Happy New Year!

Earthlings

First I have to warn you that this documentary does get very disturbing at times, when I first watched it I would watch a few minutes of it and then take a break because at times it was too much.Also there might be small parts missing because it is hard to follow just one persons videos of it without having to log in and prove you are 18, because some have been flagged as disturbing.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10

It's my Birthday!

Happy Birthday to me.... and as far as the picture, no I'm not turning 6....

Merry Christmas!

Just posting to wish any and all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

My sister got me sick...

My sister was home sick with a sore throat and some other symptoms. I have had my sinuses draining for the past week or so. But I woke up last night several times because I need to blow my noise to breath and to drink some water to stop my throat from aching so badly. But this morning when my mom woke me up to go shopping my voice was scratchy, I would talk and then it would slowly fade of  in to silence.

It has gotten better over the course of the day but my nose is still running and my throat gets sore if I don't drink enough water. But hopefully will be better by Christmas.....

Fresh

This is only the first section here are links to the others:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

More on the Book list....

I finished both 3. Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte and 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

 

and am currently working on  2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

Also today was the last day of school until next year (2011)! 

Busy day!

This morning I woke up to being barely able to hear my radio (I sleep with it on) and hearing Christmas songs coming from the kitchen, which is right below my bedroom. Got down there and cookie making had been started!

First we started out with Kiss cookies, ready to roll:

Rolled in sugar:

Ready to bake:

adding kisses:

Finished product:

And then we started on Cut-out cookies:

 Sitting on the table waiting to be decorated:

We where going to make fudge but we need some more ingredients, so we will just finish by decorating the cut-out cookies. 

Deck Flamingo....

Another fun (aka stupid) Food Safety bill....

A news story on it
I'm all for safe food, but factory farmed food is not the answer and I am not too happy with my states senators who have both voted for it......

Bad Dog!

I went to lock up chickens tonight, went outside was going to let the dog in but decided to leave him on his chain. Go out to the edge of my garden, and hear something go "Crack" I look up and point my flashlight towards the noise two deer are staring at me with another one slipping in to the woods. We three (2 deer and me) just stand there for a few minutes.

Then the third creeps back out of the woods and they all continue to watch me, decide I'm not interesting and start to graze me not 40 feet from them! Then I slowly creep closer about 25-30 feet from them stopping when they looked up. The one who ran in to the woods was at least last years fawn, the one how stared at me longest was a mom with her fawn from this year.

Then the mom just started starring at me again, then "Stomp", she came towards me one step at a time, each time with a stomp. Between stomps she stopped and looked at me and would tip her head side to side as if thinking "What is this creature?" Then at about 15-20 feet from me just after another "Stomp" Nick started barking. They all ran off in to the woods.

I turned to Nick and said "They weren't going to eat me!" Locked up the chickens, checked for eggs (their on strike) and came in and told my mom what happened. She told Nick good job! But that's her worrying about them charging me down and hurting me. (If she looked like she was going to harm me I would have scared her away). But I'm safe and sound, and there will be no reports on the news of "Girl attacked by Deer"

Book List

Someone on BYC posted this list of books which "The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here." When they first posted the list I had read exactly 6, so now I'm trying to read my way threw the majority of them. The ones that are bolded I have read italic I'm either reading , also some of the books have comments on.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen   -I thought I was going to go to sleep reading this
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte    -currently reading
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte   -horribly boring book
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurie
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger   -loved this one
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Went Christmas shopping yesterday!

Busy, crazy, and I ended the day with my headache worse the usual but I got....

Mom- a photo album and a set of frames, she had been telling us to get things like a new skillet but me and my sister have both heard her say she ought to buy these things but never does...

Dad- I bought his this summer it is a T-shirt that says DADD- Dad's against daughters dating

Stepmom- me and my sister got her a $20 gift card for Jo-Anne fabrics, she does lots of crafts

Sister- a very nice Micky Mouse key chain(she collects Micky Mouse)

Nick(dog)- A stocking from walmart full of toys

Cats- some fancy canned cat food, I'd get them toys but Nick destroys them and they really don't use

Friends- Fancy candy bar, a hat, 2 packs of gum, and a fake wii remote candy thing

Also I bought my self a game and a copy of Hannibal Rising (new) for only $2.13 including tax! Also say some cool shops and items which I'll try to fight my phone for pictures of soon.

Home sick again....

and once again watching YouTube videos, mainly Taylor Swift:
I'm only me when I'm with you
I'd Lie
Invisble
Crazier    - Its only good in till the end weird part

and this are cute/silly
A new Hope
The Empire Strikes back
Return of the Jedi
Screaming Eggs  - there is more like it (different foods) that you can find from there.

Awsome Cover, Okay book...

What I do to protect them.....

To protect them:

I harm this:

By this:

The first snow!

These are pictures from yesterday, of the snow that is no longer there:

Chickens in the snow:

and our Christmas tree being cut down, it's now in our living room: 

Peanut Butter Pie,Yummy....

Coop Repairs and apparent new damage....

That is the repairs that will hopefully get me through winter and the new damage I just found:

Don't harm the farms!

What does the government have against small/family farms? While the big factory farms get tax breaks and government funding, small farms are abused and raided:
Small Farm Raids and Unfair Treatment
The first question your probably asking is why are big farms so bad? To answer that question I recommend reading: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and anything by Joel Salantin (who is a bit weird but a good read).
Also watch:
Battery Hens
Factory Farms
and if you have a strong stomach you might want to watch:
Earthlings Part 1 -Total there is about 11 parts
 
I'm not saying that all large farms are this way, but their out there and should be stopped not clean small farms. So why not stop FDA tyranny against dairy farms and family farms?

Also Raw Milk for Sale
More info on Real Food

Poll

I set up a poll for what to add to my blog please answer there or leave a comment here!

2nd Rut

Rutting Season is a bad season as far as deer and cars. Bucks  following does don't pay attention to where they are going, so they run out full speed and get hit by cars.

But it is very sad, like on Monday when going to get my allergy shots someone had hit a gorgeous buck. He was big and about a 8 point. We slowed down because he was on the middle of the road and we thought died. Then he got up, from the look of it both back legs/spine were broken. But as we went past the people pulled over (probably the ones who hit him) where getting out with their gun to put him down. I'm glad he did not suffer long at least.

Bees?

Both BYC and my online Collage course have been talking about bees and CCD, which makes me think at sometime in the future I should establish a hive.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/silence-of-the-bees/introduction/38/
http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=419112
http://thegardenhive.com/?gclid=CIDYuviqnqUCFTRa7AodJVLSFw

But currently only bees around here are bumblebees and the hive of wild bees that live in the empty house on our property, they tend to swarm once or twice a year, here are two different years of swarming :

Graphic pictures of Raccoon Attack

The CM is not died, but I lost a BA last night

The missing CM showed up she just has feathers missing. But one of my two BAs was killed last night. Goodbye baby.

.I let the 3 extra roosters out, figuring if this raccoon is killing them, I would rather have their last days be happy. I just finished  a lot of patching up of the coop which should hopefully keep the coon out though. I'll post pictures of the ugly (but hopefully good) repairs later.

Caramel and a CM are died.....

It appears the raccoon is back, RIP babies.

Interesting.....

United States                                             29 South Korea                                              12 Japan                                                        10 United Arab Emirates                                  5 Finland                                                      1 Mexico                                                      1 Portugal   1    Above is the blog's stats for viewers...

Jack'O Lanterns

I have been meaning to post this since Halloween, but finally here they are.

Deer and feed thieves

Well yesterday did not go well while driving my Jeep to my dad's I hit a buck. My windshield, one front headlight, and my hood need replaced. The buck appeared to have both back legs broken (and an antler), we called and got a cop out for an accident report and to shot the buck if it was still alive. I'll post picture when I get them from my dad or stepmother.

But the thieves are two opossums that are breaking into the coop for feed, their not harming anything but the walls. But I'm guessing the raccoon died or was killed, because there has been no more deaths, even with the opossums breaking in every night.

Anyone Know this book's name? Fould it!

This book is about a Werewolf/vampire offspring, it was a romance in some ways, had a red cover, was part of a series and she was "dating" a vampire. I'm currently looking for it because I read it once and want to reread it.

 I found it!!!
Full Moon Rising:

Books......What to read next?

I read a lot, from really bad romance novels to YA fiction to Adult fiction to just about anything that catches my interest. For a school reading thing I've read A child called It, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith. I've just reread the Twilight series, Silence of the Lambs , Hannibal, and the 7th Harry Potter book. I'm also reading some books from one of the local libraries, In my Hands, Soul of a Dog, and All my Patients have Tales.But afterwords I'm back to rereading, but I'm putting together my Christmas list with lots of books and after Christmas I'm buying my self some more. Any ideas people?

Chicken Story- Broody Hens

So a couple weeks after the chicks where hatched one the CM hens went broody. Then several others went broody and then a BA. So it was the summer of the broodies,  a couple of CMs gave up during around this time. So I decided to let them hatch some eggs 4 white and 8 green, I gave them to one of the CMs.

But then we went on vacation leaving them under the care of a neighbor. I came back to extra eggs under her and all the pencil marks rubbed off the eggs, so I had no idea which was which on green and white eggs. But I removed all the brown and put them in the fridge thinking they had been under her only a day or two. The next day I went to cook them up for the cats (which is what I do if I think eggs are left out to long) and cracked one open to find a chick at about day 9 in development. So I threw the rest into the woods.

But then 10 of the eggs hatched on 7/29/09:

Then a day or so later #11 (I was labeling by hatch number) and I helped it to soon. And it had not helped absorbed the yoke completely and passed away. On about 8/8/09 numbers 12 and 13 hatched and went out with a the broody BA and the two hens (a CM and a BA) were raising the 12 chicks together. Then one of the eggs (a green one) exploded. Then number 14 hatched:

But #14 and the last egg where with a hen I call B#tch, she is a mean hen. So I took B and #14 outside to get a drink and when ever #14 went more then an inch away from B she grabbed her and dragged her back by her wing, leg, basically anything she could grab and was hurting her. So I grabbed her and the last egg and they moved inside with me.

#14 and the last egg

Helping me type

The egg ended up being a dud, but #14 loved me and would call out to get me to hold and pet her. At one point I tried to move her out with the broody hens and it failed. An she moved from the 10 gallon tank to a bird cage I have. 

At about 4wks

But it moved outside with the others, but never really fit in. She would hid from the others and then come running out to me and jump up to he held. But at 11-12wks she disappeared never to be seen again.

I'll continue the chickens story soon......