Cuddly Little Killing Machines!

Isn't that raccoon cute? Sure, they're downright adorable . . . until you find one trying to eat your poor chickens in the middle of the night, as one of these little blighters did. At 3:00 a.m. we were woken by the sound of the chickens doing the chicken version of panicked screaming. We ran outside to find a raccoon with a mouthful of feathers. It took off over the fence, leaving us freaking out in our jammies. We thought Lucy had been killed, but it seems like she was just playing dead or in shock (or both). Ethel was shocked, as well, but they both appear to be otherwise unharmed. I can't blame the raccoon; it's just doing what raccoons do. Upsetting for all concerned, to say the least.

I think in addition to running for their lives, the fact that both chickens are moulting--that is, losing all their feathers and growing nice, new ones--saved their lives. Judging by the clumps of feathers all over the yard, every time the raccoon got a hold on one of them, their feathers just came right out, leaving our little thief holding nothing but pillow stuffing. Well timed, my feathered friends, well timed indeed.

Needless to say, we fortified the chicken run and are now locking the girls in at night. They're not thrilled but they're also not straying from the coop as much as they used to. It's always an adventure in the backyard! Luckily, this adventure turned out okay.

Florida's Gardening Quirks

Our backyard Square Foot Gardening experiment is underway! Jeff and I have built six 4'x4' boxes and installed them in the yard area next to the deck that was once home to our rotten, never-used picnic table. So far, we have managed to fill four of the boxes with the custom mix of compost, peat and vermiculite recommended for the SFG method. Here's hoping it helps retain moisture in our killer climate. We're also topping up our original 3'x8' garden box with that mixture. Altogether, these seven boxes will give us 120 planting "squares." Wow, what do with all of that? That's the fun part!

Since many of our family and friends are in more northerly climes, and because most people in Florida don't have a clue about gardening in our climate, I'm including a little chart here that I assembled so we would know what should be planted when for central Florida. It's weird! Our schedule is the complete opposite of everything one might come to expect from a lifetime of PBS gardening shows and illicit book and magazine browsing in the stands of Barnes & Noble. It's strange to be so "off" from the cultural norm, but adventuresome too. In the next ten days, I expect to be putting down our second round of tomatoes (which will hopefully be more productive than the first), cucumbers, eggplant, broccoli, chile peppers and the first bits of lettuce, plus a re-do of our sadly neglected herb pots. Wish us luck!

Chooks!

Meet Lucy and Ethel, our two new chickens. Lucy is the larger and bossier redhead—definitely the top of the now-literal pecking order. Ethel is shy but, I think, quicker on the uptake. I guess our randomly selected names were more appropriate than we expected! They seem perfectly contented to walk around the backyard, scratch up everything, eat bugs, poop and lay beautiful, sage-colored eggs (six eggs in three days so far). Jeff's sister Chris helped us identify their breed, Americauna or "the Easter Egg chicken." They're silly and relatively well-behaved, although I learned this morning that they will let you know if you're late with the breakfast. Well, fair enough. I'd be mad, too!

As always, click on the pic if you'd like to see a larger version.  Their feathers are remarkable and beautiful constructions.  Go, keratin!

Step by step

Eight "Sunshine Blue" blueberry plants were planted in raised bed boxes over the weekend, our fence is repaired, our current garden box is still pumping out veggies, one-third of our path is constructed (helping to clear the area where our garden will go), the clothes are consistently on the line, I'm back on my bike to work more than ever before, lots of research is being done and we're about to start building a cardboard prototype of our chicken coop.

The world keeps changing and so are we. More adventures await!

That Thing I Do

The installation of the "Amazing Bodies" life science exhibition in Amarillo, Texas, is complete! I am quite pleased with how this one came out, I have to say. The activities are fun and informative, and the large-scale graphics turned out beautifully. For those of you who don't really know what I do, imagine a big empty room with boring grey carpet and white walls and then look at this picture. What I do, with my cute little teammates, is research the client's chosen exhibition topic to the nth degree, then figure out what content can be turned into cool ideas that people can actually touch and do--basically, we come up with the idea behind every single exhibit that goes in that boring white and grey room. Then, the design team here turns those ideas into "things" that can be fabricated. While all that is happening, it's my job to write interesting words for all of those exhibits using the research that we've gathered and to work with the graphic designers to come up with a label that has all that information in it. A lot of times, that also includes me researching endless photos to find that one special cow or lung X-ray or jumproping child that we want to put on that label (since we know better than the graphic designer what exact type of cow, lung or child we would like to see on that label). I also help develop any multimedia programs and find videos and sounds for any exhibits that have media in them.

And then, while I'm doing that, I set and follow where the project budget is going, set the schedules, track the project's progress and keep it moving, and communicate with the client to get their approvals as we go along. But that's all. :-)

I'll be going out to Amarillo in mid-April to do a photo shoot of the exhibit, so I should get some better photos of it. It's the first time I've ever had to handle one of our photo shoots, so that should be loads of fun. Even more exciting is the chance to see the exhibition first-hand. I spend, on average, two years of my life working on a project, but I've only been to about half of the finished exhibitions. I'm usually too busy working on the next one to go!

And what's next, you ask? Well, now that I've wrapped up a life sciences exhibition along with a small ecology exhibit about the cypress-tupelo swamps of Louisiana and East Texas, I've moved on to a project about the maritime history of the Gulf of Mexico. That's a new one! But I now know how to find my longitude and latitude if I'm ever stranded in the middle of the Gulf with a boatload of nineteenth-century navigation tools. Life is good!

By the by, that activity in the picture asks people to try to match the heartbeat rate of a dog, human and cow. It's harder than you think! And we had to track down real, plastinated hearts of all those critters, which you can see in the windows there.