New England's Narrow Road

Chicken Duty For Thanksgiving

chickens in a coop — How I Spend Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Just a quick note today before I attempt to cook my turkey, to wish all my faithful readers a happy turkey day!!

It’s 6:30am and in about a half hour I will go to my neighbor’s house and release their chickens from the coop. The cute chicks have grown and there are a lot of them! Then tonight at about 4:30 (it gets dark so early now) I will go back and close the door on their coop and hook up the electric fence so the bears and coyotes won’t have a feast. The chickens go in on their own when it’s dark.

I’ll do that all weekend while my neighbors are away because they have places to go and people to see, whereas I don’t. It’s pretty much like that for all holidays. I spend it taking care of their chickens, which I don’t mind now that the rooster is gone. (He’s in their freezer I’m told).

I almost had to quit my chicken duty when the rooster insisted on trying to slash me with his talons. You wouldn’t think that a “bird” could be so scary, but they have sharp talons on the back of their feet and he would fly up at me and kick out his feet just because I was in his pen! Fortunately I had a bucket with me and he’d hit that instead of me, but I didn’t like that and since I get paid in fresh eggs, I figured it wasn’t worth it!

So the next thing I knew the roosters were being “harvested” – I didn’t even know there was more than one -and now it’s safe to enter the pen again.
Other than that my day will be filled with cooking and cleaning up and watching football – Go Pats! It should be a relaxing day. Enjoy!

Between Fall And Winter

log home black and white — The Gray Season

In some areas I suppose it may still look like Fall and technically it is, but this is really the gray season if you ask me. The leaves have been blown off the trees and raked up out of the yards and their gray branches mingle with the hemlocks and pines on the hills. I think it’s pretty cool to be able to see so much now with the trees bare. All the houses that have been in seclusion all summer are now easy to see up on the hills and back in the woods. It’s easier to go for walks in the woods (wearing bright orange of course, because it’s also hunting season) because the weeds and tall grass has died.

We had another beautiful Fall here in New Hampshire and I truly enjoyed it and now we have our wood stacked and the chimneys are clean and ready to go. This weekend some cold weather is hanging around and I’m thinking of starting up the wood stove for the first time this season. I have one cord of firewood, which isn’t a lot, and I had some left over from last year, but it should help to supplement my oil burning and help with the cost.
I am waiting for the snow. In my opinion, if it’s going to be cold, then I want some pretty snow to look at. I don’t have to go out and drive in it as much as someone who goes off to work each day, but I do have to take my son down the road to the bus stop each morning and I don’t have a garage so that means shoveling, brushing off the car and melting the ice off the windshield. I still like the snow. Bring it on..!!

What A Way To Begin The Day

I was up at 4am which is not unusual. The cat gets antsy at that time of day and wants to go out. I get up, make my coffee and begin checking my e-mail while the cats go in and out.

This morning it is pouring rain but Richie HAS to go out. First I open the slider and he just looks, so I shut the door. A few minutes later he is back at the door and when I open it this time he dashes out into the rain. I know he won’t stay out long, but those hunting instincts are very strong in him and I swear he just has to kill something! This time of year the chipmunks are hibernating and he really misses torturing them, so he has turned his attention to the birds, but they aren’t out this early. In fact, the cats catch a lot less this time of year.

Richie has a bad habit of throwing himself against the screen door, paws up, to get my attention when he wants to come in and if I don’t see him right away he’ll climb up the screen. He refuses to be ignored.

So, sure enough, after a few minutes he is at the door and I know he is soaking wet, so I let him in and go to get a towel to dry him. That is when I notice that something is not right. I find to my horror, that he is holding a little gray mouse in his mouth. I immediately pick him up and throw him out the door before he can drop the thing, which is probably only half dead, and as soon as his feet hit the outside deck he turns in a flash and runs back inside. This time he won’t let me near him and heads for my bedroom. Sure enough he drops the mouse – I was right, it can still run – and as I close my bedroom door on him, I see the mouse scoot under my bed.

So I waited until he began meowing at the closed door and then went to see what was up. I opened the door and the cat came out. No sign of the mouse. Now I must go search for the half dead thing that is probably hiding some place in my room.

This has not been a good day so far and it’s only 5:15am.

Update:
At 6:00am my son got up and helped me flush the mouse out of the bedroom. That is not what I intended, but while the cat was looking the other way, my son started yelling, “there he goes!” and I saw the little thing waddling off toward the kitchen, so I grabbed the cat and threw him out the door towards it and a chase ensued which ended up with the mouse and cat in the basement. Okay, that’s good.

At 7:05am Richie comes walking through the kitchen with – yup, you guessed it – the mouse in his mouth, and he is heading to my bedroom again! (I leave the basement door open because the litter box is down there.) So, he dropped the mouse and began playing with it. He chased it around under my bed and out into the hall and finally picked it up in his mouth, so I picked him up and ran to the door and threw him out – way out – so he couldn’t quickly pop back in.
At last I can relax and not think about that mouse any more.

Read about my Adopted Shelter Cats here.

Ready To Burn, Stacking Firewood

firewood stacked in basement — Ready To Heat The House

I bought my cord of firewood at the end of summer for $240 and had to figure out where to stack it this season. Last year I put it in the bottom of the “hole” in the backyard of this house I rent and figured I’d just go out the back slider downstairs and bring it in as needed. I took my cue from my landlady who does the same thing, except that she has an overhang and larger flat area in the hole, so her wood is not right against the house like mine is. (See photo below) My son went out and cut some small trees that had fallen (with my landlady’s permission) and I will use those as starters.

high snow piled up looking outside — Snow outside the basement slider last year (2009)

That didn’t work out too well, since the accumulated snow from the roof slid off (it’s a metal roof) and buried my wood under hard-packed icy snow. I did manage to dig most of it out, but still had quite a bit left that I couldn’t get to until Spring. In fact, I couldn’t even use my slider to go in and out because the snow was piled about 4 feet high!
So this year, after the delivered wood dried out, and between rainy days, I dumped it down the hill using my wheelbarrow and then stacked it in my basement. Some of it is also stacked outside, but up near my porch and not in the hole. I only get one cord because I just have no place to store it. I’d like to have lots of wood and never use oil heat and it’s easy to keep the stove going once it’s heated, but it’s not my house and the set up just isn’t very good. One cord, plus the little I had left over won’t heat this place for the whole winter, so I’ll wait for very cold weather and save it up for possible ice storms when we might lose power. That has happened both of the past winters.
On top of that, I have to order seasoned wood because after August, there is no sun in my yard to dry it out. Ideally I would order “green”, not seasoned (or older cut wood), in early Spring and stack it in a nice sunny spot to dry for months to use in winter. And even better than that would be to have a big, strong, heard working man in my life who would go out and cut up dead trees and then split the wood so I wouldn’t even have to buy any! Now I am dreaming, but I have done what I could to supplement my oil heat this year.
Today the chimney lining is being replaced and soon I hope the landlady will have the furnace cleaned. Renting means you are at the mercy of someone else, so I just have to go with the flow.Related Articles