TTRPG startup and Chicken tending

 

chocolate chip pancakes with peanut butter and banana

 

November has been an odd month. It kind of seems like nothing has happened, but every day has it's own ups and downs and they all add up. Let's see, What can I tell you...

I have done a little bit of baking and canning but not much. Just some meat to have on hand instead of frozen and some broth for the canning, and a batch of cookies for game night.

close up photo of polyhedral dice

 Our neighbours that come over for a monthly board/card game night are now coming over weekly to play a table top role play game called Cypher. Since it wouldn't be a proper RPG group without scheduling conflicts, I wasn't really surprised that we had to keep rescheduling for one reason or another but after a couple weeks we all got together last Saturday for session-zero. Hugslut is going to be running the game for us and we spent all Saturday afternoon teaching the neighbours (who have never played any rpg before) how to play, and we got to make our characters. 

There is a human sized fairy who can hover/glide with her wings and does magic with dreams/illusions, a necromantic elf who fights with a bow or a rapier, a human sword&board fighter who focuses on protecting the lil guy, and a human water wizard who's good at healing as well as blasting people with water. This weekend we'll be starting our adventure together.

 

The garden is done for the season and I need to take down the temporary electric fence so it doesn't get blown down/iced to death. The garlic was planted in neat little rows and I hope to inter-plant with some greenery or quick crops like radishes in the spring.

If you can't see what's wrong, I'll feel better that I missed it until it got this bad.

 

Jennifer caught my eye a few weeks ago by staying indoors even when the rest of the chickens went out to scratch. I thought it was just because her moult was going so rough for her and she didn't have enough feathers to stay warm(her backside was nearly naked) but taking a closer look at her that night I found out she had a bad case of scaly leg mites.  (Sorry for the bad photos but she was not interested in standing still while I got close with the phone lol.)

After the first treatment or two her legs looked like this: 

The white scabbing is starting to turn black with healthy pink skin under.

She got to stay inside for a week eating as many high protein treats as she wanted alongside her regular pellets to help her grow new feathers and scales. Every day I gave her a foot bath to make sure she didn't get an infection, and to loosen the scabs. Then I re-coated her legs with vaseline to smother the mites, and since she was very well behaved and I didn't want her to be stuck in the hospital cage all day, she got to wander the living room most afternoons. By the time she went back out to the coop she was looking much more feathered and her feet looked like this:

Lots of new pink skin under just a few scabby bits. It only took a few more days for her to loose the last of the bit black bits, and just two days ago she laid her first egg since she started her moult in Oct! The girls reduce their egg production when growing new feathers but the rest were putting out at least one a week. I just figured it was because her moult wasn't going well. Turns out the moult stressed her enough for the mites to get traction and then the infestation caused even more stress on her system (etc). I'm glad she's recovering so well. Makes me feel like I have a handle on this whole chicken thing.

The rest of the flock are doing well. Kelly still hates Marsha but there haven't been any more injuries. Isabella and Romeo seem to be running interference and trying to keep them away from each other.

We've had our home energy assessment and the solar folks have come to put the braces/rails/frames? up on the roof already but the next steps are a month or two away. The greenhouse will be installed any day now. With the weather and fires and such they're running a bit behind this year.

What else.....

Now that money is coming in again we've ordered some wall mounted nightstands so we can replace the cardboard boxes we've been making do with, and we've been discussing the possibility of meat rabbits in the spring pretty much every time I look at the price of chicken in the grocery store. (It's almost always more than beef!).

The weather's okay for November. We'll get a day or two of -1C where it snows and then it'll melt a day or two later, some heavy rains that only last a day, the usual.

That's probably it. Hope you're all doing well and hopefully next blogpost I'll have some photos that aren't chicken feet to share. :-)

Chickens scratching around near their favourite bushes.