Pumpkin love, long day, 50mpg

Yesterday I was out at our annual tax certificate sale where people can “buy” certificates for taxes that have gone unpaid.  It is a way to make a quick 5% on your money at a minimum and a way to potentially get a leg up on buying a delinquent property down the road if the taxes remain unpaid.  The event is held auction style with bidders holding up their bidder number plates.  It works in the opposite direction of a conventional auction however.  The numbers, which are the interest rate the bidder will get, start at 18 and work their way down, all the way to .25%

My role there was just to ensure the hardware/networking portion of the sale went smoothly which it did outside a few brief wifi hiccups.  The rest of the time was just sitting around basically, watching bidder cards flash up and down.  If the boredom wasn’t bad enough, the deep freeze temps they had the AC set at in the auditorium left me chilled to the bone.  Thankfully it is only a once a year event.

I am already emotionally attached to all 11 of the new chicks we have been raising for the past month and a half but I definitely have a favorite, Pumpkin.  Pumpkin is the runt of all of the chicks but she also is one of the most docile/friendly.  When we open the door to the coop she will come right over, hoping Cindy or I will pick her up.  The other day we almost had a baby chick mutiny on our hands when I took Pumpkin out and allowed her to eat exclusive of the other 10.  She seemed so content. It really is interesting just how diverse the personalities of the birds are, something the average, non-chicken owning person would never realize.

The baby chicks are becoming more and more adult in their habits.  Last night was the first time all 11 of them headed up top to roost for the evening together.  A few of them had been doing it for a few days but now it apparently is a total group effort.  Of course they are all growing rapidly, we have to come up with a time line as to when we can move them out of the garage and into the back yard.

There are further complications to that timeline because of Lola’s ailment.  Even though the vet said she has parasites, I am not 100% sure that she doesn’t also have Mareks disease.  My reading about the virus makes it seem it is EXTREMELY easy for bird to get the disease.  A common practice at hatcheries is to immunize baby chicks as soon as they are hatched against Mareks.

We have been trying to find out if the chicks Rural King sells are immunized.  The staff there has proven to be pretty clueless for the most part regarding background of their chicks however last night Cindy was able to get the name of the hatchery in Michigan they get them from.  She is calling them today to find out definitively if the chicks are immunized or not.  If they are not, we have 1000 doses of Mareks vaccine in the fridge that we will be administering to the chicks this weekend.  Unfortunately, the longer you wait to immunize them, the more susceptible they are to getting the disease but it’s still worth doing obviously.  It takes 10 days after the vaccine for the immunity to be developed so that means we should keep them garage bound at least until that amount of time passes.  Of course the logistics of vaccinating 11 high energy, squirmy, baby chickens will be quite challenging and surely require two people.

This weekend has a lot of little to do’s in it which will be peppered with lots of chicken care I am sure.  It almost feels like cheating having another weekend after only three days of work but it’s a situation I could certainly get accustomed to.

Despite recently passing 150k miles on the odometer Cindy’s Prius is still rolling along at a very economical pace.  The car still drives like new, looks great and can still average 50mpg with hybrid sensitive driving habits.  It’s a seriously awesome vehicle.