Smart Dad's advice, winterizing, vent gleet, To do list

Gleet girl is back with the flock and doing fine.  Now that she is better I have completed two more items on my list.  The desk was on my list.  Its a pretty, medium sized roll top.  It had gotten so bad that I couldn't  shut the roll top and  none of the drawers would open because of the  paperwork stuffed into them.  I took the day , sorted every piece and now have a kitchen garbage bag of old bills and  such that I need to shred.  The desk is clean and pretty and I now have two empty drawers  to stuff   paperwork-y things into over the coming year. Am I uber organized? NO!  Am I organized enough to keep my piles of crap   separate? Yes.  Good enough!   
I also bottled up  a half gallon of  raspberry vinegar and started another gallon.
The two winter beds that I planted two weeks ago  have sprung to life beautifully.  There will be plenty of collards, beets, beans  and spinach   for our fall consumption.  The brussels sprouts we planted in the spring are beginning to sprout little 'brussels' and the broccoli is still producing.   I'm not too sure about the  second harvest potatoes though , they are not showing any signs of coming up yet.   We will see.  They were an experiment.
Next on the list..... Sealing everything for the winter.  Dad has been giving me   great advice about how to do this.   While some things are obvious  (even to me), He has had some suggestions that I probably would have missed.... left on my own.   Dads are great! Especially smart Dads like mine.  And he can cook.  When he came to visit for Christmas we made apple pies.  Actually, he made them and I watched.  His pies are  award  winning. I mean that straight forward. He has ribbons  to prove it, so when I got the chance to learn from him....I did. 

Vent Gleet, nasty chicken butt, dr. internet, shut-ins, hubris, stupid list anyways

A case of nasty chicken butt  threw me off my list this week. One of my 1 year old layers  turned up with 'vent gleet'.  According to  Dr Internet it is a kind of yeast infection caused by  'fill in the blank'.  The first couple of days we didn't know what it was and then she starting getting lethargic. Lethargic enough to  let me pick her up without  so much as a cluck.    Jimmy and I brought her in and gave her a bath which at first she protested until the warm water  made her butt feel better.  She was more than content to just let her rear soak in it.  We took her out, dried her off and sprayed her sore bottom with tinactin  (the mico stuff).  We put her in a big box  with a bowl of water  dosed with apple cider vinegar with the mother, a few tablespoons of plain yogurt and some crumble.   We put her in the downstairs bathroom and lightly covered the box.  We wanted her to sleep as much as possible. The next day she was much more alert  but, still  no struggling when reached for.  Yesterday when Jimmy and I picked her up to spray her derriere she squawked a bit.  This morning she is in fine fettle and was bumping around enough to knock her water over.  Her backside looks way better and she may be able to join the other girls later today.  Which is good because  the downstairs smells like chicken!   Vent gleet is not contagious but, just to be safe, we dosed all the other chickens water with the apple cider vinegar and gave them yogurt too.  Every body seems to be okay and all the butts in the pen are fluffy.  Why did I turn to Dr Internet instead of a real vet?  Cuz I'm not spending $200 on a chicken and most vets  don't know anything about chickens anyway.  The big money is in dogs and cats!  I did worry that maybe it was coccidiosis but if it was , with our slow response to  her  'gleet' , all of them would have had it and this blog would have been way different.  Anything other than  a yeast infection would have killed her in the first 48 hours and infected all the others as well.  We will see if our country doctorin'   was effective. I will update here on her progress in a few days.

Since I spent most of my spare time this week watching chicken asses and playing nurse, I'm now behind on my  30 day challenge list.  Knocking off one  chore a day for 30 days.  Maybe I should make a 7 day list and do a 7 day challenge.  I should have learned by now that 30 days is to far in advance for me to plan anything.  Our work schedules are too crazy and we have so many variables  in our life that new priorities  rise to the top  remarkably fast.  The sad thing about all this crazy scheduling is that we haven't seen anyone since the  winter except the few brave souls  that   live within driving distance and have been willing to come visit us.  We are practically shut-ins!.  We are not actively avoiding or shunning or ignoring anyone , we just cant seem to get our s#%& together  to fulfill our social obligations.  We haven't been anywhere or done anything (Not involved with work) since we moved in.   Every time we make plans to do a social thing with friends or family  something critical rears its head.  Work, plumbing, electricity,  chickens...flat tires.....you name it.... we have had to deal with it.  We were told before we bought this place that the first 18 months would be crazy and scary and hard.  Of  course, we poo-pooed that because we are so much  more relaxed in attitude than others are about these things but.....
Hubris is the sin the gods hate the most.    Guess which sin we unknowingly indulged in?