Lacuna Sabbath

This Lacuna Sabbath dawned with a special treat – RAIN!!! Not a lot, just a little, but RAIN none the less.

It has been a BIG week. I have been offered a new job. I am leaving the public service. I am scared and excited, and also feeling like the layers of stress and frustration and fracturedness and wasted effort and boredom are lifting off my little shoulders layer by layer.

For the first time in 5 years, I will be working on a project that I would do for free if I didn’t have a mortgage – and this fills me with hope and joy. I will also be able to work from home, surrounded by teapots, chooks, ducks, garden and laptop, and still get to travel, and work with folks who care passionately about the planet, diversion of organics from the waste stream, and sustainable agriculture and linking city folks with farmers and their food production.

Am I really allowed to have it all? I hope so. Scary but good. This is what it is all about I think – trying to get integration and a path with heart.

In other news, Nefley is sitting on 10 hopefully fertile eggs from Margot Gardner in Victoria. Margot is the source of my original line of silly silkies. These silly chooks are especially precious because a few months after Nefley, Jenni and their siblings hatched in 2005, Margot lost her home and a lifetime of breeding stock in a bushfire. These precious eggs are from her last surviving hens, and I feel so privileged to have them. By tomorrow we should be ready to candle the eggs and see how many of them are developing.

And about that rooster. Mr Duck Herder and I have established he is no rocket scientist. AND he has lice. Lucy dusted him with derris/sulphur when I picked him up, and I have been feeding him sulphur powder all week, but this morning, I found two little buggers crawling around under his tail. So today he got a good dusting of derris and sulphur again. None of my stock have EVER had mites or lice before, so I am hoping we can get on top of this problem before it spreads. He is struggling with the intellectual challenge of climbing up the ladder to bed, and seems scared to venture out into the garden. ON the cute side, once upstairs in bed, he did the cutest thing…he made a NEST in the straw, right beside Nefley’s. I think his nest is bigger than her’s, and he SLEEPS in it! He is also very gentle, and doesn’t seem to crow before 7.30am – so if he keeps this up he can stay with the girls overnight rather than be locked in a box in the glass house.

I am calling him “he” because neither :Willy", “Wally” or “Fabio” seems to suit him. He may be more of a “princess” or a “Maurice”. We will see.