Day 13 of 2011, The Predator Strikes

There are good ways to be woken  up and bad ones.  I remember being so instantly awake and excited when my mom came into my bedroom on a morning in December 2009 to tell me that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.  This morning wasn't like that.  Before she had even finished saying "Good morning," I was pretty sure from her tone that one of my chickens was dead.  I was once again instantly awake, but this time there was dread in my stomach.

Something got one of my chickens early this morning.  Around 5:15 this morning, my dad got up because my six-week-old chickens (the ones that were recently moved outside) were making a racket.  He checked on them, but it was too dark to see if there was anything wrong.  He went out to the workshop, a little outbuilding at the end of our driveway that he uses as an office and for a lot of beekeeping stuff.  When he was in the workshop, he heard the chickens making a fuss again.  Once again, he went out to check on them, and it was once again too dark for him to be able to see much of anything.  At this point, my mom also came down to see if the chickens were okay.

It wasn't until it got lighter that my dad discovered that one of the young chickens was dead.  By the time I'd gotten up, the other young chickens had started pecking at the dead bird, so I had to get it out of the coop.  The chick had been died from a neck wound inflicted through the chicken wire.  It turned out that it was Bertie, a cockerel that I was considering keeping as a new rooster.  He was the biggest of all my chicks, and seemed quite gentle.  He was also gorgeous, and and his black back and white belly made him appear to be wearing a tuxedo.  I guess predators appreciate quality, too.

After all the excitement about the dead chick ended, we all had barley for breakfast.  My dad had his with frozen blueberries for a local low-spray farm, I had mine plain, and nobody can remember what my mom had on hers.  It may have been chopped peach or maple syrup.

For lunch, I made some more spaghetti sauce and mixed it with the leftover tomato sauce that my mom had made for the pizza.  I also cooked the last of the spaghetti noodles from Flour City.  We topped our spaghetti with ricotta cheese made from our friend's goats' milk.

At 4:50 p.m., I realized that we needed to be leaving for my first dance class of the fall in forty minutes.  We made a mad scramble to have dinner on the table in time, but ended up leaving fifteen minutes late.  Dinner was only boiled potatoes, boiled green beans, and corn on the cob, but my dad had to run down the street to some farm stands to purchase the latter two items before they could be cooked.  The potatoes we had on hand already, as they were from the garden.