Offices never see your shining face? I thought that group photo was in an office-like edifice, no? I guess jeans are de rigeur for greenhouses, although perchance a mite dressy for bolt holes.
I Have (Demi) Divine Socks!
I favour lab coats---it is very difficult to be pinned down sartorially whilst in a lab coat.
And that was a "forced" corporate photo--designed to flatter the Dark Lords of the Kingdom Conglomerate.
Oh my. Blithely did I let the youngling have her computer time and all this happens! I wear socks with boots, Ladies. I wear boots between two and ten times a year. Just to clarify. And I did so want to have an utterly complexicated title without any dreary consistencies to worry about...
G'nite all!!
E'en in a lab coat, the nether regions and footgear speak volumes, albeit silently. No such luck, Catsy. I'm sure your fellow lab rats have typed you to a fare-thee-well.
Grownut, what is uncomplexicated about your moniker? And have you ever noticed anyone here worrying about dreary consistencies? Or dreary anythings?
Greenhouse_Gal, just in from pulling off her boots after bringing the chickens their morning cheer.
Enter Cousin Nut with parley profound! Those are truly sunny sockies MissJestr and very ept to arrive at the perfect time. ZZs you are on a grand flutterabout methinks. Off to the mountains to look for Druids today. I believe they are direct descendents of the Museys although mostly I hope they have dragons.
Moxanne? Moxanne? When did I become Moxanne?
Oh Dahlianut, I would so love to come galumphing about with you to look for Druids. Sometimes I think I might be one. Do keep careful notes and be prepared to regale us with your adventures.
Lab coats are the cure for all manner of evils. I was required to wear one in a past life, well, actually a past part of this life, but still, it seems like a past life. I was disenchanted with its lack of splendour, whereupon I removed the pocket and hand embroidered, Oh-So-Carefully, a little teal coloured "Polo" horse, copying exactly one that I had on a shirt at home. This caused many comments over the next weeks along the lines of "Where did you buy a Polo lab coat?" and "I didn't know Polo made lab coats" etc, etc. It was a good ploy.
Fellow lab rats?
I do not work in a lab anymore. I can be seen, on faint and misty morns, gliding spectrally about the station in my shin length size 40 lab coat.
Unlike grownut, I do wear shoes, but mine are in the near exact likeness of baked potatoes--nothing much can be gleaned from that.
Brilliant move with the lab coat, Mox...Mox...Mox... Uh, what comes next?
Such a simple name and so many ways to corrupt it....
Have you figured out your Druidic name? Maybe that will be easier for us to spell?
You became Moxanne because I needed it to rhyme with Catscan, silly, for my Goodnight Moon couplet or triplet or whatever it was.
Most impressive that you could actually embroider your very own little Polo emblem on your lab coat, and verily lucky art thou that the copyright police didn't descend upon you and haul you off to court. I know Disney, weirdly enough, is very jealous of its logos, so I'd assume something even less cuddly would be worse.
I suspect in some ancient former life I was a Wise Woman, but probably not a Druid. All that woad bodes ill, methinks.
My druid name is Gwennden Erwfair. (Erwfair is pronounced "air-ew-vi-er" sort of run together a little bit) It is the name of our ancestral home in Wales.
Mooooooooxaaannne -You don't have to put on your lab coat!!
(the Police, wasn't it?)
Walt was a little bit of a weinerbrain methinks. Not only did he kill Bambi's mother but I discoverd that one should pay royalties when singing a tuber digging song based on 'Hi Ho Hi Ho'. I find these things disgruntling so I have taken him off my Christmas card list.
{{we nuts, we sticks together for a reason!!}}
Dahlianut, methinks 'twas Felix Salter who killed Bambi's mother. And whoever tried to assess royalties for a parody on "Hi Ho"? Anyhow, parodies are usually protected in intellectual property regulations. Surely you could have claimed a derivative work of art?
After what Walt did to Winnie-ther-Pooh, he went off my Christmas card list permanently!
{{as in nutbrittle and nutbutter? Most sticky stuff, that!}}
{{as in dahlianut and grownut...but perhaps we are stickier than we know...;p}}
Yep---The Police--the mind boggles with the possibilities.....
Mo-o-ox-anne! A Druidic Reggae.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGQYI_TL8VQ
Or maybe a defective work of art? mi mi mi
♫ Hi Ho Hi Ho it's tuber diggin' I go....
La! Dahlianut...you are fearless! Just stick it to the MAN!
I sheared two of my ram lambs today, in preparation for putting them together with "the girls" for whom they have been chosen this year. Shearing them lends them a rather pathetic and sorrowful appearance. I hope they will still do their job...
{{{who got sheared today???}}}
[[we did! we did!!]]
They look like "well-loved" Steiff toys.
Methinks I don't espy sorrowful goatlings, but merely curlaceously curbed goatlings. I have returned from the mountains where I had hoped to bond with Druids and maybe dragons. Alas I got distracted by ducks. They were everywhere. QUACK! There was a time (which some may recall) when I almost became a duck so coursely I became enameled with them and what with quacking and examining interesting bugs in the reeds in the river I was muchly swayed. I did see a runeish scribing on a funky weird stone thing though but it was in Francais besides Druid so probably a ruse to discombobulate false Druid seekers. Tis apparent that I must consult with MissJestr about horse blinders for peoples so I am not distracted by ducks in the future.
Dahlianut dearest...they are sheeplings....not goatlings...
It's OK, I know you were distracted by ducks.
CRAPPOLA foiled by the sheepling/goatling morf again. Why o why can't they look different? I think they do it on purpose just to befuddle me :( Ahem.... (starting over) Luvly looking curlaceously curbed sheeplings dear Clarie.
Well thank you dear Dahlianut! They are not very pleased with me, in fact, one of them urinated in large quantity down my leg as I was shearing him, but they are quite settled now. They really do look different from goats. You must come visit and learn the nuances. :-)
I so believe in over the rainbow . 'Kansas' was a typo.
Moxanne, isn't it the wrong time to be shearing? Or are you just crutching them - but I thought that was the females only. We always sheared in the spring. How rude of that ram to sprinkle you like that, though!
Dahlianut, I am udderly amazed that you were even able to find your way back down those mountings. And do tell, please, what particular affinity you have for ducks?
I tried to talk my DH into getting ducks this next spring, today, but he unfortunately reminded me that unlike geese, ducks require housing, and he didn't think they'd share well with the chickens. Since this past summer was The Summer of the Hen Palace and it was totally consumed with the situation and modification of said edifice, I suspect he is decidedly uninterested in doing a reprise for duck habitation.
I keep hoping someone would like my ducks. They don't seem to be acquiring enough duckly survival skills (like swimming and flying) to go live at the vet's pond. They get along ok with the chickens but are housed separately at night. Also I'm afraid they are all males: no quacking, no eggs, and they talk to me in hisses...? I've never had Muscoveys before so I really don't know what to expect. Greenhouse, they are accustomed to very humble digs, a palacial abode would be unnecessary.
As for the shorn ramlets I think they look trim and athletic, perhaps the ewes will too.
G_G - unlike the vast majority of sheep, Icelandics are sheared twice a year, in fall and spring. So are many angora goats. That's why I only did the two Icelandics and not the others. :-) I didn't do the Icelandic females this fall because they didn't put on as much wool this summer as I would have expected, so they will have extra long coats in the spring, but better shearing.
Porkpal....gee....didn't somebody (yeah, me) tell you that the ducks would not want to fly away...
Our chickens and ducks are housed together. Ducks make more poo though, and it's messier, so that means the coop needs to be cleaned more often. Fortunately, I have Kelly for that. If they are Muscovies, then they do not quack much like other breeds of duck. The difference between the male and female muscovy is the amount of red on their faces. The males have a lot more red and usually have a sort of pobble of red at the base of their beak, whereas the females do not. Do yours all have that lump at the beak base? There are some good pictures here showing the face characteristics between the sexes.
http://www.avianweb.com/muscovyduck.html
Mine are still young so they don't have as much red ornamentation of the face as the ducks in the article, but they all have the same amount, and none of them "coos" so I still think they may all be male. Oh, yeah, and they don't like roosting either. I have put them on the roosts in their borrowed coop and they teeter and ungracefully topple off. I think they are the duds of duckdom - doubtless why their mother abandoned them in the first place. They do have lovely sleek and shiny feathers and are quite attractive - from a distance.
We did not have much luck with Muscovys; they took wing and began to visit the river and then came back to nibble on my garden. It did NOT make them popular around here. DH once sliced his hand open attempting to corral an errant duck; it was scooting down the bank and started for the river. He made a leap for it and landed in the mud, hand first, and encountered some glass. The duck, of course, simply swam off. He still doesn't know what he was thinking he was going to accomplish by jumping after a creature that both flies and swims. When we took him to the emergency room he did NOT admit to the actual circumstances of his wounding, although the ER doctor was curious because of the amount of mud in it....
Aha, Moxon, thanks for the lesson on Icelandic sheep. We both have very old sweaters made from Icelandic wool; they are beautiful.
Porkpal, palatial or not, it would still require the Building of an Edifice, which would then need to be made Safe from Predators. DH has no stomach for any more poultry structures. We had a duck house when we lived in Washington State, and we still got a raccoon that clawed our poor duckies' webbed feet through the wire floor. We have coons around here, too.
Oh well, I tried....
I would be willing but alas, DH is not! The plucking is also an issue, although we actually have one of those chicken-plucking drums. We have found that it doesn't work as well on turkeys or geese as it does on chickens, although it's still a huge time saver.
This is most interesting. Our Pekin and Swedish ducks go into the coop with our chickens, but the Muscovies just plain refuse. They stay out all night and have never been troubled. We do have raccoons and I've seen what they can do with a chicken, but never has a Muscovy disappeared or even been injured. We have about 8 and they wander all day and night, outside, uncooped. I thought, from this experience, that Muscovy ducks didn't sleep like chickens (i.e. become practically comatose and unable to sort out what is going on). I thought they maintained a much closer eye on things, and I wondered even if a male Muscovy would be a bit much for a raccoon trying for an easy meal. So, while our more "tender" ducks have an edifice, our Muscovies do not.
Yes, I recall that muscovies were hardier, but we don't like them as much as the other types of ducks. Interesting that nothing bothers them at your place! I'm not sure they were hassled at ours, either.
It says they are supposed to roost in trees, have either of you observed roosting? Mine aren't clever enough to avoid predators so they get cooped at night, however they are now so big that it is wall-to-wall ducks in their little borrowed (from the youngest chicks) coop.
Seems to me that I remember seeing my Muscovies roost in trees. They flew fairly well, as I mentioned!
The funniest critter roosting that I ever saw, though, was a turkey. A wild one wandered down to our lawn once and was chased by our dog. It flew up and over the small river, and landed high in a tree on the other side. What an ungainly bird to take to the air. It just looked so improbable!
We used to have our pine woods fill up with wild turkeys when we lived in Upstate NY.
When I moved to CA, I was driving down a busy street and saw all these big, awkward birds flapping up in some redwood trees planted along the street.
I thought: "Wow! Turkeys!"
Nope--Vultures.
Them's Pacific Redheaded Turkeys...In-dijnus...
Ah yes....there is actually a prestigious housing development in the East Bay (across the Bay from San Francisco)--named "Black Hawk" for the dark majestic birds that ride the thermals in the surrounding hills--problem is, the Black Hawk is in-dijunus to Mexico--it doesn't come this far north.
Yep--Vultures.
None of our Muscovies have ever roosted in a tree. In fact, I've never seen any of them even try to get into a tree, or on any other structure on our property. They do fly, occasionally, although the males invariably have ridiculously clutzy landings in which they nearly do somersaults, and they seem way too heavy to fly very elegantly. The females fly better. They fly to the soybean field next door, and fly back. They don't roost on anything, even though they have a multitude of trees, fences, buildings, goat huts, etc that they could roost on if they wanted to. They huddle together on the ground, winter and summer. They tend to hang out either close to the barn (but not inside it). Sometimes they have little hissy fits, in which they all thrust their necks out repeatedly and make little hissy noises. I have been known to try to emulate them, unsuccessfully.
Of course none of our chickens have ever tried to roost in a tree either. Maybe I have height-phobic birds.