Recently I have been a little more than just busy. I have found myself with what seems to be about ten too many irons in the fire. But I must say that I am not at all bored, nor do I find at any time that my days are not interesting. Such being so leaves me with little room or reason to complain.
My feet usually hit the floor, on the carpet beside my bed along about, or shortly after, the hour of five in the morning. The Little Lady and I were both country raised and have not been able to shake that biological clock that says rise and shine. It is usually the call of Mother Nature that stirs me awake at this hour. That, of course is assisted by a plus fact that Eberheart, our resident self winding alarm clock, feels he should tell the world that it is time to get up. His usual repeated cock-a-doodle-doo wake up call echoes loudly from the monitor whose speaker we have housed in a little mock cage dangling from our kitchen ceiling.
Following the quick visit to the porcelain parlour, I usually check the incubator, where I have several dozen bantam eggs set to hatch on several coming dates.
In the meantime they must be carefully monitored as both temperature and humidity are important, and each and every egg must be turned several times each day. While in this same room I usually stop for a moment or two to check the fish and give them their daily shake or two of food.
By this time, the lights in the canary room, which are on a preset timer, usually snap on. From then on it is usually a cacophony of chirping young, with gapping mouths demanding food, which is intermittently over ridden by the burst of songs by the happy contented parents as they busy themselves shelling seed and poking it into the hungry, wide open mouths.
Shortly thereafter I start to clean, feed, and water each and every cage. This is a fun chore as each and every bird has its own particular likes and dislikes, and hesitates not in letting you know by the different tone and notes of its own individual voice. But in general it is just an impatient, me first, demand that is expressed. Not too much different then the human habit, when you come to think about it, is it?
Along about this time I usually make the usual “triple SSS” bathroom call, and then it is turn the eggs in the incubator again, then breakfast for me. I have always been taught in the habit of feeding the animals first, before I get involved in other things, and it is a habit I don’t usually care to break. But I do make the self winding alarm clocks, housed out in the shed, wait until after my breakfast dishes have made their trip to the sink. I usually feel guilty about this, as it is usually their, easy over eggs that accompany the bacon and toast to my kitchen table.
Nevertheless, they don’t seem to mind, and they usually greet me with a number of multi-toned squawks, clucks and cackles, as they grumble about how late I was in getting out there to feed and give them fresh water.
I usually mumble and grumble right back at them, and I often threaten to hang an axe on the back of the door, with a chopping block close by, if they don’t lay for me my breakfast eggs. On occasion I threaten to introduce them to the local KFC representative. Before the day is out they have usually paid their rent with a home grown egg for my breakfast.
Quacker, my little white female call duck, whom I have housed with the cluck-clucks, always greets me with a long series of quack, quack, quack, quack quacks, and keeps her one-sided conversation up continually until she is fed and watered.
After that, I just dicker around the garden all day, I pot up a few perennial plants, which I sell out front, and I make and package a few hundred bird house kits for the kids workshops. Other than that I just do nothing.
Take care, ‘cause we care.