just sayin...

Eva (left): Dad's pretty bad at blogging isn't he?

Cate (right): Yeah. Guess he's been busy.

good day for a walk

in praise of modern medicine

What are we doing today Dad? Just hanging out?


With lots of other people. Hmm....


Look at all of them!


Wait. Can't quite read that sign.

Much waiting later...

I decided pictures inside might not be appreciated by others so I put away the camera. Claire did great with her shot. Gave me a brief little silent treatment afterwards, but that only lasted about a minute or so.


After that I had a promise to keep.


Seems like a good one.


Things got a little crazy after that.

rufus gets a pump!

About two years ago Rufus came home with us from the hospital. We had to take special care of him.

You see, Rufus has diabetes which means he has to check his blood sugar frequently, count the carbohydrates in everything he eats, and take insulin shots.

Well, two years have passed. Time marches on, and Rufus still has diabetes. There's no cure for it yet. We still check his sugar. He has his own meter now, and Claire has taken on some responsibility for him.


Sometimes his blood sugar is too low. A cookie might help with that.


Fortunately for Rufus modern technology is helping. Recently he received an insulin pump. Just like Claire's! (He's been a little jealous that she's had one for a while and he was still getting shots. It took a little while for insurance to approve one for a bear. It's still experimental in the ursine population.)


Claire still takes very good care of him and has been very happy to learn how to use his new pump!

old maid!

for the record

I have to apologize to my Rhode Island Red whom I accused of slacking. At some point when we contemplated chickens I thought of getting breeds who would lay brown, green AND white eggs so we'd have variety. That idea never really occurred, but mentally I just assigned white egg duty to my Rhode Island Red.

According to wikipedia's entry on Rhode Island Red

Rhode Island Reds are excellent egg layers. Although they can sometimes be stubborn, they can end up producing up to 250 to 300 large, light to dark brown eggs per year.

Hanging my ignorant head in shame...

when does school start again?

We've been a bit lax lately in the household with letting the girls scatter toys around the house.

This is what I came home to today. Apparently there was a wedding between two of the dolls and these are the guests.

The wedding couple must be very popular. I think just about everyone came!

i am the eggman

Sorry for another chicken post so soon...

When I got home today I went down to check on the chickens.

I walked around to the side to see if there were any eggs. This is the door to the nest boxes, where they have kindly agreed to lay their eggs without much training at all. Such good chickens.

I opened it up and this is what I saw:


Four eggs! Wooohoo! That's a record number so far! Let's get a closer look:

Aren't they purty? :) The two green ones are from the Ameraucanas and the brown ones are from the Buff Orpingtons. At least I think. One of the brown eggs is lighter than the other one. Why? I have no idea. The Rhode Island Red is supposed to lay white eggs and I haven't seen any white eggs yet so she better get on the ball.

mary, mary, quite contrary

While we were on vacation lots of things popped up in the garden. Mostly weeds, which I spent the day pulling. But we also got a lot of tomatoes and peppers suddenly ripe. We missed a fair number of them while we were gone, but more keep coming so that's okay. I also decided to dig up our potatoes since the tops had died off a while ago. I got a whole bowlful of potatoes from just a handful of seed potatoes so I think I did okay. Some of them were small so perhaps I should have left them longer. Next year I may do a larger hill and see what happens.

No. Cucumbers aren't supposed to get that big. These were hiding amongst the tomatoes and didn't get picked when they should have. I may make some refrigerator pickles out of these. I fed one that was REALLY huge to the chickens and they devoured the seeds and pulp -- leaving nothing but the outer shell.

Claire was also very proud of her watermelon which we grew from a sad little plant that she brought home from preschool in a paper cup. I put it in the ground not expecting it to survive, but we now have a little watermelon. I was going to wait a bit longer to see if it got bigger, but while weeding today I noticed it had a slight crack on the bottom. I decided it was ready to pick. It's chilling in the fridge right now, so perhaps the tasting will occur tomorrow.