hatch 'em or crack 'em?

Usually, I eat eggs for breakfast.  Fried up, yolks still soft.  Salt and butter with each bite.  yum.  Or, crack 'em raw, separate and discard the white so just the bright, gold yolk slides into a jar of cold kefir.  Add a little honey or some maple syrup, shake, and mmmmmmmmm, so good.  
      About a month ago I decided to try something I've been itching to do for a bit now.  Hatch 'em, instead of eat 'em.  Would a little baby chicken come out of my breakfast food?  I had to know.
One whole day spent on you-tube taught me enough to build an 'egg-hatcher'.  Incubator just doesn't sound complete.  In order to be optimistic, I spoke to friends and family of the 'egg-hatcher' and its contents.    Breakfast food was kept around 98 to 100 degrees with 30 to 50 % humidity, for 19 days.  My little hopefuls were turned every 8 hours and rotated around the circle.
     Then, one Tuesday afternoon, one of the eggs was an egg shell and there was a wet, scrawny, creepy looking little creature flailing around the egg-hatcher.  A few hours later, there was another one.  I stayed up late into the night to watch the other 4 eggs.  Sleeping on a mattress on the floor, my alarm going off every hour, I watched one of the baby chicks peck its way out.  The 4th chick was already out when I woke up from the last hour nap.
        Amazing.  Just blows my mind.  4 little beings walking around a shoe box now, peeping.  Peeping, peeping, peeping.  Oh its just the sweetest noise.  How did this happen?  Something I usually eat turned into beings, live beings.  Oh the wonder of it!  Life happening right before my eyes.
        That was about 3 weeks ago.  The other 2 eggs never hatched.  4 out of 6 on the first try, I was so very pleased with the whole experiment.  They lived in a card board box for another 19 days.  We went out for 'walks' every day.  They'd get shoved back into that shoe box, lid on, and find themselves at the base of a tree next to the pond.  I watched in wonder as they started scratching and pecking, opening their wings, just walking around like a bunch of chickens.  Who taught them how to do that?  It certainly wasn't me.  I was just sitting there staring in disbelief.  For awhile it seemed each day they displayed a new behavior I see every day from our adult chickens.  (Who knew there were so many different chicken behaviors?)
       All the while I continued to collect eggs from the chicken coop every day and eat them for breakfast.  Really?  These yummy treats could turn into cute, fluffy, peeping creatures.  Or, I could eat them right now, maybe with a little cheese?  yum.  So very strange.
       Well, there's 3 left.  One got snatched by a farm kitty while we were out on a 'walk'.  That was heart breaking.  Ripped a hole in my chest to watch that little nugget being carried away in a cat's mouth.  Oh what a failure I was as a parent...  the kitty has kittens though and she was trying to feed her babies.  I understand.
    Now they live in the 2nd part of the duplex that is our chicken coop.  I hang out with them every day, sometimes twice.  They are a true joy in my life.  Just hours of entertainment really.  Like watching a fish tank.  Constant motion and soothing noises.  The picture above was taken today.  Its the 2nd batch that escaped breakfast.  Arrival date is first day or two of August.   I am very excited to watch the miracle all over again.

 

teats n honey

       Yesterday after I posted this and sent it to some friends and family, I got to thinking about the word teet.     I realized that it was probably spelled wrong.  In the title of the blog, in the web address, and in the text that I had written.  There is a vague recollection of teet being underlined in red while I was writing.  And I do remember a thought flashing through my mind as I ignored the red.  'I know about teets.  Who ever runs the dictionary on this computer and assigns red to words does not know about teets like I know about teets.  Must be one of those farm words that only farmers really understand.'

         Its true though, right?   How can one truly understand all there is to understand about the teets on a cow's udder, until one has squeezed many of them.  Day after day after day.  There's so much to know. There are short ones and long ones.  Short fat ones and short skinny ones.  Long skinny and long fat.  Many times one udder will have 3 short fat ones and one long one (fat or skinny).  Which direction does the opening point?  When its squeezed does the milk flow directly down into the pail or do I have to make a subtle adjustment in my wrist so the milk doesn't squirt her leg, or my knee?  Sometimes the back two are so close together that my hands don't fit at the same time.  Morgan is like that.  She needs to be milked back in one hand and front in the other.  But the front ones frequently empty out first so then there's a choice to make.  Squish my hands together and rub knuckles in an uncomfortable fashion, or just be patient and milk one teet at a time.  

            Anyway about the word teet.

Eckhart Tolle says somewhere in one of his books, that words are sign posts.  They point to the object or idea they describe, but the word itself is not what it describes.  If a young person learns the word 'honey' before having tasted honey, they do not really know what honey is.  They may spell it correctly on a test in school, but to truly know honey, one must let it drip on their tongue, close their eyes and breathe in as the mouth experiences all there is to experience with honey.  And a guardian of bees may even say that to truly know honey, one must care for a hive all year and then gently, carefully, collect their bounty, filter it, put it in jars, and spread it on some buttered bread. 

 Then, and only then, may one correct the spelling of the word 

teet.  

kickers for a high step

This is Gertie.  I milked her this morning, and yesterday.  we don't milk the same cows every morning.
It just depends on who comes in to the milk house next.
She 'high steps' a lot during milking.  Stepping around is annoying, but not a huge problem.  High stepping, not so good.  When I'm sitting there with a pail of warm, delicious milk squeezed between my knees and I see that hoof come over the lip of the pail, its all I can do to get it out of the way.  No reason to cry over spilled milk is true, it happens all the time.   At the same time, it is a lot of work to squeeze those teets and collect the milk.  So I'm trying my hardest not to let her spill the pail containing all my (and her) efforts. I put the 'kickers' on her again this morning.  There is not a good way to describe this.  I have resisted using them on the cows, with general success.  I tolerate way more stepping and moving around than Miguel does.  With not any more spilled milk I might add...
        So its this very unique relationship between the human and the cow.  We ask her to come out of the pasture and into the milk house every morning.  OK, Gertie does that.  Then we ask her to stand still while we squeeze her teets and take all the milk she made in the last 24 hours.  Milk that is meant to go to her calf.  Oh, but we took her calf when it was 3 weeks old.  Why?  So we can have her milk.  When Gertie doesn't stand still, but does the dreaded high step, I could interpret that as resistance.  She doesn't want me to have her milk.  Or maybe its that her udder is very tight & full and it causes discomfort when her teets are squeezed.  (my nails are nice and short, I take care of the ladies that way.)
So then the kickers come out.  That's the human part of the relationship where I'm saying to the cow, "this is what's up.   I'd like you to hold still, but I need you to keep your feet down."  It's a unique relationship.  I'm still working it out in my mind and my heart...
The kickers are two wide, iron 'bracelets' we'll say, connected by a chain.  Slip one bracelet onto her leg, just above the knee.  Then pull tight and slip the other bracelet over her other leg.  She can still lift her legs, but there is no more high stepping.  For Gertie anyway.  She responds well too it.  Each day is a new day.  She gets a fresh go every morning.  Hopefully tomorrow she won't wear the kickers.