Cutting the cord

Well, I cut the cord yesterday.  To Facebook, that is.  I'm not sure why I was so enthralled with it in the first place.  I had gotten to where I was checking it at least 10 times each day and wasting hours reading about what everyone was doing while not doing a damn thing myself.  Maybe it's my addictive personality that sucked me in.  I'm not sure exactly how it got to the point that it did, but it definitely did, and I needed desperately to pull the plug on it and start living my own life.

I could go on and on about Facebook and the countless hours I've wasted on it, but like I said previously, I cut the cord and will speak of it no more.

So here's a brief overview of what's been going on in my life.  I made the very difficult but completely necessary decision to quit my job on March 7 of this year.  My baby boy was turning one year old on March 17, and there was no way I was going to have time to plan his birthday party while working my ass off at a job I had grown to despise.  Plus we were in a financial position that allowed me to take a couple of months off and regroup before starting another job.

The birthday party was a success.  Here's a pic of the birthday boy.  My awesome little leprechaun St. Paddy's day baby, Ezra.

So with all of this new found time on my hands, I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself.  I knew the first thing I wanted to do was get some chicks!  So the week after the big birthday party, I found a man in Villa Rica with some chicks on craigslist and we all went out there on Saturday to pick out some chicks.  We ended up getting 6 chicks - 2 welsummers, 2 blue marans, and 2 wheaten marans.  The next week, we were at Ace Hardware in Carrollton (that's also a Southern States) and they had chicks, so we got the only buff orpington they had and a golden comet.  Here's pics of the first 6 chicks we got. 

Here's the farm chickens harassing them when I took them out there to peck around.

One of the blue marans died in the first few days.  Not sure what happened.  So we were down to 7 chicks.

So after a few weeks, the chicks inevitably began to stink up our garage so I took 3 out to the farm on a trial run.  Well a strike of bad luck hit, and a storm blew open the door to the coop and all of the chicks were gone when I went to check on them.  Jason fixed the latch on the coop, and a few days later we took the other 4 chicks out to the farm.  They did well for a few weeks - this is the golden comet, blue maran, buff orpington, and welsummer.

I got more comfortable with them pecking around outside of the coop, so I decided to let them out for the day.  Well, the buff orpington was nowhere to be found when I came back to check on them.  So we were down to 3 chicks...  And the blue maran was most definitely a roo.

I moved the 3 remaining chicks in with the ladies in the big coop when they got big enough to defend themselves.  They were able to free range during the day.  One day, the big blue cock (hehe) and the brown chicken were completely freaking out and wouldn't leave the coop.  I looked around and found a bunch of feathers spread out in the brush near the fence.  Something had gotten the golden comet.  

So out of 8 chickens purchased, only 2 remained.  And one of them was a roo.  I'm still hoping the welsummer is a hen/pullet, but only time will tell.