AN UPDATE AT LAST

It has been a very long time since I posted here – so much has happened, and when stuff starts to snowball, you just get overwhelmed. I loved seeing the book in print, and of course, that took up a lot of time and energy. But also I quit working my part time job, started volunteering one afternoon a week at the dA Center for the Arts and started working again on my cozy novel. I also have been thinking about painting again – well, more like obsessing over it, which, in my experience, is the only way to do it.

But it has been too hot to do more than obsess over things.

CHICKEN NEWS

We have chickens, and the heat is hard on them. Chickens can be resilient – they can stand in snow and not flinch, but the heat really sets them off into odd behaviors, illnesses and throws them off their laying. This is too bad, as they lay the best eggs ever. (Except for Big Karla, the French Copper Marrans, she hasn't laid a thing since March. Who knows why? Her age? Her temper? Chicken voodoo?)

Big Red, the Rhode Island Red, lays a brown egg nearly every day. Spot, the Barred Plymouth Rock, lays a very smooth brown egg, also nearly every day. Whitey, the White Leghorn, was doing fine there for a while, laying a small, torpedo-shaped snowy white egg almost daily, until the heat hit and she started – inexplicably – to molt out of season. Hens don't lay during a molt, so I'm just waiting for her to finish shedding feathers and get back to work.

And Flora and Dora – the Red Speckled Sussex Games – well, they usually lay great big beautiful cream-colored eggs every day, but Flora has become broody – they don't lay when broody, and I am using all the usual methods to get her to stop it. And Dora is on strike in sympathy, I guess. The usual methods include trying to bring down the temperature of the chicken's underside, which goes up alarmingly during broodiness – by dunking them in cold water and keeping them away from nesting materials. (No, they don't like it, but it helps them in this heat.)

So instead of 6 beautiful eggs every day, I'm getting about 2 per day…still enough to dine on, but not enough to share.

Here are pics of the chickens.

THREE BEAUTIFUL THINGS

The puppies are so sweet. Can't believe we have three rescues. Only one kitty left now, as Nero died last Christmas.

My brother, Bill. He moved to New Mexico with his wife and pets and lives up a rustic canyon outside of Truth or Consequences near Elephant Butte Lake. It is so beautiful there. I plan to visit him in October. Here he is with a bass he caught.

Reconnecting with old friends. Sometimes the best things about getting older include looking back on how many opportunities we have had to make friends. Finding the ones who have dropped off our radar can be especially sweet, like finding that last peach on the tree which has had all summer to ripen.