Chickies! (Part III)

Due to some technical difficulties/delay in achieving Part II of the Chickies! hatching project, we are moving on to Part III, which is really the most important part of this venture.

Chickies!

Look, aren't they adorable and totally look like those marshmallowing ones you eat on Easter, but you don't eat these, because they are cute, and also lay eggs?

Anyway, these chickies are currently living in my parents' (or mine, I mean, as this blog is totally NOT being written by a ghostwriter who is also my unemployed daughter) shower in the downstairs bathroom.




They look happy. With any luck, they will not turn into doggie snack food, and make it all the way to the chicken coop, where they will make eggs.

Chickies! The circle of life, or something.

Chickies! (Part I)

We are embarking upon a grand journey to what may or may not end up being baby chickens. This will be a fraught enterprise, and thus I (ghostwriter to my mom's blog) am chronicling our adventures to pave the way for future explorers in the chickie-making process.

Step 1: Abscond with the desired quantity of eggs from a none-too-happy
broody hen. 

Step 2: Take eggs and place gently in a warmed incubator. In this case, our
incubator is a somewhat ancient looking metal contraption borrowed
from a nice next door neighbor. The trickiest part so far has been heating
the incubator sufficiently, using a nearly unreadable (to me, ghostwriter)
mercury thermometer, and then turning a screw until the desired
heat is achieved. I'm still skeptical we have actually reached the right
temperature. But we'll find out soon enough.

The eggs must be turned three times for the first week, requiring nice
little pencil x's on each egg, to keep track of what's been turned. We have
thus far successfully turned the eggs on schedule, thanks to a very
useful calendar that above-said ghostwriter created.

And, voila! The chickies-to-be are resting comfortably in a big metal
container thing. 

Pea pods and Pale Ale

When the spring yields to summer and most of the days become warm and wet, there is a beautiful drama in the skys.


You can stand in our yard and see a 360 degrees of drama. The wind creating amazing clouds to the north, just as you look to the south into a thunder head pelting the town with hail, wind and rain. The darkness that covers the daylight and the constant noise of thunder and wind are so exhilerating and frightening at the same time.
It's a temporary drama, though. You can see the days ticking by between the last cold and the first frost, then the long cold winter again.





With the weather comes the delicious pleasures of spring. The chore of picking every day after work, is followed by the pleasure of eating from the garden.

I've discovered that pea pods are wonderful with a super pale ale.

Hours of work planting, mulching, weeding, staking and nurturing are so worth it when the refrigerator and freezer begin to fill with the harvest.

The work of planting and the excitement of watching everything grow eventually gives way to the problem of what to do with all of the food. Friends and family will only take so many zucchini and peppers before they are overwhelmed and begin to avoid you. I am trying to find a food bank that will be interested in distrubuting the largess.

Farm Animals

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When you live in the country, you start to acquire lots of things because you have room to keep them around. It's been like that with animals on our little farm.

Gypsy showed up about 2 weeks before we left on our tropical vacation. At that time our big, brown dog, Bear, was very enamoured of her. She would come and go between ours and several of the neighbors' acreages. Eventually she settled on us. It probably had something to do with our very friendly and attentive male dogs, and being let into the house and back yard (yeah, by me) and fed. By the time we got back from Guam she was part of the pack. No one else seems to want her or has tried to find her. She's very sweet and very submissive, but has been peeing on the carpet in our bedroom near Shadow's pillow (passive-aggressive?).

(We should have figured after our experience with the cats that feeding an animal pretty much guarantees you'll be . I thought I would just feed a couple of them so they would keep the mice population under control. Pretty soon we were buying 16 pound bags of cat food every week and putting out bigger and bigger litter boxes --which got used as well as every open space on the garage floor.The garage started to smell really bad. Over the next 2 years different batches of kittens showed up, all of them looked suspiciously like the nasty old Tom cat who hissed at us when we got in the car to go to work. We've since boarded up the cat door to get them out of the garage--they promptly took up residence in the half finished shed, but they keep trying to sneak back in. )
Bear is big and furry--part Golden Retriever and part New Foundland. What he doesn't have in the smarts department he makes up for in charm. He really loves treat time. In the morning if you ask him, "Bear, what time is it?" He'll bow down give a howlie kind of bark. He and Odin are great friends and chase each other all over the yard. If Bear escapes he heads straight for the the pond at the end of the property for a swim (or if he's really lucky, to chase a skunk). Bear always comes into the bathroom when I'm taking a shower and spreads out on my bath mat. It's really tricky to get out of the shower and not step on him.

Odin can best be described as congenial. He is a little dopey, but so beautiful. He's half Great Pyrenees and half black Lab (but not a spot of black on him). We got him when he was about 3 months old after a I saw his picture on the Credit Union bullitin board. As soon as I saw his picture I knew he was my dog. He regularly jumps over the back fence, but never goes very far. He and Bear will wrestle together. Odins favorite tactic is the roll on his back, sometimes rolling over and over down the hill. When he and Bear come in any door it's always at the same time, pushing until they burst thru together with Gypsy squeezing in underneath them.

Shadow is our little dog. She's 11 years old now and has cataracts in both eyes (pretty much blind) and very grey. She really doesn't seem to like all the other dogs much. She's very jealous and pouts if Don gives the other dogs attention. She learned to tolerate Odin, pouted some and snapped at Bear, but completely went into seclusion when Gypsy and Chris's dogs (2 very hyper mixed breeds that stayed at the house while we were on vacation and Chris was dog sitting) showed up. She's only recently come out from under the bed. She does love to go downstairs to the TV room and beg for bites off Don's plate. She's always been a bit of a recluse, though.

In additional to all the dogs and various farm cats (Choco, Shocko and Spoto-the original 3 cats) we also have a very pretty and large cat called Gracie that lives in the basement. She has been on a diet since we got her in November (Erin's cat from New York). I usually sit and pet her every night while I read (lately Sophicles). She has slimed down and even plays with me--batting at my hand and a crumpled up piece of newspaper.

As soon as we build the chicken coop, we will get some laying chickens (maybe a few ducks, too). I can't wait. Every respectable farm should have animals.

Tumon Bay

Looking north toward Two Lover's Point from Mata 'pang Beach at Tumon Bay.

Tumon is where most of the tourism is. Guam attracts lots of vacationers from Japan. They come for the beautiful empty beaches, fancy hotels and shopping, shopping, shopping. Compared to the cost of goods in Japan, Guam is a great bargain.

There is a big upscale Galleria, Gelatio shops and all sort of tourist stores (including Hard Rock Cafe). We went to big Aquarium where you walk thru tunnels inside the aquarium and see amazing sea life that is typical of what is in the reefs and seas around Guam.

There is a really long stretch of sandy beach, at Tumon, where you can wind surf, snorkel, swim, jet ski and sun bathe. The sandy beaches are not common to Guam, most of the beaches here are rocky, coral stretches that make getting to the water difficult. (No matter where you go into the water you must wear coral shoes. You have to step very carefully, if you slip you'll get cut on coral. A regular ritual after swimming in the ocean is washing and treating all coral cuts and scrapes with antibiotic ointment. It's very easy to get a bacterial infection from the coral.)

There are also a lot of Japanese wedding chapels along this beach, too. We walked most of the sandy stretch before cutting thru the Hilton pool area to the main street and business district. It was amazingly uncrowded everywhere we went.

Sella and Cetti Bays Hike and Snorkel Trip

On Friday we decided to combine 2 activities, snorkeling and hiking. We took a 1.5 mile trail 440 feet down to the Sella Bay. It was a beautiful Guam day (high 89, low 75, winds out of the east at 10-15). We headed down the trail thru the jungle. Going down was pretty easy. We only lost the trail a couple of times. When we got to the river (not much more than a steam--it's the dry season) we just waded thru it all the way to the beach.




Sella Bay can only be accessed from the trail or a boat. It was beautiful and deserted. It looked just like the beach in the movie "Castaway".

Guam has amazing coral reefs, unfortunately, to get to the water on most of the beaches you have to walk over the coral, damaging it. We did some snorkeling here at Sella Bay, but the water was a little murky because the river ran into it. So we walked around this bay to Cetti Bay. It was just as beautiful and desolate, but it was so difficult to enter the water to snorkel, we had to step on so much coral. Once we did get into the water, the reef was amazing. We saw so many fish, different colored corals and other sea life. It was really beautiful.

Hiking back up the trail was a lot more difficult. There were places you had to use ropes to pull yourself up a steep rock face. I didn't drink enough water and got a little overheated. I waited in the shade while Heidi and Don figured out which way the trail went.

If I lived here I would go on hikes and snorkel all the time. It's amazing to be in the jungle one minute, then come out to a grand view of the ocean the next. And to swim in the coral reefs and see all the life that lives within it, is really amazing.

Happy Birthday Buddha

Today we went to Buddha's Birthday party at the Ypao Park at Tumon Bay. Heidi wanted to go because they were supposed to have good vegetarian Thai food. The Thai food looked a little "sketchy" according to Heidi, so we had Korean noodles and kimcee. It was good. We also sampled some fried crispy vegetarian rolls, chai tea and a very strange shaved ice that was crushed ice with strawberry syrup and a big scoop of strawberry jam in the middle (we removed the jam)



The highlight of Buddha's birthday party was a brief rain shower (felt so cool) and a local dance group that performed traditional Chamorro dance. The kids were really cute and it was fun to listen to music (though one song sounded a lot like a Simon and Garfunkel song). Erin explained the most of the Chamorro culture was lost when Spaniards landed and converted everyone to Catholicism. Some 20 years ago a group redeveloped some of the traditional Chamorro dances and music based on study of other Micronesia cultures. They began a program to teach the kids this music and dance. It is very successful and popular here.