Nesting News

The wind is howling outside of this big empty farmhouse tonight. After keeping an eye on three days of wintry mixed precipitation and losing power for a time here in PA, I've also been keeping tabs on the weather in New Hampshire, where the IceMan is happily under 2 1/2 feet of snow. Since the state-of-emergency ice storm a little over a week ago, the upper northeast has experienced unrelenting winter weather. This has put quite a damper on plans to get him home in time for Christmas. I'm trying to let go of the notion that I can control the weather and that I will be at the center of my family's celebrations this year.
The other location tab on my weather site today is Los Angeles, CA where my beautiful Green Eyes just landed on the first leg of her trip to Aussie land. In a few minutes she'll board another silver bird for the 15 hour flight to Melbourne (where it will be 93 degrees when she lands tomorrow afternoon) and then another four hour flight to Perth on the west coast. If she returns as planned, Green Eyes will be back in the fold here the second week of January... Just in time to pack up her belongings and move into a sweet apartment with two of her gal pals at the end of the month.
Rather than lament the planned and unplanned changes to our family traditions this year, with a little effort, I am focusing my attentions on favorite simple winter time pleasures instead of caving in to 'normal' pressures of the season. A little greenery and a few candles make a world of difference. A power outage Friday night came just as I started putting together a pot of french onion soup. I moved the whole operation to the wood stove and finished it, complete with gruyere topped toasty bread chunks. It was a perfect end to a cold miserable day of driving in nasty weather and a simple winter pleasure that I normally wouldn't have come up with on a typical Friday night. Slow time. Slow Food. Wood fire and candlelight.We savored every tasty bite.

As a finale to the weekend, the MAN and I made the decision to buy a new coop for the girls before the hardest part of winter hits. The MAN constructed their current home a good many years ago and it was in dire need of some rehabilitation and winterizing. However, winter beat us to that task. The new coop was delivered late this afternoon. It is quite roomy and nice. The hour before dark was spent on filling the nesting boxes with straw and moving the sleepy hens, one by one, into their new home. Filling those small nesting boxes seemed, somehow, to give me some comfort about the big empty nest I will be rambling around in the rest of this week. We'll need to keep the hens locked in for a few days to adjust and reboot their memories about where they are to roost at night. I guess time will tell how well all of us old chicks learn our new tricks!

Hinkel Haus