My, How You've Grown

Wacky weather. Just days ago, the weather was so nasty that some buses were cancelled, snow plows were out, there was just a LOT of heavy, wet snow. Then the temperature dropped! Now we have had a mild spell, some rain, and much of the snow is gone. Great chunks of it tobogganed off our metal roof with thuds.

If you recall, I mentioned that husband put up a coop heater that looks like a little flat screen.

There it is, mounted to the wall behind their roosts. It does a fine job keeping them comfortable. They are, in fact, able to withstand quite cold temperatures like other birds in the wild do. They fluff themselves up, sit with their feathers over their feet, even huddle close together. The "flat screen tv" keeps it just warm enough. They also need ventilation in the winter to release the build up of moisture in the coop. The remodelling of the coop this past summer now provides that perfectly with two vents up at ceiling height, away from the birds so they don't get a draft.

However, we just went through a wicked cold snap, ridiculous for November with temperatures of "feels like -18 degrees Celsius". Because I give the birds the option of stepping outside through their little chicken door, the heat does not stay trapped in the coop during the day and their water kept freezing. I would smash through it in the morning, but by evening it was frozen again, sometimes almost solid in a bucket. It was time to drag out a purchase made a few years ago that never got used, until now.

Voila! The heated water bucket to the rescue. Because husband redid the wiring to the coop there was no problem attaching the bucket cord to a short extension cord which I secured to the conduit with some zip ties (don't want any crazy flapping to pull down any cords). That should do a great job keeping their water from freezing in the next cold snap (which I am hoping doesn't come again for a little while!)

I grabbed my phone to take some pictures of the roosters while I was out there because they are quite remarkable now. Here is what they looked like when I first got them at only about four months old.

The orangey / light coloured one on the left is Buffy. The brown /black one in front is Nugget, and the brown /black one at the back, right is Bruce. At the time I didn't even know they were roosters. Have a look at them now, at about seven to eight months.

Here is Buffy, all windblown and sexy with his white tail feathers.

Here is Nugget, no longer just a little chicken nugget, being a little younger than the other two, not quite as magnificent yet...

For the grand finale, here is Bruce. Normally his tail feathers are in a beautiful, iridescent black/green arch, but it was windy today. He is the biggest of the three, the dominant rooster, and quite handsome. He is, however, approachable, not at all a jerk like the tiny Rusty we once had. I am trying to get rid of the other two, and I intend to keep Bruce. Unfortunately, nobody is interested in two free, gorgeous roosters. I want them to join a flock, not become supper. I personally will not be eating them, that's for sure. They have names and personalities.

Tomorrow, husband and I are taking his mother (is in a senior's home, has dementia, is perfectly healthy otherwise), to have her first cataract surgery. It has been an incredibly long wait to get this done. There have been initial consults, follow-up appointments, and of course the usual ridiculous wait time. We kept wondering when the surgery would be, hearing nothing. Husband phoned Friday only to find out that they are closed in the afternoon. Then, much to our surprise, we got a phone call at 5:45 p.m., Friday, as a courtesy call from the hospital reminding up of her surgery... THIS MONDAY at 7:30 a.m.  What????

Husband told the person he was talking to that he had not received this information. She replied that they had let his mother know. Oh good lord. She would have forgotten the conversation within moments of hanging up the phone. He politely, yet firmly let them know that he had left instructions that he was the one to be contacted, not her, as she has short term memory issues. So, much scrambling was done, arranging to book time off work, informing the nursing home, finding paperwork, realizing there was a prescription for eye drops that she was supposed to be using a day before the surgery... Everything is now arranged. We will bring her here to spend the night at our house, as the hospital is not close by and we will have to leave early the morning to get her there for the beginning time of 7:30. All of this running around and last minute arranging could have been avoided if instructions had been followed. We've just had too many incidents of people messing up, not doing their jobs, that we almost come to expect it now.

We are keeping our fingers crossed that the surgery (it's laser surgery now) will go smoothly and there won't be any issues. They only do one eye at a time, so hopefully when it is time for the other eye, we will be contacted with an appointment time well in advance. I also hope that this cataract surgery improves her quality of life, as she does enjoy watching tv, but must have a tough time of it right now with her vision as bad as it is.

Apart from all of that, there were fantastic sales on at Canadian Tire this weekend and I bought new outdoor Christmas lights for our rail fence. We have had multi-coloured lights, but I wanted all white to make it a bit more "classy". This is called 'warm white'. Unfortunately, I underestimated, so I shall go back in and buy two more boxes, still at the sale price. Today was a perfect day to put the lights on the fence because it wasn't too cold and I could have my thin gloves on to be able to wire them into place.

That's it for me, hope you had a good weekend!