Saturday was busy, and so was Sunday. I made my way over to the Tilth Fair presumably to fob my chicken off on a set of willing victims, friends from grad school, and with the hopes of fobbing El Bandito off on some unsuspecting ones. The chicken expert/volunteer wrangler guy assumed I was there to show my chickens and helpfully told me there was cage space and kind of hustled me over to it. I thought, well, this is nicer than this box I’ve currently got them stowed in, why not.
The next thing I know I am answering questions for the next three hours and talking to really cool people all morning. An accidental volunteer, I am one. The other chicken lady left for a while so they grabbed me to go up on stage and answer a couple of questions about backyard birding. The good news is the chicken expert there was not 100% feeling my diagnosis that El Bandito is a boy and suggested I hold on to Glen or Glenda for a bit longer. Will do. All I have for comparison at home is Death Ray the partridge Silkie, who is certainly female.
Figure 1: It is important for you to know that a chicken is a living exclamation point.
Figure 2: Veronica Peep investigates with her assistants Cricket and Othercup.
Figure 3: El Bandito/La Bandita. What do you think?
The other part of the weekend involved mass plum processing, since the Italian plums are overflowing on the trees right now. Thank god something grew well here this summer. It’s hard to tell from this bowl, but this is my biggest one and our take was probably about 20 pounds. That takes care of snack week.
We have tentative plans to move to a more rural area and put in Italian Plum trees, largely for the purpose of making slivovitz. Because I married a foreign hillbilly. Your chooks are awful purty.
My co-worker asked today where his rooster was. I’ve just been too slammed to arrange for pick-up and delivery. If Bandito is indeed a crower, let me know and I’ll make arrangements to take him off your hands.
Sorry to have missed your turn at educating the masses. And to have missed your fambly at the park. We’re kind of sucking at keeping up with life lately.
a cock in the hand is as good as one in the bush – is how i like to put it….
also: G. is teaching me to be gender sensitive and say stuff like “ze”. i keep forgetting and Ruby has to reminds me to say “Queer” instead of “Gay” so maybe your chicken is a lesbianna, i don’t know….
Ze sure is pretty!
it could be that i am high on vicodin (for a legitimate reason, unfortunately) but i saw the picture of the plums and i totally thought those were giant purple eggs that your chickens lay. and i was all, that is so cool, her hens lay giant purple eggs! and then i realized i am totally retarded and that should the economy totally collapse i will surely die of starvation because i don’t know how to grow food and i can’t tell plums from eggs.
Elf–yeah, well, join the crowd. I put my comment on those lurvely purple eggs in the wrong post–the one below. And I am currently on nothin’ but fresh morning air.
The speckledy ones are so pretty.
I have awesome recipe for plum sauce, if you want. We used to have this tree that output a shitload of plums, but the plums were small and basically flavourless, so every year it was plumsauce galore.
You are kind, but they have been poof-voila-presto’d into a plum tart as of this morning. Also, they saved me over $9,000 during snack week. Woot!