Tag: hobby

SoCS: Joyce’s chickens

One of the substacks I read regularly is Joyce Vance.

She is a lawyer and legal scholar whose commentary I hear often on television. She writes long and thoughtful posts about the current legal issues in the United States, of which there are many.

To lighten things, she also posts about her hobbies.

She will show us what her latest knitting project is, for example.

The thing other than law about which she posts most, though, is her chickens.

She and her family keep a coop with several varieties of chickens. She posts about what she is feeding them. Their interactions with the family’s dog and cat. Their new coop. What they are doing around the yard. How they hop up into her lap sometimes.

She will also occasionally post photos of their eggs. Because there are different breeds, the eggs are various colors and sizes.

The chickens bring Joyce comfort and joy, which she shares with her readers.

I admit that I have no desire to care for chickens myself, but I appreciate Joyce’s sharing her love with all of us.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “chicken or egg.” Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2024/06/28/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-29-2024/

(not) feeding the birds

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about the location of our house is that our back yard abuts a natural area with a state-owned fence giving us a barrier to large wildlife. We’ve used this relative protection to feed birds year-round, watching them swooping down for seeds and suet and then back into our trees.

our backyard bird feeder system

That sense of protection was shattered last week when we awoke to find the central pole snapped and the mostly empty feeders on the ground. The plexiglass of the hopper feeder was broken, making it unusable. The copper suet feeder was bent and had been taken across the yard to one of the large trees.

Our assumption is that a bear had come around the end of the fence and entered our neighborhood and used our feeder station to fatten up for hibernation.

Although it wasn’t the first time a bear had been sited near us, it was the first time we had ever had our feeders raided. Because our local Wild Birds Unlimited store recently closed, B and I trekked up to the store in Fayetteville on Saturday to get the supplies we needed to repair our system.

I had thought that, given the rarity of bears in our neighborhood, we were safe to resume feeding the birds who need the food even more as the weather gets colder and the growing season ends.

I was wrong.

Sunday morning, we awoke to find our new pole broken and empty feeders scattered around its base. Fortunately, this time, the damage to the feeders is repairable without needing to get new parts.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to put them back out until winter is setting in and the bears are hibernating.

The back yard seems empty without the feeders there and the cardinals, woodpeckers, blue jays, nuthatches, finches, juncos, titmouses, and my favorite chickadees flying in and out, especially at dawn, midday, and before sundown. I know, as wild things, they will be okay without our seeds and suet set out for them but I feel badly withdrawing a food source they have relied on for so long.

Maybe in a few weeks…

SoCS: Paco and puzzles

After having announced Paco’s death on One-Liner Wednesday this week, I had thought I wouldn’t post again until I had time and mental space to put together a proper tribute post or, perhaps, a post about last days and good-byes.

Then, the SoCS prompt arrived and it was puzzle and I knew I needed to post for it.

Until these last few months when he was too ill, Paco worked puzzles as part of the routine of his day. He still got the daily newspaper in print and did their wordsearch, which had the added twist that the remaining letters could be unscrambled to solve a question that was posted with the puzzle. Paco also had wordsearch books that he would work on. Wordsearches seemed like an unlikely type of puzzle for Paco to enjoy because he was dyslexic, something that he did not discover until his youngest granddaughter was diagnosed as a child with an inherited form of dyslexia. This led to a number of fundraisers organized by first Paco’s grandson and later his aforementioned granddaughter to raise money for Learning Ally, which helps people with visual impairment or print disabilities to access written language. These fundraisers came to be known as the Paco Project in his honor.

Another word puzzle that was part of Paco’s day was watching Wheel of Fortune in the evening. It came on right after the national news. My older sister would often call him at the time and they would watch part of the show together, even though they were hundreds of miles away from each other.

Paco’s other puzzle passion was jigsaws. When he was in his apartment in independent living, there was a card table in the corner of the living room with a puzzle on it for him, Nana, and visitors to work on whenever the mood struck them. For many years, he made 500 piece puzzles, with the occasional 750 piece thrown in. However, over his last couple of years as some dementia developed, he cut back to 300 piece puzzles. He worked on those until he fell in June and never recovered his ability to be up and about and clear enough mentally for puzzles.

At some point, after we get through this initial period of busy-ness with paperwork and bureaucracy following a death, we will find a home for the several shopping bags’ worth of Paco’s jigsaw puzzles that we brought home with us. I expect we will keep a few special ones as mementoes for ourselves and donate the rest for others, who we hope will enjoy them as much as he did.

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As you can tell from this post, Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is puzzle. As always, you are invited to join us. Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/09/17/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-sept-18-2021/