Chick Magnet

The coop arrived a few weeks ago and the girls are now used to living outdoors. The first photo shows Andie with her increasingly crazy hair-doo outside of the coop for a little free-ranging. Chickens are omnivores and love a varied diet. By eating grass and plants (along with all kinds of bugs), they get a lot of beta-carotene in their diet. Much more than the mostly corn-fed factory chickens get. The yolks of the chickens who eat their greens are a much deeper, richer yellow than we are used to getting from the grocery stores here. In Europe, the yolks are still quite orange. My girls haven't started producing eggs yet. That should happen sometime around Christmas/The New Year.

The second photo shows my friend Ruth the chick magnet. She came to visit right before we left to visit my dad in France. The girls absolutely adored Ruth and kept trying to eat her shirt. They are 6 weeks old in this photo. At this point they were still making cheep cheep noises.

So Many Expressions

Okay, so I know this blog was originally about knitting, and now it seems to be about all things chicken. I'm assuming the novelty will wear off a bit, and I will start knitting again...

In the meantime...Neil and I were talking about how many expressions are derived from our poultry friends. Here a list of a bunch. Please add to the list.

-chicken/ chicken hearted (acting cowardly)
-strutting like a rooster (showing off)
-cocky (I guess pretty much the same as above)
-hen party (a party for women only, especially one that is organized for a woman who is soon going to get married)
-hen pecked (a husband who suffers from a nagging or domineering wife)
-laid an egg (to fail to make people enjoy or be interested in something) Anyone know why this has negative connotations?
-egg head (again, anyone know the origin of this one?)
-crowing (announcing something great)
-cock-eyed (this is to do with how a rooster sizes up a potential threat. They won't look directly at the foe, preferring to try and seem nonchalant and look straight ahead. All the time they are trying desperately to see via their peripheral vision.
-chicken feed/scratch (a very small amount of money, especially money that is paid for doing a job)
-coming home to roost (if you say that chickens are coming home to roost, you mean that bad or silly things done in the past are beginning to cause problems)
-a bad egg (someone who behaves in a bad or dishonest way)
-a good egg (a person with good qualities such as kindness)
-egg someone on
-a chicken and egg situation (a situation in which it is impossible to say which of two things existed first and which caused the other)
-have egg on your face (to seem stupid because of something you have done)
-a nest egg (an amount of money that you have saved)
- put all of your eggs in one basket (to risk losing everything by putting all your efforts or all your money into one plan or one course of action)
-as scarce as hen's teeth (to be very difficult or impossible to find)
-be no spring chicken (to not be young any more)

Vote!

I got my voter info card in the mail the other day.

It looks as though they are trying something new and you need to pull out your 3-D glasses to get the information.