2024, animals, Family, Farming Update, Uncategorized, work

Chicks!

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Today’s Farming Update comes from Ben.

The college says it’s ‘Aggressive Goose Season’. Proof of Spring if I nothing else is.

There are two pairs of geese. One pair in the courtyard on the West side of campus and they will fight you. And another pair on a median in the middle of the East parking lot. The male stands in the middle of traffic keeping watch. It’s down to single lane there and security has put cones around them.

I picked up chicks from the post office on Thursday. Poultry chicks I mean.

I ordered 50 this year. And because details are a problem for me, somehow I got 15 male ‘Blue Laced Gold Wyandotte’. I didn’t mean to order boys. Still don’t know how I did that. And I looked at this order several times last week to watch the ship date and I never noticed. Details. They’ve been vaccinated for coccidiosis.

So. Guess I’ll have fresh chicken to eat this summer. My mom showed me how to butcher chickens several years ago and that’s when I decided I’d rather collect eggs. I think I’ve heard the neighbors says there’s place I can take them to be butchered. It’s not a good idea to have adult 15 roosters. The poor hens don’t get a chance as they boys never give them a break. And they fight amongst themselves. And believe it or not, we’ve never had a whole chicken to bake, so that will be something to learn and experiment with. Baby chicks are kind of expensive depending on the breed. Somewhere between $4.55 (for the boys) to $5.19 for the green egg layers. I’ll be ordering baby ducks later this summer and they’re $8.36 for a mixed variety, to $9.52 for mallards. Minimum order is 15.

We heard the sandhill cranes this morning. I hope they stick around a while. Saw a turkey vulture too.

Our dogs, Luna-tic, and Bailey are getting along better. Bailey has realized she can fight back, and when she does, she can hold her own and not let Luna push her around, and now they are playing more than just fighting.

TIPS FOR BAKING CHICKEN?

WHAT’S YOUR POST OFFICE LIKE?

37 thoughts on “Chicks!”

  1. Glad you clarified about it being poultry chicks you picked up.

    My favorite chicken recipe is Chicken Cacciatore – I have a recipe from Robin… which I’ve adapted for the crockpot. Hmmm, might have to do that soon.

    Post office is regular, probably 50 years old… I’d like to imagine the old building it replaced. I remember a really old P.O. in Storm Lake, IA.

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    Ben is a chick magnet, to be sure. I love your stories of getting the chicks. I do understand the 15 rooster chick mistake. That is something I do–I cannot pick up the visual details on a form and make so mistakes. My solution is to have other people complete forms and/or check my work.

    I do not have a great method of baking chicken. Baked chicken in Italy and France is my favorite, but those countries must have secrets about this. Mine never turns out like theirs, even if I put a lemon in the cavity.

    re: Post Office. I don’t like our Post Office. There is often a long line of impatient people. The Postal Workers kershlump around the work area in no particular hurry. It always seems under-staffed and tense to me. But it also seems that some customers are pretty mean to them.

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  3. Try Julia Child’s casserole roasted chicken recipe. I think that uses a whole chicken

    I often saw my Aunt Norma butcher chickens. She had big white Leghorns. “Norma’s Chicken” is a long time favorite recipe. You cut up a chicken, coat the pieces in flour and Fryin Magic, and bake, covered, with a little water added.

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  4. My brother-in-law grew up in Holland, MI. The cross-town rival high school was about 6 miles away in Zeeland, MI.

    Zeeland’s main industry was then (and might still be) poultry.

    The high school teams were “the Chix”.

    A sign by the highway on the way into town, I’m told, read,

    “Zeeland, Where the Chix Lay Best!”

    He has mentioned to me that it got a lot of snickers from teenage boys.

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  5. my ideas for baking chicken is to kill them first but if that’s the goal why not just kill them now. Drown them take a shotgun to them chop their heads off why wait

    Jacque and I share a post office and it is a typical govt institution

    if the line threatens to get short someone goes on break to make sure you spend the full half hour minimum wait time looked after

    they have a machine that sells postage and I usually do that if I didn’t bring pre stamped packages

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  7. Our post office is being audited by thevFeds for slow and sporadic delivery, destruction of mail, and general incompetence, due to the diligence of Amy Klobuchar. Our post offices were included with the Minnesota post offices shevrequested audits for.

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    1. There were times in the last year when we only got mail a couple of days a week, and we live in the middle of town!

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  9. In my tiny hometown, the Postmaster and clerk were known everybody and my dad and his brother were the rural route carriers. There was no in town delivery so everyone went to the PO to pick up their mail from their box. Dad and his brother drove their routes Monday through Saturday whatever the weather. I rode with him once and learned how much work it was sorting and delivering the mail on a three hour route. Those cute little mail trucks didn’t exist to rural carriers drove their personal cars. For the majority of mailboxes, he had to lean out the passenger window, which meant sitting in the middle of the bench seat and use his left foot on the pedals. It did a number on his back and he eventually had two back surgeries (along with suffering sciatica for many years). During December (Christmas mail) and January (tax forms and catalogs) they even sorted the mail on Sundays. And Dad was always kinda grouchy at home during those times. He would roll over in his grave now if he knew how expensive stamps are and how shoddy service is for many folks. During his career the Post Office was Federal so he didn’t earn Social Security. His SS came from years of driving school bus.

    Like many folks now, service at my Post Office is slow most of the time. Most of the clerks are sorta friendly.

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  13. I don’t bake whole chickens often but I have a favorite method. Clean the chicken, removing all the giblets inside. Wash it inside and out. Rub it everywhere, inside and out with a generous amount of olive oil. Rub salt and pepper inside the cavity. Puncture some small lemons and stuff the cavity with lemons and garlic cloves. Slip more pieces of sliced garlic cloves under the skin. Shove some sprigs of rosemary into the cavity with the lemons and garlic. Slip some more pieces of rosemary under the skin. Rub it all over with salt and pepper. Lay it breast up in a roasting pan and bake at 325 for about an hour. Turn it over and turn up the temp to 350 and roast it until the skin on the back is golden brown. Check the temp with a meat thermometer to be sure it’s thoroughly cooked.

    The post office here is in a lovely old Kasota stone building overlooking the Cannon River, the Ames Mill (Malt-o-Meal) dam, and Bridge Square Park. Inside there are antique metal fixtures with patina, leaded glass, oak panels, and murals of the rural countryside. The postmaster was a really crabby man for many years. He must have retired and was replaced by a friendly, younger woman. I haven’t had problems with our post office, or the one in Dundas. There is a young woman with lots of tattoos and purple hair in the Dundas post office. She’s always helpful and friendly. I never had problems with either Faribault’s or Waterville’s post offices either. I did a lot of business at the Waterville PO, due to the nature of my job. It was before a lot of electronic communication, and, while some things were being done online, I had to send out a lot of stuff to customers who wanted information on area lakes.

    One thing I’ve noticed is I frequently receive mail for other people here in the condo association I live in. Rather than taking to the post office to be delivered correctly, I just deliver to the correct address. I can only hope others are forwarding my mail to me somehow if they receive it. That’s a problem with our individual carrier, not the post office in general.

    Some of the delay problems are caused by the US Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who was appointed by 45. After his appointment, mailboxes were removed from street corners, post offices closed, employees laid off or transferred, and sorting machines were removed from processing facilities. And some of the attitude problems are caused by being treated rudely by customers.Some people believe they pay the wages of the government employee who is serving them, so it’s okay to be rude. It’s really hard to continue to provide cheerful service when you’ve been treated so disrespectfully. Just sayin’.

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  14. I have three post offices that I think of as close to me. One of the things I’ve noticed is that so many post offices, you have to go upstairs to get to the service area. Makes me wonder what the heck is in the basement. The other thing I’ve noticed since pandemic is that none of my three post offices has a huge variety of stamps for sale. Often times stamps that are shown online, they don’t have at the post office. In fact several times in the last few years, I’ve just ordered the stamps online and been done with. (Because you know, you have to have the right stamps on your envelopes.)

    No thoughts at all about chicken recipes. I do hope the blue gold boys will feature in some photos with their pretty colors before they become dinner.

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  15. I remember going to the post office in my town to apply for a Social Security card when I first started working. There was no Social Security office in the area, so I think I had to bring a birth certificate. Something like that.

    That post office is now a restaurant. It’s called the Postmark Grille.

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  22. Good stuff this weekend, y’all. Now I have at least two computers that won’t let me like or post my comments. Next week I’ll ponder that more.

    Be careful tomorrow. Thanks for the songs regarding today or tomorrow!

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