Loving the Morning Light

Drama Drama Drama, but no Llama… yet.

The ongoing saga of the ducks!

So Early this year we lost our chickens from a neighbour dog attack. The neighbours paid for us to renew our flock and I decided I wanted ducks as well as chickens with the money we got. I bought a breeding pair from another neighbour and 3 to eat, and drove to Nelson (about 2 hrs away) to get 6 more ducks, two females and 4 males from a different breeding stock, but the same breed, Muscovy.

 

Out of the 6 we got from Nelson, all but two got killed by a bobcat and one of the remaining two died of… something, don’t know exactly what.   Just fell over dead one day.   The last one was a female, but boy, compared to the 2 that remained from the other batch, she was so timid, unhealthy looking and not strong.   She seemed happy enough by herself, swimming around and the male left her alone so I thought maybe she’ll just get healthy and strong and then start laying eggs or something.  No such luck.  I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days so I walked around the pond and there she was… just curled up dead.  She had either starved herself cause she didn’t want to make the 10 ft swim across to the bank to eat or something… who knows.

 

I had to leap in the pond, swim over to the island and fling her rotting carcass to the shore with the dog shadowing my every move and trying to roll in the dead duck carcass.   Fun and games.

 

Then last night our youngest cat, Georgie,  slipped outside and never came back.  She’s usually back by morning at the very latest, but usually within an hour she’s meowing at my bedroom window wanting to come in.  She doesn’t like being away from us for long.

This morning, no Georgie.  hmmm.

Then Kate comes out of her room in tears and bunched up in pain 😦  we had to take her to emerg when she threw up some streaks of blood.  yikes.  Of course, like always, people start feeling better on the way to the Hospital.   Anyway, the Dr. gave her a Gravol and reassured us that it was probably just a tummy bug of some sort.   We were there for 3 hours.

Come home, still no Georgie.   I called all over the property making she she wasn’t stuck anywhere or having a deep sleep.  I went up to the neighbours to see if she got trapped in any of their buildings or if they had seen her.   I went down to the other neighbours and no go there either.   I went across the road to another neighbours and hear “MEOW” MEW” “MAOOOWWWLLL” from waaaaaaayyyyy up high in a huge pine tree.  My guess is she got chased up by the dog and spent the night there.  The guy helped me get her down and she was panting and hot and when we got her home she drank water for about 5 min.

 

Kate is sleeping and feeling okay.   I think I will pick her up some Gatorade while I’m in town having a birthday lunch with the girls.

 

Sigh!  At least the day doesn’t seem to be continuing in this weird disjointed fashion.

 

 

Hurtin’ Albertan meets the Windy City – Chicago

The folks took us to see “the Bean” in Chicago.  At first walking up to it I was thinking, “Why does this exist?”  but then it was SO mesmerizing we could hardly tear ourselves away!

This was an interesting fountain, that wasn’t running at the moment… but the faces change every few minutes.

Tons of amazing old architecture with stonework.

and, really high skyscrapers with long long long fire escapes

Of course while there we HAD to have deep dish pizza at Gino’s in old town, even if it meant standing in the cold for 45 min to get in.  We left our marks.

And a couple of ducks.

What would a visit to Chicago be without a picture of the skyline.