Chicken stuff...

Well, wow. I guess I've been a little lax in updating this! But I've got good reason, really - on March 6, we received our baby chicks from the hatchery in Iowa! We are now the proud parents of 16 chickens who will supply us with fresh eggs for the next several years. It was sort of a nightmare at first - the hatchery shipped them during a BLIZZARD, and as a result, they were stuck for an additional 24 hours on an unheated truck without food or water, which proved fatal for eleven of the original twenty seven that we received. (Needless to say, we were greatly disturbed by this, and I let the hatchery know exactly how I felt about the whole thing!) Tom and I spent the first seventy-two hours getting up every few hours in the middle of the night to check on the ones that weren't doing so well, and we told everyone: if you're not sure if you're ready to have a baby, start with chickens! Nothing like rousing yourself at 2 a.m. when it's twenty below zero and dragging yourself out into a dark garage to check on dying baby chicks... Yikes! And of course, the day we got them was the start of a week-long cold snap where the daytime high temperatures ranged up to about...oh...five degrees above zero...! Good thing we have the monitor heater in the workshop to keep the place around eighty degrees for the little babies...

BUT, the sixteen that we have now are all thriving, and they are just some of the most beautiful creatures I've ever seen! They each have these wonderful personalities, and I haven't told Tom yet, but I've started naming them... Last week, they discovered that they had WINGS and that they could FLY! So Tom built them a little set of "chicken bleachers" so they have a place to perch and roost. They are a ton of work, I won't kid anyone about that, but they are so much fun, too! We easily kill a few hours each day taking care of them and then just hanging about and watching them. When they sleep at night, they all pile on top of each other, and as I told our friend Rob (who is in on the whole chicken-raising operation with us), it looks just like someone emptied a bag of chickens out onto the floor of the brooding box! Next step: Tom and Rob have to buy lumber and windows and are going to build a well-insulated chicken coop out in the backyard under the pole barn for the girls. I feel as if I'm living on a homestead! Kinda nice, actually...

And on that note, of things kinda nice, I sold a necklace yesterday to the woman who works in the lab at the wastewater plant with Tom. She's been after me for a while that she wants to buy one of my pieces, and before she had expressed an interest in buying The Blue Beyond, but she wound up buying We're All the Same But Different! That's the last piece I would have ever figured she would like, but she asked me to lengthen it to a 20" necklace, which I did, and I delivered it yesterday afternoon to her. She put it on right away, and I have to admit, I just laughed out loud because it looked PERFECT on her! And it gave me such a good feeling, knowing that I crafted this necklace that she absolutely fell in love with, and then when she bought it, I felt like it really made her feel good about herself, and that made me feel good! It was just such a happy-Zen moment, that I immediately went home last night and started sketching a whole bunch of new designs to work on (in all my spare time, har har har...)

So, on Tuesday, I am driving out to Clayton with my friend Mary Jane to visit the gift shop at the Handweaving Museum and Art Center to talk to the gift shop manager and programming director about selling my work through their gift shop. How exciting! My first museum! It's such a beautiful museum, and I can't wait to look around the gift shop with Kim on Tuesday... I was hoping to have a line of fused glass jewelry ready to go by then, but I just haven't had the time (or the money) to invest in a whole new line of materials... As it is, I don't think I could have done much kiln work in the workshop with the baby chicks in there, anyway - I don't want to expose them to anything else that could make them ill! But, at some point in the near future, I will get into the glass fusing work more, and then I'll post some new work on my website and on my Etsy store.

Thanks for reading my blog, everybody, and I hope everyone has a wonderful, relaxing weekend! I am going to spend the weekend finishing my application for the Philadelphia Museum of Craft's annual show, so cross your fingers for me!