misty donkey herder

Antifascist, anti-covid, anarchist, AuDHD. Queer and non-binary, she/they. A country house with too much going on: 3 adults and a kid, a garden and orchard, a donkey and a mare, chickens, cats, house rabbits and guinea pigs. (RIP rats)
Living at the tip of the Kitsap Peninsula in the PNW, thank you to the Suquamish people who lived here before us.
~*~ I block everyone who tries to tell me who I must vote for ~*~

Allergies: 80% of the world
Connective tissue: Extra stretchy
Old ass blog of my adventures with my mare: http://fundersgoodidea.blogspot.com/

Public Key

npub19p88kwdcch3tzvyw2dqfxul3v385cpd80yxnpjque0zmvjgngzjqla29cj

NIP-05 Address

donkeyherder_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszsnnm8xuvtc43xz89xsynw0ckgn6vqknhjrfseqwvh3dkfyf5pfqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wdmksetjv5hxxmmd4wwkt5

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relay.noswhere.com

Author Public Key

npub19p88kwdcch3tzvyw2dqfxul3v385cpd80yxnpjque0zmvjgngzjqla29cj

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Last Notes

2024-09-28 21:49:15

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fabulous, fabulous news. It’s so good to know it can be done!

2024-09-28 21:48:59

My brain chemistry is falling into its usual autumn disarray, but this year I have a *good* psych so hopefully I’ll improve soon. In the meantime, I’ve been slowly heading into fall yard chores.
I’ve got two blueberry beds with two bushes each. I got them both weeded out, then got one mulched and the other half-mulched. And I fought off all the sales emails and replanted *my own* shallots and garlic.
The blueberries by the driveway aren’t pictured yet. I pulled the weeds from around them and mulched with worm-studded chunks of my finest compost. Then I laid down some cut open paper feed sacks for moisture capture and temporary weed control, topped that with some straw, and spread poly mesh fence on top of it all to keep the chickens away. Then I went looking for the landscape staples, but they’re gone from all the usual hiding spots, so I ordered more. Hopefully the chickens won’t do too much damage today.
Down in the heart of the garden, I’d let strawberries run totally wild in the bed for the two small young blueberries. I ruthlessly ripped them all out and mulched the bed with dry corn leaves. More corn stalks went around the herb blob where the cottontail raised her babies this summer — she never came back to reuse the nest, so I filled the cavity with fine finished compost. The herbs are already leaping into action, and the stunted little yellow sweet pepper plant beside it is still working on growing some fruit, bless its heart.
I pulled all the strawberries, but dragging them to the compost pile seemed unnecessary when there was bare dirt in the bed next door. So I planted my garlic in that bed, layered the wilting strawberry runners on top, and called it good.
Up at the top of the garden, I had one empty bed that’s kind of hard to harvest from — perfect for shallots.
None of my alliums did well this year, but they were handicapped by beds with poor soil. The shallots weren’t big enough to eat, but there were enough to save and plant in a better bed. And I’m finishing up a multi year experiment with the garlic: two years ago I saved some bulbuls from the flowering heads you’re supposed to cut off, and this year I grew them out. Just like they’re supposed to, the tiny little clovelets from the flowering heads grew into small solid bulbs, like dwarf daffodil bulbs. Those got replanted yet again, and this year they’ll grow into proper garlic heads with multiple cloves. I’m very interested to see how big they get, and also I planted some cloves from my biggest normal garlic head for comparison.
#gardening
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2024-09-04 20:19:04

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my free range chickens will occasionally go hard at the horse manure compost piles, but they don’t spend much time in the compost bin by the house that’s filled with rabbit litter and garden waste. The really good stuff is usually too far down for them to do real damage to the pile.
And they would do damage to a compost pile. A lot of the decomposition that happens is due to fungae spreading their filaments through all the cellulose. Plus the bacteria that handle the aerobic digestion need a really precise level of warmth and moisture. I don’t think there’s a good way to combine chickens with active composting (but I might be wrong!)
I find the chickens to be really useful in other ways. When I pull the old crop out of a bed, the chickens will spend a few days scratching (and pooping) in that spot, getting up the last bits of weeds and bugs. Then I can dump finished compost in there and they’ll scratch that in for me too.

2024-09-02 15:27:45

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I love this 🥰
I’m left-dominant ambidextrous (my brain won’t commit to ANYTHING) and it’s not the hardest of disabilities, but it still fucking sucks. So much of our stuff has a right handed bias but it doesn’t have to!

2024-09-01 16:07:05

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I grew up in the rural US, where people just have veggie gardens in their yards, and it’s the same here. You *can* buy pretty, purpose-made garden stuff, but people usually make do with baling twine and bits from the trash.

2024-09-01 00:03:22

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I wonder if this is so big the state will have to buy them out. That’s a huge number of homes that have just been destroyed, basically, by natural disaster. I guess if you’ve got solar you could cut loose from the grid and stay, but that area is basically uninhabitable under capitalism now.

2024-08-31 03:20:02

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When I can, I like to spend the golden hour with the chickens, especially when there’s chicks to look out for. Ninja really appreciates the help, too. This afternoon, when I showed up to put dinner grain in the coop, she had the chicks under the old raised beds. Once I was there, she slowly led me and the chicks across the (freshly mown) grass to the deep mulch under the cream hydrangea, where they spent almost an hour scratching up tiny tasty things. Presley led the main flock from their afternoon snacks in the orchard around through the terraces and into the garden for their last scrounging before bed.
Then that hawk showed up again! Bey let out a two-note warning call and every chicken froze solid. It perched in the fir by the coop and I, lacking anything else to do, went and pointed at it and yelled for a while. It ignored me so I just stood there too, watching it scanning for prey. It would turn its head, then bob about an inch forward and back, to triangulate I suppose. Then it would turn its head again and repeat the process.
Eventually it took off, scornfully flying rather low directly over my head as I yelled and chased it. It went right over where Ninja was frozen by the hydrangea, then kept going to the fence on the far side of the garden. I followed it and kept pointing, and in disgust it flew off to the neighbor’s yard.
It was utterly silent, except for me yelling, the entire time the hawk was around. A couple minutes after it moved on, the hummingbirds resumed hunting each other in the holly trees, but it was a couple minutes longer before the rest of the birds, wild and tame, suddenly started making quiet sounds again. Once Ninja gave the all-clear, the chicks came out of the shadows, and they got right back to scratching.
The biggest chick has a baby rooster’s tail, bronze banding on his wings, and perhaps some topknot, and I’ve named him Zeus. The Unfortunate Jimmy also has a rooster tail, and his underbite isn’t getting any better. Legs is as tall as Zeus, but she’s got a stubby pullet’s tail and quite good feathering on her legs. Our kid is really into retro gaming these days, so I think the all-black pullet chick will be Contra - she’s got no markings, black legs, and even a black beak. I think the other two are also future hens. One has a quite interesting face, with a yellow beak at the base that transitions to black at the tip, and I’m pretty sure that’s the one with the interesting bit of white on the wings, too.

2024-08-31 01:25:14

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see?!

2024-08-31 01:21:02

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they’re dangerous because they look so stupid that other drivers have trouble tearing their eyes from the horror

2024-08-30 23:02:45

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okay, I graduated from law school and even passed the bar, but it was almost twenty years ago and I immediately left that state for good, so I’m not a lawyer but could play one on tv. I think the answer is that the opposing council is only allowed to ask questions about what the witness witnessed. And you’re not supposed to ask leading questions, of course. So “would you agree Dr Bob says you’re obsessed with fire” is a leading question about something vague. “What did you overhear Dr Bob say to his colleague about you when you waited outside his office on January 4 2023” is a legit question. I think?

2024-08-30 22:57:13

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The expanded version of why I got a barn cat but don’t need one anymore:
I needed a barn cat to keep the inevitable rats from nesting in and peeing on and ruining my horse’s stored hay. Nightlight was pretty good at that! But my mare poisoned herself on a toxic weed last November (on the day Henry Kissinger died, which kind of ruins that upcoming holiday) and almost died. Part of the discharge instructions was to feed her the special low-starch diet for insulin resistance. No more bales of hay piled in a stack! Now she and the donkey eat “diet hay,” a low-starch vitamin fortified chopped hay sold in expensive little plastic-wrapped bales. Everybody’s various bags of feed are stored in rat-proof steel garbage cans. There are still barn rats, too many barn rats even, but they aren’t ruining any feed so I don’t need a barn predator anymore. The owl that lives in the woods behind the barn is theoretically helping, at least.

2024-08-30 22:21:06

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once I picked it up, it was like “oh FUCK!” and started struggling. I took one quick look at it to make sure it wasn’t injured (what would I do if it was???) and it still had its umbilical cord! But I just put it down inside the corn and it vanished. Vaya con dios, tiny idiot.

2024-08-30 22:18:11

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I miss Nightlight, my murdercat, so fucking much. She’s been gone for over a month (and by gone I mean the coyotes got her) and I still miss her every day. I won’t seek out another barn cat, for both the bird-lover reasons and the cat-lover reasons, but she left a big hole in my microecosystem.
I never saw so many baby bunnies before, because Nightlight would murder them. It’s way nicer to see them grow up than to find a head on the door mat, and it’s great to see the stupid baby songbirds fledge too. But now my garden is flush with rabbits, and the predators are taking note. This asshole hawk is the least of my worries - he’s only the size of a bantam chicken, so the adults aren’t in much danger. The coyotes, after eating my cat, are AWOL and now the meadow bunnies are breeding like rabbits.
There are Too Many wild rats in the barn and near the coop, so I’ve regretfully started trapping them again. The ravens are beyond overjoyed to get the occasional rat corpse, but the coopers isn’t a threat to them so they’re not interested in driving it away for me. I’m just hoping they’re hanging out often enough to keep any god damn bald eagles from finding the rabbit buffet.
I miss my murdercat, yall.

2024-08-30 22:05:03

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That asshole Cooper’s hawk almost got a chick this morning. I was downstairs talking to B when I got a glimpse of a shadowy bird diving into the garden, past the raised beds, then Ninja came shooting past the beds screaming her head off. I was (unusually!) too frantic to think clearly and it took at least ten minutes for me and our kiddo to find the babies. Ninja ended up trumpeting her panic from under the dogwoods but the babies were hidden near the attack, in the raspberries. When she finally stopped the alarm call and started the where-are-my-chicks call, at least I was able to call her back over to them so they could stay hidden.

2024-08-30 21:56:07

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“they’re GW approved potions, thank you very much!”

2024-08-30 21:55:27

Spoiler: I picked it up (to put it safely in the corn) and it *did* fit in my hand. #chickens #chicks #DailyBunnies
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/053/197/858/408/336/original/12853398467a9d7e.mp4

2024-08-30 21:47:34

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I had one of those too, gone too soon to a murderous raccoon! No, this mom is a copper Maran, my best hen and a fearsomely bad temperament. I took all of her eggs and replaced them with her gentle flock mates.
Four are from Easter egger hens and the other two are from a buff Brahma. The father is a big black-and-red Polish x Maran fellow who passed along his coloring to everyone. I’ve got one chick with fuzzy legs and another one may be growing a topknot! Two of the chicks had very fluffy chins and I’m hoping they’ll grow the EE beards.

2024-08-30 15:46:41

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post-covid lack of smell strikes again, maybe?

2024-08-30 02:21:30

This adorable idiot had just escaped death from above, but once the Cooper’s hawk had moved along, it came right back. This isn’t from the Herb Litter, it’s at least two weeks older. So cute!
#DailyBunnies
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/048/582/982/802/603/original/1a75ad9d3b32a324.mp4

2024-08-29 17:15:31

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it evokes both “tusslin” and “rasslin” and those are trustworthy country words

2024-08-29 15:37:15

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oh that’s so sweet!

2024-08-29 13:48:56

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gay men and queer women united in their desire to be stomped by haute butches 😍

2024-08-29 00:02:13

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it’s ok, island time runs different

2024-08-28 21:17:39

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hmm, over here it was taco time about an hour ago and now it’s nap time

2024-08-28 17:06:13

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if anybody else in the US falls in love with these, I got mine from Red Pig Tools - this is the listing for the right hand version, but they make one for lefties too!!
https://www.redpigtools.com/Hand-Plow-Right_p_1182.html

2024-08-28 17:01:46

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that’s sound advice, but I can barely handle one account and one app to view it. I believe in my anarchist sysadmins! They got it back up before I went into withdrawals 😅

2024-08-28 16:36:36

Omg decentralized social media is great until your server goes down. Glad to be back, here’s your baby bunnies for the day! Jumping on the #DailyBunnies hashtag
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2024-08-27 17:49:05

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aww, RIP coco puff.

2024-08-27 15:30:20

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that’s hardly the moon’s fault!

2024-08-27 14:41:35

Marched out this morning, flung the coop door open, and Ninja *growled.* Kinda pleased that I didn’t think she was growling at *me,* I just immediately turned around to see what was bothering her. It was a Cooper’s hawk! Sitting on the garden fence twenty feet away!
I know that something has to eat all these bunnies, but coopers hawks will kill small chickens, too. (RIP to Honey and Toast’s sister, gone before she got a proper name 😢) I yelled “go away” and waved my arms, and it went away - to the fence at the bottom of the garden. When I chased it, it just flew up into the big Doug fir. I went back to the coop and waited for something to change.
The next challenger was the female Anna’s hummingbird. She flew all the way to the top of the fir, probably 75’, and buzzed the hawk. The hawk ignored her and she had to leave.
The raven was next. My hungry friend had been on the noble fir by the barn, but it flew over to the Doug fir and perched on the other side of the top. I yelled encouragement to it but absolutely nobody cared what I was doing. Then the raven took off, and the hawk hassled it! Put its little claws out and threatened to fall upon my raven friend! I shrieked, but the hawk wasn’t trying to kill and the raven didn’t give a fuck.
The hawk had finally had enough of my nonsense, though. The raven flew back around the house to the noble fir, but the hawk kept going to eat the neighbor’s bunnies and my chickens filed out of the coop. Whew!
I’m tentatively calling it at 2 baby roosters, 4 pullets. Two of them have that suspiciously perky tail, and this morning, one of those two made a baby version of the “come look at this treat!” call. Stay sweet, little guys.
#chickens #chicks

2024-08-26 18:47:10

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I lost two old ladies this year who were 6-7, somewhere in there. It’s a grand lifetime for them.

2024-08-26 17:00:47

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a fine name for a fine hen. It really sucks to lose them 🫂

2024-08-26 15:13:47

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we didn’t, though. About a third of the town’s houses burned, but after a frantic week CalFire saved the downtown, and the fire didn’t make it to our area at all. We were all evacuated for three weeks, iirc?
We talked about moving vs rebuilding during that first terrible week, and we decided to try to stay if our house made it. But we couldn’t ever relax again, and on the one-year anniversary I was like, let’s bail, you’ve always wanted to go back to the PNW. And so we sold our beautiful house to a nice family who could still find solace in a redwood forest, and we moved to the rainy Puget Sound.
Everybody thinks “wow, what a view” when they see our place. I see a straight shot, maybe a quarter mile, to run to the shore if it burns here. The meadow is beautiful, but it’s defensible space too. Both of us adults are pretty mentally scarred, but we *are* healed now, I think.

2024-08-25 19:35:49

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😱

2024-08-25 17:25:47

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oh no! Did boo have to put the food in their own mouth?? Tragedy

2024-08-25 15:11:50

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I love catching up on your scrollbacks so much, man 😂 entirely adult choices, I’m six years older than you and I anoint you a Grown Up 🤣
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2024-08-25 15:01:08

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I’m pretty sure the pandemic lockdown cracked thousands of trans eggs, too!

2024-08-25 14:58:58

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oh no, this is a terrible momma bun! Not a good nest spot, lady! Good on you for giving them a little cave, I hope they didn’t get too chilled.
I have a bunny nest going under a clump of herbs I transplanted from a big planter to a raised bed. The bed has a chicken-wire cage over it too, and I’m so impressed at my bun-mum’s good nest spot. Mine are further along; when I move the mulch from their entrance, I see eager little grey noses for a second before I leave them be.

2024-08-25 13:55:48

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we lived in Boulder Creek, where the fires were still burning, and that was the first day they let anyone go back in the evac zone. I checked on our house, then drove back to our temp housing in San Jose. Here’s a video from 3:30 that afternoon, as I left our house.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/023/001/660/349/982/original/4b083f3c61c16726.mp4

2024-08-25 13:36:14

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haha, these are homegrown cheap chickens! The rooster is black-based with red highlights in his neck. The three hens who contributed eggs are all light colored. I don’t know what these goobers will look like with their adult feathers, but I suspect they’ll stay black-ish without being All Black. Those all-blacks are cute but I worry they’d just die in a heat wave!

2024-08-25 03:11:33

My sweet Haze has an abscess on his lower left torso! They’ve (both) been to the vet, and I’ve been doing the antibiotics / NSAID / hot compresses thing for half a week now. He doesn’t mind the hot compresses too much! It’s improving, but not very fast. 🫤
So I’m sitting up here and I look over and notice that the rabbits are grooming each other. Then I realize Sebby is gently but insistently cleaning out Haze’s abscess! He licked and licked at his friend’s side, until Haze hopped backward. Then Haze stuck his head between Sebby’s front legs, sort of hiding from the world. Sebby licked Haze’s ear for a moment, then he went right back to the abscess. They did the jump back / seek comfort / give comfort thing *again,* and I finally thought to turn on the camera. This is the end of the third and final round of wound-cleaning. #bunnies #houseRabbits
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/020/466/769/695/650/original/f162da812e1ce51e.mp4

2024-08-25 03:11:32

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many people assume the biggest reaction is the best one.

2024-08-25 00:16:05

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And here’s a couple of cute stills of the dismount. #chicks #chickens
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https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/019/778/452/904/102/original/2b140e1f57d914a2.jpeg

2024-08-25 00:10:28

Everyone knows that the 1-3 day old “ball of fluff” is the cutest stage of a chicken’s life, but did you know about the *second* cutest phase? Here’s Ninja doing her taxi impersonation. #chicks #chickens
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/019/756/070/662/047/original/018a2528ca9f4f6a.mp4

2024-08-24 23:02:50

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it was *amazing!*

2024-08-24 18:47:38

I thought I heard a #raven right before I went out to feed lunch. Got the equines and the main bunch of chickens fed in the barn, got a scoop of grain for Ninja’s brood in the garden. Then I went and stood on the top terrace steps and looked around in all the trees, trying to see if there was a corvid lurking. Suddenly, I heard an excited series of nonstop caws, and I saw my raven friend launch themselves into the meadow and fly toward me as fast as they could. MY HEART, y’all! 🥰 I left them a big handful of dog food and went to feed Ninja.

2024-08-24 18:41:28

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oh duh, cowmunist beetle!

2024-08-24 18:40:49

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that’s dinner solved! Hifive! 😂

2024-08-24 18:22:39

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ladybug == communist cow beetle

2024-08-24 18:19:35

I’m seeing so many harvest photos and I have nothing to share. It’s just too cold! I have four huge tomato plants loaded with huge green fruit, but they’re not ripening. The beans topped out at less than a foot tall, same with the peppers. The eggplant and cucumbers have managed to set fruit, but I’m getting one small cuke every two or three days and the eggplants are still egg-sized. An apple fell off a tree when I shook it, but it wasn’t sweet so I ended up dehydrating it for the buns and piggies. And the older of the carrot pots has stalled out and looks smaller than the carrot pot that’s a month younger!
The peas are stoked though, they’re over a foot tall and nicely climbing their twine walls. Good old peas!
#gardening
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/018/376/593/892/201/original/8dc4a9e54ec888b4.jpeg

2024-08-24 17:55:45

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a horriberrible crime

2024-08-24 17:52:25

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here’s one of mine: white bread is chicken food.
My parents were whole-wheat-only hippies, so that was our normal. But we had chickens, and they needed treats. We had cracked corn and sunflower seeds, but sometimes my dad would bring home almost-expired Wonder Bread, and we’d feed that to the chickens. It’s not fit for humans, it’s too fluffy and squishy, it’s not people food! It’s chicken food!
I eventually learned to love grilled cheese on white, and bagels, and all the other iterations of white-bread, but I never could enjoy sliced white bread sandwiches. (And then in my 20s I realized I was allergic to wheat, etc.)

2024-08-24 17:44:04

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I’m becoming more and more convinced that tradition is what you learned from the world around you when you were ten years old

2024-08-24 17:04:54

Oh shit, y’all! I just realized that nobody noticed Fire Evac Anniversary this year!
We had to pack up and run from the 2020 CZU lightning complex fires, and it fucking wrecked my (and my husband’s) mental health for years. Our kid was 5, and it was insanely stressful on him too, but he’s grown around the trauma in that way kids do.
I still can’t sit and write out the whole six-week fire experience without reopening the wounds, but I can talk a little about it. Today’s tidbit is that I woke up during the lightning. I’d never seen a lightning storm like that before, and I hope I never see anything like it again. I barely woke up when it started, and I laid there and thought “this is how the world ends.” One of the windows had a couple of redwoods growing six feet outside, so they’re mostly obscured, but I could see these almost nonstop erratic flashes of lightning through them. Everything was tinder-dry, and it was a huge dry-storm front, and obviously the forest around us was going to burn.
But there was nothing to do right then, and my consciousness dissolved and I fell asleep again.
Time to shut that memory door again, I think. Glad to be living in icy drizzle now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZU_Lightning_Complex_fires

2024-08-24 15:39:41

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I’m on the other side of the world from you, but sometimes this thought helps stiffen my spine: I rarely see the other paranoid maskers because they also stay home as much as possible. They’re still out there, just not *out there.*

2024-08-24 14:44:10

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for my husband and me, I think the pandemic, which is clearly not over, added too much ongoing pressure to be able to socially-mask through it. I was so much less anxious five years ago!

2024-08-24 04:38:29

I forgot to post yesterday’s adorable portrait mode shots of a couple of the #chicks. Three of them are completely identical at first glance. The two I suspect are from the buff Brahma’s eggs have bronze banding on their black wingtips. Jimmy has the parrot-beak, poor dear. Of the others — one has one white wing feather, and they have differently colored beaks and feet, but it’s not obvious and they haven’t started to have personalities. Here’s White Spot and Fuzzy Legs, real names TBD. (Jimmy will stay Jimmy!)
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/015/147/754/689/215/original/f34accee2fdf42ba.jpeg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/015/148/160/795/947/original/fdbb79432dabfae6.jpeg

2024-08-24 04:23:09

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Hah, I just realized - that shot is perfectly level. That’s the slope of the garden, not my wonky photo!

2024-08-24 04:19:19

The white #hydrangea is really happy! It’s drooping from 24 hours of misty rain, but somehow that just makes it look even bigger. I pruned it back to chest high last fall! It’s put on several feet of new growth this year, and those flower clusters 😍
#bloomscrolling
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/015/072/743/300/060/original/cd6935e9515d671f.jpeg

2024-08-24 02:56:11

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omg, Shriek is perfection 🤩

2024-08-23 23:47:34

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did you save part of your plot from The Great Poop Flood, or are those a gift from a friend?

2024-08-23 23:47:13

A twofer of cuteness on this beautifully soggy day. #chicks #chickens #rabbit
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/014/001/166/447/677/original/7720e0db7ece76fd.mp4

2024-08-23 18:19:29

It’s way past time for me to make myself new pants. Leggings first! These are the Apostrophe Patterns leggings, so the main hurdle was bringing the tape measure to my husband and standing still to be re-measured. I did a muslin pair in some very soft heather charcoal knit, to check the fit, then started pulling out fancy fabric from my stash.
No serging *my* leggings seams, thank you! I’ve got way more it’s-touching-me sensory issues than anybody else in the house, so I always spend a little more time on my finishing. These are just 1/2” seams, folded down and topstitched, using the stretch stitch pattern on my sewing machine. So smooth!
Every time I flat lay these leggings, I’m reminded of why no store bought leggings have ever fit properly. I have a big cute butt, and I hate those lower back drafts when your shirt doesn’t quite cover the gap - I want a high back. But I also want a low rise front. My tummy doesn’t like waistbands! So I end up with the silliest looking flat lays, but they fit me exactly how I want and *they stay up.* If you really want to make leggings, and you don’t look like a fit model, the Apostrophe Patterns are the way to go. If they don’t fit, re-measure - this pattern *will* work.
#sewing
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2024-08-23 01:21:35

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makes my favorite anarchist / feminist art!

2024-08-22 21:21:00

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this is fascinating! I hadn’t even thought to check relative face color! I know my chickens relax and fluff out when they feel safe, but I’m only looking at their faces and combs to check their overall health.
The scientist is wrong about this, though:
“Once the hierarchy is established, each hen knows her place. When a rooster is present, he will hold the highest position in the hierarchy,” Bertin said.” Roosters and hens have separate hierarchies, and the top rooster doesn’t always get to mate with the top hen. The top rooster polices the other roosters with vigor while the hens just seem to want to know where they stand, without really caring what their particular rank is. Whoever the top rooster turns out to be, he has to individually work out his rank with the hens, either by seducing them with tidbits or just chasing them down to mate. But it’s certainly not automatic!

2024-08-22 21:09:35

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twink boi scouts

2024-08-22 16:50:25

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ahhh, I have a different but equally stupid set of problems with mine. At least half the time when I launch the iOS app, it rediscovers at least one speaker - you know the popup where it’s like, “I found a new device!”? I swipe those away and the app realizes it already knows them and it’ll usually work. But airplay has gradually stopped working on various speakers, and using the built-in podcast apps on the sonos app sucks.
My kid and I like to listen to leftist history podcasts together in different rooms! It’s tragically nerdy, but it matters to us!

2024-08-22 16:34:41

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I literally flipped over here to distract myself from how mad I am at sonos. I’m complaining to my husband about it RIGHT NOW. Does reinstalling the app actually help? Why won’t my goddamn airplay connect to the speakers anymore? Nothing has changed except sonos enshitting itself into nonfunctionality!

2024-08-22 15:07:26

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oh ho ho, would you like to chortle at someone else’s misfortune? We know a family who’s been living in Houston for about 3-4 years. They went with rooftop solar, which was fine until a component of the transfer system failed. Insurance (or a warranty, idk, it’s a new system) stepped in — but the part was backordered by the manufacturer, and they had a six week wait. The next week, the hurricane hit and the whole city lost power for a week 🫠

2024-08-22 15:03:05

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yes, of course! I’m not poking at your mini-grid, I’m trying to be helpful!
Will Home Depot or whoever deliver to your wilderness? If you put cinderblock columns at the corner of each panel, you could flop a piece of plywood on top, resting on the columns like a tabletop. Good plywood is like $100 a sheet, but it might be worth it.

2024-08-22 14:19:13

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😂

2024-08-22 14:16:07

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hey friend, do you have a way to cover those lovely panels if there’s a hail storm?

2024-08-22 00:16:47

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yeah, everyone except the last family had already gone. No more porch babies til next year 😭

2024-08-22 00:15:50

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my kiddo just said that today too!

2024-08-21 17:31:52

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2024-08-21 17:29:16

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✊ straight-passing queer couples ✊

2024-08-21 17:22:12

The swallows have gone. It hits me like a blow every year. I worry so much for them — they’re so small, and they have so far to travel to find winter bugs! Of course I project all of my pandemic fears onto them, too — don’t go near sick birds! Come back safe next spring!
Plus, we’re all going to get eaten alive by dusk mosquitoes now ☹️

2024-08-21 17:18:16

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he wasn’t the only man who regularly practiced there, either. All of the men I did yoga with were the kind of man you’d pick over the bear without hesitation. I wish yoga as a whole didn’t suck.

2024-08-21 17:16:32

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I’m thinking so fondly of my transmasc friend Silas, who transitioned while becoming a yoga instructor in the Santa Cruz mountains. I know that western yoga has deeply questionable roots and a lot of toxic leaders, but our studio was truly amazing. I did as much emotional healing on the mat there as I did with my EMDR therapist. Silas’s day gig is massage, too! He became himself in such an emotionally supportive environment, and I wish everyone could feel that.

2024-08-21 17:07:24

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how very DARE

2024-08-20 15:17:53

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other people have excellent suggestions on seed saving (Carol Deppe is brilliant!) but I’d like to offer a more immediately practical suggestion: buy some seeds for the library. When a local library set up their seed library, I made a couple of $20 orders from my favorite regional companies and had them shipped straight to the library! Feels good 😊

2024-08-20 05:00:16

The kiddo needed swim trunks! #sewing
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2024-08-19 21:13:38

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my mom would make fried pies sometimes when I was a kid in MS. Biscuit dough rolled out thin with some fruit in the middle, then another lid of biscuit dough. So fucking good! We usually made peach or blackberry, chocolate fried pie would have blown my mind!

2024-08-19 19:12:33

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we rented a house in Boulder Creek California once that had a secret staircase down to a mini basement theater. And one of the bedroom closets had a ladder up to the hidden half of the attic, where the owner of the house was still storing his weird junk. It looked like a perfectly normal suburban tract house, plopped down like a Sim City build in the middle of a redwood forest. The owner had excavated the media basement, by hand, and we were honestly terrified to go down in it. You slid a bookcase aside in the garage and ducked down a very short, very narrow dark set of too shallow stairs to emerge into an 8’x8’ media room, with an obsolete projector and some real movie theater chairs. The walls were all painted black and the shallow steps had light cords. Our kid was 3 at the time and we didn’t tell him about the secret room (or the ladder in Dad’s office closet) until after we moved out!

2024-08-19 19:00:03

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any time I’ve created a disaster I think “mistakes were made”
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2024-08-19 18:56:41

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anglerfish!

2024-08-19 18:54:14

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size queen

2024-08-19 17:45:32

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any time you set a healthy boundary, the sly motherfuckers around you are gonna call you crazy. Phones ain’t cheap!

2024-08-19 17:43:22

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do you have a delicious use for the scraps if you go sleeveless? Not cutting two sleeves would give you a big chunk of scrap!

2024-08-19 17:41:50

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oh no. Oh no no no, my time travel choice would be to *not* go to law school! Everybody around me was *wrong,* I’m not in any way meant to be a lawyer!

2024-08-19 03:00:57

Okay, Bey 🙄 #rabbit #chickens
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2024-08-19 02:54:35

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looks good! This is such a self-teachable hobby. I only started sewing in 2020 — you’ll master the basics in no time!

2024-08-18 23:04:04

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oh, growing the food and processing the food and actually eating the food are three entirely separate things! I want to try parching my corn because that sounds like the laziest way to eat it 😅

2024-08-18 23:02:37

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thanks! It’s this pattern, and you don’t need a serger, just a domestic sewing machine. The serger speeds up the process, but the seams aren’t as nice as properly sewn, trimmed, and topstitched seams. The pattern requires fiddly, precise measurements, but it’s got great instructions!
https://apostrophepatterns.com/products/myfit-sports-bra-crop-top

2024-08-18 22:58:49

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That’s so cool! I tried to grow cascade gold last year but an unfortunately open gate let the donkey eat it when it was knee high, grr! This year’s contender is https://www.adaptiveseeds.com/product/vegetables/corn/flour-corn-purple-mountains-organic/
I got a hand crank grinder in a fit of optimism the first year, but I don’t remember if I have a sheller yet. I’m not jinxing anything this year!

2024-08-18 20:40:00

I spent a timeless hour hanging out with Ninja etc. in the garden. She likes it when I pull stuff up so she can scratch through the fresh dirt, and she also really appreciates the company. She and Bey are still on high alert for that Cooper’s hawk, but eventually they relaxed enough to preen for a while.
Ninja’s the top ranked hen and easily the most self-sufficient of the whole flock. But now she’s in Mom Mode, and it’s really heartwarming how willing she is to relax around me and ask me for help with the chicks.
And Beyoncé! He seems content to be near Ninja without pecking the chicks. Much. I’m willing to admit that my best boy is a mean little shit, but he’s been living like an outcast for half a year now, since he lost the crown to Presley. Presley won’t tolerate Bey at all anymore, and Bey has taken to hanging out with Ninja. He’s very tentative and quiet, which is the opposite of his personality when he was flock king, and a mellowing of his alternating panic and bravado after he lost his crown. They’re doing a good job watching each other’s sixes. I’d hoped he would bond with the Sicilians, but he only wanted to fight them to make himself feel better. Ninja would murder him in a fight, and he knows it, so he’s actually working with another chicken for the first time in his life. #chickens
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2024-08-18 18:34:49

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found something!
https://blog.southernexposure.com/2018/06/processing-flour-corn-at-home/

2024-08-18 18:32:32

I just didn’t know how this half yard of bright rainbow ombré would actually look as a bra until I finished it, but now I think it’s pretty cute! #sewing
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2024-08-18 18:24:37

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YAY!!!

2024-08-18 18:17:18

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the problem with field corn is that 99% of the literature is written for medium to big ag, and they’re worried about being able to use equipment to harvest. And on top of that, 99% of the field corn we plant these days is dent corn and I’m growing flour corn, a more fragile and delicious type — all popcorn is flour corn, but not all flour corn is popcorn.
But what I’ve been able to find seems to indicate that as long as the ears stay 8-12” above the soil it’ll all be fine.
I’m very grateful to @npub1fqf…ajkk for giving me the confidence to plant that patch so densely! If it wasn’t such a jungle in there, some of the ears would be in the dirt.
I’ve been trying to grow this kind of corn in particular since 2021, when I read a truly wonderful book called The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self Reliance in Uncertain Times by Carole Deppe. I grabbed it because of the title, but to my delight quickly found that the author lives in west side Oregon and shares my food allergies. She’s got celiac disease and can’t tolerate wheat, and she grows loads of field corn for her grain needs. The book is very loosely organized, with incredible tidbits but not a lot of direct hand-holding, and I’ve learned a great deal about the types of corn, corn breeding, seed saving, planting density, etc - but there’s nothing much about when to harvest flour corn! Sooner than flint or dent, that’s as specific as she gets. Aghhh 😫