Cherry Blossom Parade

Part 5 of the Cherry Blossom Parade has been fixed on the source site.  Jonthan is on the near side at 2 minutes 20 second in.
Chris

It was a beautiful weekend in Northern California. We spent most of it outside on our back patio- so did the chickens. It's important to get out and enjoy the spring since it will probably be summer next week (hot weather that is). 

The chickens are getting big. Weekly weighing puts all three at around 25 oz (1 1/2 lbs). Yesterday they discovered how fun it is to take a dust bath in the Christmas cactus pot.

And they still don't like being held. Notice that Philip is smiling but the chicken is not.

Philip installed outdoor speakers so that we can enjoy music on the patio while watching the chickens and BBQing.

Rachel

Planes coming in.

 On their way up.

Elliot enjoying the tugboat.

Oliver. He was looking at the tugboat washing machine.

Lock 7 Saturday afternoon. These planes are being shipped from

the USS Intrepid in NYC to the Scotia-Glenville air museum. Two seperate barges.

THE CATS

The last interview-

"And your impression of Flannery when you first met her?" "Well, I was partly prepared for it, because I had seen a couple of photographs of her. And I knew how old she was(27). She was very easy to get along with, had a kind of a soft way of speaking. But at the same time, she could be very funny about things, very quickly."

"To my amazement, Flannery had a rather low opinion of Ireland. She called Blarney Castle "Baloney Castle." That was worthy of "Finnegans Wake."


"At Home with Flannery O'Connor: An Oral History" may be purchased from andalusiafarm.org. All proceeds go to "The Flannery O'Connor-Andalucia Foundation,Inc.

Today's interview is with 2 cousins that lived on a dairy farm near Milledgeville.

"...they would call and say they were coming out there, and they were bringing Flannery with them, and Momma would say, "Now, you be here. And you can play with her. I knew that she was a little girl, and she didn't know how to do anything right. And she couldn't fish. So I just sort of tried to stay away, as far as I could."

"...and they invited Flannery to go to Macon with them. She agreed, and said, "wait a minute," and when she came back she had a box of chickens to take with her."

"Well it was the talk around town that that little girl was a writer, and you'd better watch what you said."

"Their way of life was simple. On Sunday, they came to church, and on Thursday, Miss Regina did the week's shopping while Flannery had her music lesson. She was my last piano student, and it was fun, because after we finished what she had been told she should practice, we always had time to visit. And it was those times that I value...."

"When she came to ask me about taking lessons, I told her:"Flannery, you know how to play the piano." And she said, "Yes, I took lessons from Sister Mary Joseph. But you know and I know that Sister Mary Joseph was deaf, she wore a hearing aid, and if she didn't want to hear what you were playing, she'd just turn the hearing aid off..."

The next interview is with her NY editor, Robert Giroux.

"She took him around the farm. I met all the peacocks. She explained how they slept at night, had to get up to the roof, off the ground onto the trunk of the tree. And they had a little ladder for themselves, and got up on the roof at dusk and got ready to sleep. I had no idea they were very vain. I had a camera. They really jockeyed for the best position."

I baked bread last night and started some fromage blanc.  This means that the chickens got whey this morning.  They are quite excited about it.

In hot weather, the chickens would tend to lose appetite and have a higher risk of dehydration, at a time that I need to have them eating and growing.  It seems that whey is a very good way to keep them drinking and hydrated with the warmer weather while also keeping their protein intake up, too.  At the same time, I get to keep my cheese intake up.  I call this a win-win-win situation.

I should have enough whey and cheese to last us 5 to 7 days.

The 6th interview...

The 6th interview...

Visiting the farm...."the barn where I met Equinox, the Burro. I slept in one of the two upstairs bedrooms and was wakened in the night by a peacock on the roof screaming "Help!" I mean, it really sounded like that."

"She told me once she had to avoid the tracks the "Dixie Limited" ran on, and of course, the "Dixie Limited was Faulkner. And I thought he had mussed his face in every pie, leaving a lot of it "un-et". Well, Flannery "et-it."

"Anyway, Flannery mentioned a friend in Shcenectady whom she had told about me, and it turned out to be Granville Hicks, who wrote for The Saturday Review. He came to Yaddo and took me to Schenectady for dinner at his home, a very nice evening"

The weather is getting hotter (high of 88 today) and the chickens (now about 9 weeks old) spent most of the day lazing about.  In the evening, they became more active.  

Priscilla (formerly "Big Bird", but we had to change that due to copyright issues, and "Other One", but someone thought that would hurt her self esteem, never mind that eating roast chicken in her presence doesn't seem to effect her self esteem) made it onto the roof for the first time.

This raises some concern regarding the adequacy of the backyard fence to keep them in (and relatively safe).  I hesitate to clip their primary feathers because that would also hinder one of their defensive mechanisms. Bed head, the smallest one and slowest developer, completed the food web with the help of the neighbor's cat two weeks ago.

The 5th interview- again with no birds! "I do remember that she told me about the donkey, her Mother's Day present to Regina."

The 4th interview has let me down. The man never met Flannery- he was a penpal! So, no trips to the farm and no bird stories. He does, however include a quote from a lecture she gave. Question- Were you influenced by William Faulkner? Answer- "Oh, no I was not influenced by him at all. Nobody wants his horse and wagon stalled on the track when the Dixie Limited comes along."

Interview the 3rd-

I gave her a call a couple of weekends later and said, "I'm going to be in Milledgeville next weekend and she said, "Well, come on by after lunch," and I did. We simply sat on the porch, watched the peacocks and talked. I took my daughter, my four-year-old daughter, Lucinda, with me and Flannery let her chase the peacocks. She couldn't catch one, but she loved to chase them.

None of us ever thought of walking to Ocercoker instead of doing the long drive. The Locavore Hunter has decided to do just that. Although, he is starting from Virginia.

Gym Dandies Cherry Blossom Parade 2012

See Jon at 2 minutes 20 seconds waving on near side

From the 2nd interview of a Flannery O'Connor friend-

"Her interest in her fowl is well known, and the peacocks are her special interest, but she had all kinds: she had ducks, geese, swans, some that interbred. I remember one peculiar-looking little creature with strange feathers, whose legs seemed as if they were on axles. His feet were wheels. He had a most peculiar gait, but evidently lived a quite happy life."

The Gym Dandies were in Washington for the 100th annual Cherry Blossom Parade. There were 165 units. Watch for the parade in syndication as the Gym Dandies are shown for a few minutes. The kids did a great job.

Megan waiting to start:
Jonathan:

Followed by Scooby Doo:

Toured Washington and Mount Vernon afterward:
Dealership:

Chris

I just received "At Home with Flannery O'Connor: an Oral History" and in the 1st interview a friend tells this story. As we were walking to my car Flannery said, "I've got to tell you a story. Last week, a farmer came to talk to my mother, and we were walking with him down this same little stretch of road at the back of the house. All of a sudden, one of our chickens crossed in front of him, and he reached down and picked up that chicken, and he threw it up in the air. The chicken came flapping down, wings going as fast as it could go, cackling and carrying on. Then, much to our astonishment, he picked that chicken up again and threw it in the air and did that several times. Finally he put the poor chicken down, who by that time was completely dazed. Then the man dusted off his hands and said, "If you ever want to give a chicken a good time, just throw it up in the air."

Rachel gets really upset when the door gets left open and the chickens go into the house.

Dad and I did NOT do this.

Cyndy at Porches looking at Mass MOCA


Me at Porches

Cyndy at Hoosac Tunnel East Portal

Tim at Springfield Armory Museum, and a Factory 5 car

Yertle the Turtle

Wild turkeys playing in the snow

We got our taxes done and mailed today, and then everyone got a dust bath.