No attention make chicken angry!

By Leave a Comment
Feb 27 38

I see you all politely ignored my bizarre chicken-centric post.  Ignore chickens at your own peril, my friends!

Just to be obstinate, I’m going to discuss my feathered friends some more.  I quite like my chickens … at first I was all “Meh, chickens, whatever, they lay eggs.”  But over time, I’ve grown quite fond of them.  Not fond enough to name them or anything – they’re just known as The Chicken Collective (like an alt-rock band, such as Arcade Fire) although I did name the one black chicken.  Mostly because I can tell her apart from the others.

This is Black Roc Camaro:

She insisted I take a photo of her good side, and not the paralyzed side.  Her other eye is all droopy, a lasting impression of TWooie’s chicken killing spree.  She’s the Queen Chicken, and nobody fucks with her.

I like the chickens because they are funny as hell.  If I call “Ladies!” they all come a-runnin’ to see what I have for them to eat.  They cock their heads to the side when you talk to them, which makes them all look like tiny little Tweeds.  And they fight over worms, which is gross but hilarious.  Right now they are all picking on Road Chicken, who just wants to eat some snow in peace.

They are also extremely handy as dog sitters.  If I need to get some stuff down around the property, I can just plunk Faith down in front of the chicken coop and she’ll stare at them for a good hour straight if necessary.

Faith continues to be my good girl.  She’s such an easy creature to have around!

And she does not want to eat or even hurt my chickens, unlike SOME dogs I know.

How DARE you malign me that way!

As you can see from the fluffy white backgrounds, the snow has visited us at long last!  And lots of it too – there was a good 8″ or so of snow out there this morning for our morning walk.

Do you think the dogs were happy about it?

Maybe just mesmerized.

What I noticed while editing snow photos this morning was how often I get The Accidental Dog shot when I’m trying for something else.

Like The Accidental Faith:

Or The Accidental Dexter:

And The Accidental Piper:

No wonder I feel like there are dogs *EVERYWHERE* sometimes.

In fact, I just went through a kind of short period where I thought maybe I just hated all of my dogs for a little while.  It felt like every time I tried to do something, there was a dog in the way – poking me in the eye when I leaned over to put on my boots (Woo); laying outside the bathroom door to trip over after my shower (Piper); springing across my half-sleeping form when the alarm went off (Dexter), squishing under the babygate to raid the cat box and torment the house chickens (TWooie)…then there are the three 12 foot long planks of my unfinished dog walk stretched across my kitchen because they’re still unpainted and I have nowhere dry to store them (and they are too tall to lean up against the wall) which I alternately trip over and stub my toe on many times a day.  The sun shining through my windows showing me all the many noseprints on them.  Faint traces of farm mud splattered across every surface in the house under a height of 2 feet.  Endless dog-drying-towels laundry.  Piper’s continuous growl through breakfast preparations.  Tweed and Piper snarking at one another under the bed at night when I’m trying to sleep.  Dexter’s new game of launching out the front door at 5AM pee time and racing for the back of the property barking so the other dogs will chase him, barking as well.  I was just sick to death of them all and wanted them all to go straight to hell, without barking, without stepping on me or poking me or tripping me, and just friggin’ STAY there, and the hell away from me!

I’m sure not the only person who has these lapses, am I?

In class last Thursday I was getting unreasonably irritated with Dexter who was skipping out of the last pole in anticipation of the next obstacle and when The Sadist chided me with “Remember he’s just a baby dog!” I snarked back “But he KNOWS how to do all the poles, he’s just being an ass.”  Later he pulled me aside and pleaded with me not to become *that* handler, you know, the one who blames their dog all the time instead of just working through the problem as a challenge to be solved.

Why do you hate me so, Food Lady?


I told him that I was just irritated with Dexter for other stuff and I had accidentally brought that irritation with me to class.  And that’s when I realized that, in fact, that was *exactly what I was doing … and not just to Dexter at class, but to all my dogs, all the time.  I suppose my general irritation at losing my car, my aching shoulder, the cold shitty weather / long winter etc. was making me frustrated and I was bringing it home to my dogs, who I was viewing as another form of frustration – after a long day at work and a long commute home, it’s dark and cold and the dogs are wired from being alone all day and it’s too dark and late to give them much exercise, and then I lapse into a tv coma beside a warm heater until bed time and … and their behaviour is my own fault, because I am not doing much with them.  Really I am frustrated with ME.

So in honour of letting go of my frustrations, here are some reasons why I LOVE my dogs.

Because I just rolled in the snow and then posed for you, all serious-sexy like:


Because I chased a rabbit through the pokies and made my ears bleed, but I’m smiling anyway:

Because I’m so earnest when I sit here begging for you to kick snow at me:

Because I think EVERYTHING is FANTASTIC!

Because even though I am far from perfect, and you didn’t mean to love me, you do anyway … you know you do!

Because I never do anything wrong.

Because we chickens are a superior race, and somehow, your life always comes back to chickens.

Damn post-invading chickens!

Go love your dogs for an extra moment.  You’ll be glad you did!  I made mine pancakes this morning as a way of apologizing for my bad behaviour :)

Happy Snow Day!

Is it time to go outside again?  Is it?  Is it?

(Here’s some extra love for Tweed, because I love him the mostest!)

My life has gone to the … chickens?

By Leave a Comment
Feb 26 6

So last night I had this dream, where one of my chickens laid a HUGE, like unreal sized, egg.  An enormous, outlandish, triple sized egg.  In my dream, I picked up the egg to go show it off to someone else and I broke it.  I was so disappointed!

And so … today after work I checked the hen house and found a chicken had laid a really big egg.  Not as huge as the one in my dream, but definitely noticeably bigger than average.  I brought it into the house to give it a wash before putting it in the egg carton, and I BROKE it while drying it off!!  Seriously!  I can’t make this shit up, people.

Even worse, I was slightly late for work this morning because I had to stop my car on the side of the road and chase down a random stray chicken.  I’m not even joking.  Chickens can run really fast, but *I* can run faster than a chicken.  I caught her – a pretty cream coloured hen – and decided that possession is 9/10ths of fowl law, so I drove back home and added her to my flock.  Maybe she’s the one that laid the giant egg?

Well that’s just shocking.  Look at my exaggerated face of shock, with the use of this handy prop.  Yep.

^^ Captain Sarcasmo

In other chicken news, my bantam rooster and his lady love had some kind of bird flu (wuh oh!) and have been living in my house for the past week so they can take their antibiotics.  The laying hens are unaffected by the cold, and if they take the antibiotics, we can’t eat their eggs, so I had to separate them.  My life really has gone to the chickens.  I just ordered some of these:

They’re called Frizzle Cochins and they have curly feathers!

Say Tweed, could I borrow your sarcasmo-shock face for a minute?


I promise I will be adding a real post soon – today it started SNOWING and it’s still coming down like crazy.  So tomorrow we’ll take photos in the snow!  Wheee!!

Now if only my pipes would thaw – I’m back in “no showering for Food Lady” land thanks to the obscenely cold weather.  Le sigh.

Mock My Ride

By Leave a Comment
Feb 20 33

Introducing the “new” Food Lady Mobile, the 1990 Toyota Corolla Wagon.  Now dubbed The Waggin’ Wagon, because whenever someone drives past me all they see are ears and tails milling around and spilling all over one another throughout the entire car.  This experience has been a timely reminder of exactly why I crate dogs in my vehicle!

No, I did not buy a 21 year old car as a solution to my transportation problems.  Even for me, who goes about most things in an ass backward fashion, that would be weird to do.

Instead, what I did was *whine* about not having a car to call my own.  And to shut me up (probably) my friend Alison gave me her old car.  She bought a new one, and hadn’t gotten around to figuring out what to do with this relic (made the year I graduated from highschool, incidentally) so she said I was welcome to it.  And beggars cannot be choosers; so she signed over the title, and I took it through AirCare (and it passed! ) and now it’s all mine.

On Thursday somewhere between picking up all my stuff from my dead POS Pontiac, returning the rental car and picking up my “new” car, I managed to squeeze in a test drive on a 2007 Kia Sportage (how do you say that?  Is it like Sport-AHHHjj or Sport-Ijj?) and I *liked* it.

It looks like this:

And the back seats fold down flat forward, which offers some considerable cargo space:

But even so, the wheel wells seem to take up quite a lot of space and I’m not sure I can get 4 medium sized crates in there (I say 4 because I know for SURE I can’t get 5 in there, and I am thinking the WooTWoo, being onedogsamedog / a single entity, can just share one).  I shall have to do some measuring of crates and think on it.

I’m just trying to avoid having another minivan.  The ones I can afford are shite, and the ones I can tolerate are way out of my price range.

Anyway, for the now I am driving the Waggin’ Wagon around and yesterday, as an experiment, I brought all six beasts to work with me to see how we fared.

Tweed is my Co-Pilot (he gets the front passenger seat because he doesn’t like anydog to touch him)

Faith stands behind the driver’s seat and stares at me through my side view mirror, which is really just disconcerting, and probably means I need to adjust the mirror.

Also, she stands there all crouched up because Piper is sprawled out taking up the rest of the backseat and won’t share with Faith.

Mr. Woo spends his time in a small crate in the way back, plotting how he can move up the chain of command and ride loose.

And in another small crate beside that rides The TWoo, who is pissed off …

… because insanity dog aka Dexter takes his chances by stretching out atop those two slippery crates.

In BC, your car has to pass “Aircare” – an emissions testing procedure.  If it fails, you can get insurance for 3 months to have time to make the necessary repairs that will allow it to pass.  I thought for sure a 21 year old car would fail, so my plan was to let it fail, insure it for the grace period (and make no repairs) and give myself time to hunt down a newer car without any pressure.  However, since the Waggin’ Wagon passed, it’s insured for a year now, and I’m thinking life without a huge monthly car payment isn’t so bad for the moment!  Even if the sea of dog swirling about in it is kind of annoying.  So we’ll see.

In other news, in a  few short days Dexter will be 18 months old and eligible to start competing in the AAC.  This is exciting!  He will be competing in his first non-sanctioned fun match in March, just to get his feet wet.  I’m in no hurry to rush his training along.  He’s still finding his feet, and the Sadist keeps saying ominous sounding things like “You do realize he’s not even running close to full speed yet, right?” and “this dog is going to be so damn super when he’s got some experience” and other stuff that make me wish I was both a better person, and a much better handler.

He is just so much fun!

No updates on the mystery that is Faith … the breeders / sellers never did respond to my email inquiry :(  But the woman who surrendered her said *she* got her from another guy, and she remembers him saying in passing that his wife had changed her name to “Faith” because she was originally named after a nut and she didn’t like that.  So I’m more than certain that “Walnut” is indeed Faith, but I guess we’ll never know how she got from Oklahoma to the west coast of Canada!

And nobody has applied for Faith either, which makes me sad.  Well, one guy did apply for her, but didn’t realize she was deaf (which is sort of a hard thing to miss, given I mention it in every.single.paragraph in her bio) and didn’t want her when he found that out.  How come nobody wants my pretty, no issue lovebug?

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