The coop we built from some diagrams in an old organic gardening magazine served it's purpose well, but had some drawbacks.  It was very heavy and difficult to move, quite hard to clean, and hard to completely secure.  The final straw was when we found a mouse or rat was trying to take up residence in the next boxes.

For the new coop, we settled on a Chick-N-Hutch with an attachable Chick-N-Rabbit Pen.  It was easy to put together, is relatively light, and was cheaper than the materials we spent on the original coop. It has a pan under the wire mesh floor that collects the poop and can easily be slid out. 

The coop also has a pole across it, so that the girls can perch at night.  While there's room for all four to do this, they're still fighting over who gets to sleep on the perch (two or three of them win, and the other one or two sleep under them on the wire mesh).

The only major downside so far was that it had an unsecured swinging panel on the back wall that we thought a raccoon could exploit.  I replaced it with a thicker hinged door with a latch.

Soon after we set up the coop, Madeleine learned that if she got scared of the chickens (pecking or chasing her, which they occassionally do) she could run inside the coop and close the door behind her.

PaulAndAnn.org has a new look, a new home, new features, and a lot new under the hood.  We are now hosted at Joyent, rather than on the Linux machine under my desk (I would always cringe when I could hear the CPU fan cranking hard on a hot day).

Of particular note:

• You can leave comments to our blog posts.
• The new image at the top of the page is at a park near Ann's parents' house, from our recent trip to South Bend.
• A facelift for photo albums, with pop-up preview mode and access to downloading the full-sized images (hopefully to the delight of certain grandparents).
• Paging of blog articles, so you don't have to wait for all of them to render when loading the main page.
• Everything's faster!

Let us know if you see anything amiss as we complete the transition.  For those who care, the site is running on a new CMS engine I have written in Ruby on Rails for use with other consulting client.

A recent unexpected development was that she just figured out what our first names are and how to use them.  That day, she walked out to our front door and called, "AAAAAAAANNNNN!" in the general direction of her mommy.  She's occasionally using both of our first names, particularly if the "mama" and "dada" calls aren't working effectively enough.

Madeleine's imaginative play has taken off in the past few months.  She plays a lot with her baby doll: changing its diaper, putting it to sleep, feeding it, having it blow bubbles, etc.  She puts together her interlocking blocks and declares them a boat or a cat or a dog.  She draws "cats" and "dogs", one of which looked almost intelligible recently (which I'll choose to believe was not a mistake).  Ann and I have both had fun taking her to My Play Place, a cool toddler play area just a few blocks from us with all kinds of interesting toys and arts & crafts.

This quarter also included Madeleine's first trip to the zoo, trips with Mommy in a new bike seat, an Easter egg hunt, a couple trips to the ocean, and lots of splashing at the water table (yes, midwesterners, it really has gotten warm enough for that here already).  And, of course, Maddy helped us pick out our new chicks and enjoys watching, feeding, and hanging out with them.

And, finally, here is the latest Maddyspeak translation guide:

• "feep" => "sleep"
• "hawlk" => "help"
• "fing" => "swing"
  
• "fide" => "slide"
• "bay-bay" => "baby"
• "pookie" => "peek-a-boo"
• "shish" => "fish"
• "Ah-ah" => "Ana," her beloved babysitter
  

Latest photos are here.

We've had to put down Soufflé, one of our two Rhode Island Red chickens, after a couple weeks of illness.

We don't know what caused her condition, but just noticed her limping around one day. She had one of her feet curled up and was trying (very unsuccessfully) to walk on her knuckles. I initially thought she injured one of her front toes, but I'm not sure that was really the case. We also noticed that the tip of the claw/nail on the back toe (thumb?) was broken off.

I taped her three toes to a piece of cardboard, as recommended on some online posts.  She was then able to stand/balance on it), but she still kept falling over when trying to walk (mostly with the foot sliding one way or the other). The cardboard has also come off twice.  A quick call with a vet relative with chicken knowledge said it was premature to put her down and we should at least give her a week, and we heard from someone else that chicken leg/foot injuries are not uncommon and tend to heal.

We separated her from the rest of the flock, keeping her in another part of our yard for the day and returning her to the coop at night. We hadn't seen the others in the flock going after her yet, but were worried that could become a problem. A couple days later, we borrowed a cage to bring her inside to reduce her stress.  We did a fair amount of research, mostly on backyardchickens.com, and tried some recommended treatments (B vitamin supplement and calcium).  

While we were away on vacation, our neighbor nursed it to some extremes-- letting the chicken sleep on her and making a sling/hammock out of old pantyhose to hold her up in the cage (our neighbor has her own pet birds and gave our chickens massages the last time she chicken-sat).

So after having a beekeeper keep bees in a hive in our backyard for the past couple of years, our neighbor, Dell, and I decided we should go ahead and learn the art and science of it ourselves after our beekeeper went missing-in-action when our last colony died off in the fall. What that has meant practically is that for the last three months I've been reading books about beekeeping, attending meetings with the Alameda County Beekeeper's Association, visiting other beekeeper's hives in Alameda, attending a local "Introduction to Beekeeping" class, and ordering equipment, while Dell put forth half the money and provided the space to house two hives. I haven't minded too much, as it's proven to be an intellectually stimulating and exciting diversion from chasing around a toddler, hanging laundry, and cooking meals. The more I've studied, the more intrigued and excited I've become. The science of honey bees is fascinating and I've been reminded why I was a science major in college. Every time I get home from a class or a meeting I spend the rest of the evening regaling Paul with random facts about bee behavior. (For example, the queen bee leaves the hive once in her lifetime when she mates with several males in mid-air.  Then she returns to the hive to lay approximately 1,000 eggs a day every day for the rest of her life until she dies, gets kicked out of the hive by a younger queen, or gets eaten by said younger queen). Last week, I got to suit up in a full bee suit and veil for the first time to smoke and check on three colonies a few miles from here. I came home encouraged that I now know enough to begin colonies of my own.

I've been having lots and lots of dreams about bees, and have been wringing my hands about where and how I wanted to procure the bees to fill our two hives. Finally, yesterday I got a call from a veteran beekeeper that I could come to catch a swarm with him.  It was an exciting afternoon as we had to capture the swarm that was 25 feet high in a tree. The end result was that my neighbors and I drove home from Berkeley with somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 bees in my trunk. Today as Paul, Madeleine, and I checked on the hive several times, we witnessed hundreds of bees taking their inaugural flights around Dell's backyard as they got their bearings around their new home.

I hope to capture another swarm before the swarm season ends this month to put in the other hive. We'll probably get a honey harvest this year, although some beekeepers have warned me it will probably be "small" -- just 50-60 pounds per hive this year since we're starting from nothing. That will be just fine with me. When Dell and I decided to do this in January, it was because we wanted all our fruit trees well pollinated, so the thought of honey was like the icing on the cake. Now, of course, I'm pretty excited by the prospect of a honey harvest too.

It's a little tricky to make out, but the first photo shows the swarm of bees clinging to a tree limb 25 feet up in the tree. To capture them we attached a painter's bucket with metal hinges to a long stick, raised the bucket to just beneath the swarm, gave it a sharp jab, and all the bees fell into the bucket. Then we literally poured the thousands of bees into my waiting hive on the ground. At dusk, when all the remaining bees found their way into the hive, we closed it up and popped it in the trunk for the bumpy ride. Dell and his wife Pat decided that to celebrate we should stop for a drink on the way home. Before going into the bar and after coming out, we opened the trunk to let the bees get some fresh air.