the summer when I was a kid.
I grew up in Plains, Kansas, which is about half the size of Perkins. There were probably 30 kids in our immediate neighborhood, so you could always count on having something to do.
Of course, this was before video or computer games. We only had three channels on the television and, other than Saturday mornings, there wasn’t a lot of kids programming, anyway.
But outdoors, there were oodles of things to do. We’d play freeze tag, put on our own plays, make forts, invent our own games, or just hang out.
Red Light/Green Light, Red Rover, Duck/Goose, Spotlight and riding bikes filled our days.
We’d walk barefoot uptown to the pool on hot days, and were always sorry we forgot our flip-flops when we had to cross the hot, black asphalt on Main Street. That stuff was so hot, it felt like a sizzling, mushy marshmallow as you ran across. It felt so good to put your seared feet in the pool.
At night, we’d lay on the ground and look at the stars. Funny, but you could see the stars so much better back then. I really have to look now to find the Milky Way.
Light pollution, National Geographic says. That’s a topic for another post.

Fowl Business

I really enjoyed reading Charles Wall’s recent “I Remember” column in The Journal.
Charles talked about raising chicks, which is really a fun activity.
I’ve purchased little chicks to raise and also hatched them in a small incubator. It’s a little work, but well worth the effort.
It took me awhile to figure out the best way to keep the eggs at a constant temperature. You also have to watch the humidity in the incubator. You also have to be vigilant about the temperature after the birds hatch, and make sure their water is clean and ice-free.
There are few things more pleasant to hear than a bunch of baby chicks chirping contentedly. To get a sample of that, just watch the Atwood’s (a local farm supply store) insert this spring to see when they get their shipments of baby chicks, then drop by the store. It’s fun, and the kids will get a real kick out of it, too.
If you live in the country, you might even be motivated to purchase your own flock. Chickens really don’t need that much room, just a small chicken house with a yard that can be fenced in if you don’t want them to be easy prey for predators or running all over your yard.
Free-range chickens love to chase bugs, and besides, the fresh eggs are great.
My largest hatchery project involved guinea hens rather than chickens.
I have a small flock of guineas. I just love them. They are extremely easy to care for, since they mostly care for themselves. They’re not quite as domesticated as chickens, so they prefer roosting in trees at night to staying in the chicken house like chickens do. That “wildness” also makes them a little tougher for predators to catch.
Guineas also love to eat bugs and very small animals, like lizards and small snakes. I feed them cracked corn in the winter but in the summer, my guineas pretty much turn up their beaks at the corn. They prefer to catch bugs and roam around looking for seeds and such.
I’ve been very surprised at how long they live. The small flock I have now is about 13-14 years old.
Despite their toughness, guineas are really not very good parents. They will lead their chicks through areas that are tough walking, such as tall, dewy grass, or they will sometimes just walk off and leave them.
They are, however, very good at hiding their nests. Several years ago, I discovered a couple of nests in the midst of a patch of cockleburs. I imagine several of the hens used the nests because I collected more than 80 eggs.
We put them in the incubator and ended up hatching about 75 little guineas, or “keets” as I learned they’re called. They were the cutest little things. I thought they looked like quail.
I kept them penned up until they were about half grown, then let them loose on our property. They have been an endless source of amusement and they take their jobs as snake and bug hunters and visitor announcers very seriously.
Of course, over the next few years, the flock dwindled down to about 12, which have been doing fine. (I refer to them as the “Smart Dozen.”)
If you think you’d enjoy raising birds, have space for them to roam, and don’t mind their loud calls, I’d recommend trying guineas.

Electronics dependency

Finally! Back online.

About a week ago, our house was struck by lightning. It was during a weird thunder-sleet storm.

In a split second, we lost nearly every electronic device in our house, plus some in the shop and the barn.

It hit with a blinding flash accompanied by a deafening crash that brought Maddie screaming out of the basement. After a quick look around, we discovered the tv, stereo, tivo, and dvd player were toast. We also found one of our dogs, Murtagh, who has an unreasonable fear of loud noises, under Maddie’s bed.

It was not a comfortable night, I can tell you. The scent of burned plastic and ozone hung in the air, reminding us that there could be some little spark, somewhere in the house, that wasn’t quite history. I kept waking up, expecting to smell smoke, but luckily, that didn’t happen.

Since then, we have also found that the phone line was fried, along with the satellite radio and stereo out in the shop, and the fence charger down in the barn.

The internet guys were out today and they discovered our wireless router was pretty much melted. They did get us connected back to the net, however, which is a big relief.

I suspect that somehow Keith engineered the whole thing. He’s been lobbying for months now to get a new, big flatscreen tv. I felt that our old tv was quite good, and big enough, but Keith has really been wanting a new one.

Finally, awhile back, I offered a compromise – I’d give my full agreement for getting a new flat screen if he replaced his four-foot-tall 1970’s-era speakers (all of them) with some of those tiny, very efficient new speakers they have on the market now. Some of them can even be flush-mounted into a wall, or placed high in corners of the room.

He didn’t want any part of that, however, so we were at a stalemate. Well, we were until that lightning strike. You probably have already figured out that the first thing that was replaced was our tv – and with a nice new flat screen.

I’m still working on the speakers.

The Cover of Life

If you ever get the chance to see The Cover of Life, make sure you take it. It’s an excellent script by R.T. Robinson, and I believe it’s somewhat autobiographical about his family.

The story is set in Louisiana during World War II. It’s about three young brides whose husbands are serving as soldiers. The girls all move in with their mother-in-law for the duration of the war.

Well, the final performance of the play was this afternoon. It really went well, and though I’m ready for some free time, I’m already missing being at the theatre and working with the great cast and crew.

It’s kind of strange during the last performance. As we change costumes during the play, we take them back to the costume room. Same with props. As the play progresses, the dressing room gets to looking pretty bare; prop tables, too. In fact, as I was waiting to go on in the second act, I was thinking the prop table looked kind of like a Christmas tree with no presents under it. Sort of sad.

Keith (my husband) was just cast in Town & Gown’s next play, Everybody Loves Opal. I believe it opens at the end of January.

Changing the subject entirely, below is a portion of the Nov. 20 column I wrote for our weekly newspaper, The Perkins Journal:

Manette Mansell wrote a funny column about the time she was cornered in her chicken house by a mean rooster for the Nov. 6 issue of the Countywide & Sun (the Tecumseh and Shawnee paper).
Anyone who’s raised any kind of livestock probably has at least one of these types of stories. Hers reminded me of the time I got treed by a hog.
We were raising this hog, and it was getting close to time to take it in to be made into pork chops.
This hog was pretty big and it had gotten pretty wise about figuring out how to escape its pen.
I went out one cool morning to feed the livestock and discovered the hog had shoved a panel of its pen down and was wandering around nearby.
Hogs are pretty smart, so as soon as it saw me, it knew it was breakfast time, and it came running.
I can sometimes be pretty smart, too, so I wasn’t about to feed it unless it was in its pen.
That’s when the battle started.
I put feed in the pen, then tried to trap the hog with the panel, but every time I did that, it would shove the panel aside and dash out.
This continued on for awhile – long enough to get us both pretty frustrated.
You know, hogs can be pretty mean.
Every time I approached it, it would try to bite me. This stalemate went on for about 15 minutes. Me, trying to get that hog rounded up and that hog charging me. I finally had to take refuge on top of a panel and just sat there, wondering how I was going to get out of that mess.
I was resting, perched up there when my friends Nancy and Louie Zirkel drove up.
Let me just back up a bit for those of you who don’t live in the country.
When you don’t have to worry about the neighbors taking note of what outfit you have on, you don’t think a whole lot about what you wear out to the barn. This day I happened to have on some red sweat pants and I had just pulled on a plaid jacket and my roper boots. I was stylin.
I wasn’t real amused when Louie sat in the car, rolling with laughter at the sight of me perched on top of a hog panel in my finery.
Nancy did giggle a little bit, but she got out of the car and helped me round the hog back up. Girlfriends always come through for ya.
(After Louie got his jollies, he got out and helped, too.)