The chickens, part three (as the blough's tell it...)

Well, it is true that everything happened kind of in a blur. First, we were vacationing together in November, joking about buying an alpaca farm together somewhere in the central coast on our way up to the bay area to visit family. Next thing you know, they were falling out of escrow and talking about moving away to Indonesia so we had to come up with something drastic! Hence, the farm proposition. I know, i know, it was kind of mean and cruel to entice them to stay, but hey, we were trying desperately to prevent our best friends from bouncing town! In all of the excitement somewhere, sometime before we even knew that escrow was likely to close, Sarah found the chicken lady on craigslist. Now, you have to understand sarah and craigslist. She called me yesterday, outta the blue (when she was really, truly, supposed to be finishing up some work for one of her MBA classes) and told me she was going to be early for dinner because she found an unsurpassable deal on a gate that she had to pick up. A gate that we have no use for, a gate that was pretty and only $10 and she really had a deadline for her homework so she had to take a break and go pick it up. This is Sarah on craigslist, but I digress.

So Sarah was on craigslist and found this really great deal on, like 20 chicks that were all different breeds and she was so excited about it. She told me her plan was to go up and see if the lady would let her pay for the chicks and hang on to them for us for the next month until escrow closed. Sounded good enough to me, we could scramble and build a coop over that first weekend and get them all in a nice little home soon enough, right? Well let me tell you, new projects that involve building never really are as simple as they seem they should be. Many of you probably know that, and of course we did deep inside, too, but we were hopeful and craigslist and livestock are kind of like crack to some of us. Sarah is absolutely right when she says that the boys are the ones who have a better head on their shoulders about some of these decisions, but don't tell them I said that.

Ultimately, one way or another we ended up with a dozen young chickens in our backyard. This was on top of the half-dozen we already had from before, the older gals that had been our backyard chicken factory for the last couple of years. Since they were older and set in their ways AND their coop was really not big enough to comfortably fit any more, we had to build a makeshift run for the new brood. They were all supposed to be pullets, but you know the story. I think two of the ones that we kept in our backyard turned out to be roosters. That's another story all together! I will blog about that adventure next. For this one, i leave you with a photo of one of the roosters in our temporary chicken squatter shanty run...