Quick Change

Some things don't change:  I still have all my old bad habits, I still wear bibbies 355 days a year, dusting remains my nemesis, and the dog and cats still take up the majority of the bed.

That said, Nature did an abrupt about-face yesterday and dropped the temperature at least twenty degrees.  I wished I'd worn more than a tee-shirt down to the barn, but I wasn't prepared.  Back at the house, the day before I'd turned on the ceiling fan.  Yesterday I put on a jacket and wore it all day.  While grateful for the break, it's hard to make a fast adjustment to such a quick change.   Now the prognosticators are saying we might get rain a couple of days this week.  I can say with a degree of certainty we will.  How do I know?  Because there is a sack of goat chow in the truck and it will have to stay there for awhile.  Given the current rat/squirrel problems, I cannot put it in the feed shed, nor can I take it down to the barn until the girls eat up much of what's in the barrel and, if I left it on the hand cart, there is the same problem there.  Sigh.

The little girls are also going through a change.  Were I not familiar with chickens, I'd be worried.  Suddenly there are flurries of feathers in the pen and coop.  They don't have some dreaded disease; the flock is moulting.  What I have never understood is why they lose their protection just at the time the weather changes and it starts to get cold.  You'd think it would be the other way around so they wouldn't be so hot in the summer.  Add it to the lengthy list of things I don't understand.

Nature will continue to throw us curve balls and it's up to us to try to keep up.  I know for sure that this morning I'm back to robe and slippers.