Egg Eating: Law and Order Style

Remember the crazy egg eating episode we had several months ago?  Even though we concluded that that was just an isolated incident, it happened again.  So here's the story: Law and Order style.

In the criminal justice system, egg-based offenses are considered especially heinous.  In the Homestead, the special people who investigate these crimes are known as the special egg-victims unit.  These are their stories.

(Dun dun....)

June 3, 2012, 9am

Up on the roost

Shawn approaches the coop to let the ladies out.  There is a ruckus of Abby and Pearl squawking loudly.  He opens the coop and steps on an empty eggshell.  Tell tale signs of egg eating are all over Abby and Pearl's yolk covered faces.  After a thorough investigation from detectives, the egg is determined to be Elsa's, which she laid on top of the roosting shelf.  It is believed that it may had cracked on impact, and  Abby and Pearl were tempted by the deliciousness inside and couldn't help themselves.

June 3, 2012, 11am

Out in the yard

Pearl and Abby determine they love the taste of eggs.  They plan on taking another.

June 3, 2012, 5pm

In the coop

Detective Shawn goes out to collect eggs and finds another casualty lying next to two whole eggs.  By the power of deduction the victim is identified as a Frannie egg.  The investigation has now determined these crimes to be a string of serial egg murders.  Security around the nesting boxes is heightened.

June 4, 2012, 11am

In the nesting box

Detective Hana finds Frannie in the nesting box, with Abby blatantly waiting for her next victim.  To prevent a third egg-murder, Abby is shooed out of the coop and the perimeter secured to provide both Frannie and her egg safety.

June 4, 2012, 1:15pm

In the backyard

Detective Hana takes a dead junco away from Abby and Elsa.  The bird is determined to have died from natural causes.  Detective Hana is totally grossed out and horrified at the string of crimes in her homestead.  Frannie continues to labor in the nest box.

June 4, 2012, 2pm
Around the coop

Detective Hanae leaves for work and secures Pearl and Elsa in the coop to lay while leaving Abby and Frannie out in the run.  Detective Shawn comes home to find two eggs in nesting box, unharmed.  This leads to the conclusion that Abby is the instigator of egg-eating, though no arrests are made due to lack of concrete evidence.

June 5, 2012, 9:30am
In the coop

Detective Hana goes out to the coop to find it has flooded... again.  She wants to cry, but it makes this whole egg-eating thing not as annoying anymore.  She begins the painstaking coop cleaning process thinking about how the next coop is going to be flood-proof.  While picking up wet straw, a small gray mouse darts out.  Detective Hana is afraid of finding a pile of baby mice under the rest of the straw so she leaves the rest of the cleaning to detective Shawn just in case.

June 5, 2012, 1:30pm
In the nesting box

Abby lays an egg and doesn't eat it.  

Though the case remains open, Detectives Shawn and Hana determine that there will be no charges pressed against the ladies in question, due to an unwillingness for the prosecutors to eat the offenders.  However, security will remained heightened around the nest boxes, and a dummy egg filled with mustard may be placed in the nesting box to show the offenders that not all eggs are delicious.

Mug Shot of the suspect.

Preventing Wedding Hangover

Well, the wedding has come and gone.  Though I'm a bit sad about this fact, just thinking back on the absolute perfection of the day makes me feel all fuzzy inside.  I'm working on a whole page with all the DIY-ed wedding deets so be looking out for that in the next few weeks.

Prior to the wedding I was aware of a phenomenon known as the wedding hangover.  You know, you spend months thinking exclusively about the big day, fretting over this and that, creating decor, sending out invites, planning logistics, and possibly even dreaming about it, which all leads up to a huge culminating mind-overload of awesomeness.

But then it's done.  (For us it was done a bit quicker because we didn't go on a legit honeymoon, and instead spent two days at a little cabin on Bainbridge Island.)  People who came into town go home, gifts are opened, the leftover food is consumed and you're left to just reminisce about how awesome it all was.  And you get a little blue about it.  Your mind all of a sudden has extra room to think about things not related to the wedding and you go back to your disaster of a house (because you were too busy to clean during the days leading up to the wedding,) and reality hits like a ton of bricks.

Luckily, the bricks weren't so heavy for us since we're currently in the throes of moving hour little homestead.  We were sad for about a day or two then we had to get our butts into gear.  In the last week or so, things have been moving and changing.

We got our backyard storage shed delivered:

A second garden box was built (and quickly filled):

(MORE!  I need more garden boxes!!!)

The bat box was put up:

(It was really scary getting it up there because it was SO top heavy.  We almost had to fish Shawn out of the blackberry bushes.)

And we moved just enough stuff over to the new place to host a bonafide kegger to christen the new house.  (Leftover wedding beer :))

Now that the new front door is installed and all the locks are changed, we can really start moving stuff over... as soon as we build a chicken coop.  (Sigh.)  We just picked up some grape stake fencing that we may possibly use to build the coop and are deciding whether we want to move the old run from our current place to the new one or just start from scratch and build another.  We've been looking at coop plans for several weeks now and are getting to the point where we really need to start building if the ladies are coming with us.  It's going to be a pain, the hubs and I will fight (a lot) and it'll get expensive.  But at least we know that going into it.  We just gotta do it.  Oh, and we had another epic flood in the current coop, so we know for a fact that we will consider heavy rain and flood prevention in our new design.