Ever start a blog? Get real excited and post a bunch of thoughtful,
interesting stuff? Maybe you too have
made lists for future posts, and found yourself scribbling down notes about common
threads that link them all together and create Profound and Valuable Insights? I hope so, because those are some good times,
for sure. If you’re like me, however,
you’ve also hit patches where you look up and suddenly realize that its been weeks
or months since the last time you posted anything, even though you can't actually come up with much of a reason for the lapse. Having been through it a few times in the three or four years that I’ve
had a blog, I’ve come to view it as a
cycle, with peaks and valleys and seasons and all those other great metaphors
from nature, rather than a narrative that just cruises forward in the kind of straight,
unbroken line that I might've originally imagined. The good news is that, this time around, I’m happy to say that I’ve
finally stopped beating myself up about it; I’ve stopped feeling
guilty, stopped identifying as a slacker, stopped being sure that I’ve
failed at what has to be the lowest stakes game out there. In other words, I’ve just gone
ahead and embraced the fact that its completely fine for a blog to have a life
of their own. The tide comes in and the
tide goes out. This time around, no
worries; I readily admit that I’ve just been farting around with lots of other
things in the non-digital sphere instead of pontificating in front of a partly
real and largely imagined audience, and I’m cool with it, and now, as of August
24, 2015, I’m ready to squeeze the bellows and fire things up again. I’ve always had Things to Say; I’m simply recommitting
to getting back in the harness and doing it
again. Until my next lapse, at
least.
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| photo credit: Austen Diamond www.austendiamond.com |
Our new flock is a small one- just 4
birds (in the past we’ve had up to 25, which is admittedly way too many). We've got 4 different breeds, including a bantam silkie. Silkies have smooth, fur-like feathers and they're the only kind of chicken that my wife Michele has ever really warmed up to. Unfortunately, the last one turned out to be a rooster, in spite of being named Veronica, and his tenure was thus short-lived. We've got our fingers crossed for the new recruit (Petunia), and so far it hasn't displayed any overt male behavior (aka bossiness, strutting about, or crowing) so I have to say that I like our odds.
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| They get so shy when you try to photograph them |
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| Petunia is the smaller bird on the left |
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| This is the "sidecar" where we'll collect eggs starting in about a month |
