I didn’t have a chance to mention this earlier but on Christmas Eve (!) our chickens gave us the first egg. We don’t know the chicken it came from but so far we’ve had an egg about every other day. Today, though, we got 4 so far so slowly all the chickens are starting to lay So far we got a total of 10 eggs – one cracked and we quickly turned it into an omelet – YUM! It’s amazing how the egg yoke looks so much more yellow on these eggs.

Here are also a few pictures of our finished chicken coop.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year to everybody!

We had a wonderful Christmas and Santa Clause was very generous to the kids. They were super excited about all the presents! Otherwise we had a mostly relaxing holiday break. I had the last two weeks off and we spend the time cleaning up in the back yard and doing a few day trips.

Out back we mainly demolished the kid’s (never fully completed) “Tiki House” and converted it into a habitat for our Desert Tortoise Red. The fish tank she was in was just way too small in the long run so now she has a relatively large enclosure (about 8 by 5 feet) that gives her shelter and a fairly large area to sunbathe. We’ll eventually redesign the burrow but for now she has a good home.

A while back I got a great deal on LivingSocial.com for a 1 year membership to the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa. We paid only 25 bucks – can you believe it?! The kids have been asking to go back there for months now so for our first “day trips” we went to the museum for the afternoon. We then spend the evening at the Phoenix Zoo admiring the ZooLights.

Our second day trip was to the Besh Ba Gowah Archeological Park in Globe, AZ. The site is definitely off the beaten path and what a treat it was! We brought a snack and had a wonderful time walking around the partially restored ruins.

Our third and final trip was to Flagstaff. The kids have been wanting to play in the snow and since we didn’t go up there last winter we figured this is a good time. As always, the drive was scenic and we first stopped at the Walnut Canyon National Monument. Part of the loop trail was closed off due to ice but otherwise we had a blast! Except for Shiloh maybe who wanted to just run around – definitely not a good idea on that trail since it has a pretty sharp drop-off on one side pretty much all the way around. I ended up having to carry her most of the way. Oh well, we’ll come back here when she’s a little older and “mellowed out”. Alexander and Jonah did really well on the trail, though and wanted to hike a lot more. After Walnut Canyon we grabbed lunch and then headed to Buffalo Park. Unfortunately, most of the snow had melted and there were only a few patches left. The kids still had a lot of fun during our impromptu snow ball fight but no sledding this time . In the evening we went to Lowell Observatory. The stars were amazing and just like I remembered it from years ago. They had the 24″ Clark telescope pointing at Jupiter and a portable 16″ Dob was available for viewing the Moon. I don’t think the kids quite appreciate the history of this place yet but they still had fun looking thru the “big” scopes.

Small astronomical side note: Despite the person at the Clark telescope saying that the seeing was “great” I’ve had better views of Jupiter thru my 10″ scope at home. Don’t get me wrong, though, it was still amazing looking thru this fantastic instrument. The view of the Moon was great. However, IMHO, not what I would have chosen to use a 16″ scope for at this place. Then again, for the general public the faint and fuzzies lack the WOW-effect so I can’t blame the staff for picking these particular observing targets. It’s exactly what I would have picked for an event like this .

No doubt about it, things have been busy around here. My parents came to visit for about 5 weeks in late October/early November and we all had a good time. The kids had a huge blast hanging out with Oma and Opa and my wife and I actually got to go on a few dinner+movie dates.

Last weekend we celebrated Thanksgiving and stayed away from the stores as much as possible. The Black Friday craze is just out of control! I can’t believe how many stores advertised that they would open Friday “morning” at midnight. I can’t imagine that anybody would want to shop at that time, but hey, I guess there’s plenty of people out there otherwise they wouldn’t open at such an ungodly hour. Either way, we did not go anywhere on Friday and only went to Walmart Saturday to get some extra food. After having turkey for 4 meals in a row we needed some variety .

Our chickens are doing well. My dad help us finish the coop and I’ll post a few pictures soon but needless to say: it turned out fantastic. The only negative development is that one of our “hens” turned out to be a rooster. Unfortunately we could not keep it – luckily a friend of ours was interested and gave him a good home. The chickens are about 5 month old now and we think that the remaining 11 are all hens now but I guess only time will tell . If all goes well they should start laying eggs early next year. We can’t wait.

Otherwise we’re all sick right now. Some bug has been going around in our house for the last 3-4 weeks and we don’t seem to be able to shake it off. Alexander had to stay home for a few days last week and now that he’s back at school Jonah, Shiloh and mom are sick. Oh well, like they say: Drink lots of water and rest. Yeah right! I wonder how much “rest” we’ll all get with 3 kids and 2 of them sick.

It doesn’t look like much but I made some good progress on the chicken coop. I actually had to fix a few really dumb mistakes I made when I build the first part of the frame. Oh well. Now I’m ready to construct the floor and walls with the egg boxes.

Luckily the weather is finally cooling down a bit so that it should be a little easier to be out there more then an hour at a time.

Whew, I finally got around to porting over our photo album!

After looking around for a better tool I found JAlbum and was very impressed by it’s features. Compared to the scripts that I was using before it would make it a breeze to add new photos and albums but didn’t realize how much work it would be to move our “old” photo album over to this new program. While at it, I also added a ton of pictures and in the future I will regularly add new photos and keep the album more up-to-date. Go ahead, have a look around and let us know what you think.

Family Photo Album

I took a few more pictures of the chicken’s temporary home and the first stages of the chicken coop. Enjoy!

I should also mention that for about 3 weeks now we are owners of 12 chickens. YES, you read it right: Chickens.

We’ve been toying with the idea of having out own eggs for some time and after taking a “class” about raising backyard chickens we decided to go ahead and take the plunge. So, to make a long story short, we went to a local feed store and bought 1-3 week old chicks. Here’s the starting lineup:

• 4 Ameraucana
• 4 Rhode Island Red
• 4 Barred Rock

We’re hoping they are all hens but at this point we don’t know yet for sure. We might have a few roosters in the mix. We’re totally new to this so we’ll have to wait until it’s obvious I guess I’m sorry to say, though, that we won’t be able to keep any roosters.

As you can see in the pictures we’re in the early stages of building a chicken coop. We’re probably a few weeks away from the chicks being able to move in so at this point they are in a temporary box in the kid’s playhouse. They outgrew the plastic bin you see in the picture in no time so now they have enough space until the “luxury” coop is ready. I’ll post updates as I make progress out there.

I didn’t get around to it sooner but here are a few pictures of our “new” front yard without our beloved tree. I actually like the look of it. It’s so nice and open. We still have a tree to the right of the driveway so I hope the HOA won’t complain since we’re supposed to have a tree in the front. Oh well, we’ll see how smart they are.

We actually have 4 tiny oak seedlings in a pot in the back yard that we grew from acorn (from our neighbor’s tree actually, which coincidentally is also no longer there either) and we’re thinking about putting those where the big tree used to be. The jury is still out on this one though.

Oh boy, what a storm last night. We went out shopping only to find on our way back that they wouldn’t let us get back to our community. We tried all the back roads and after a bit of trial and error we got close enough to at least find out what was going on. The police had Hunt Hwy all blocked off because a ton of power poles got knocked over and were blocking the road towards Copper Basin.

Luckily, after maybe 20-30 minutes we were able to reach our community only to discover our next obstacle: the power was out. Since our front door has a chain and the garage gate has no manual override we found ourselves locked out of our own house Fortunately I was able to get us in without doing any damage and only a screwdriver as a tool (I won’t go into any detail here but it was really a bit too easy to get in).

Anyway, after finally getting into the house we put up candles everywhere. I think the kids actually enjoyed this quite a bit. We were planning to grill burgers for dinner so the power outage really didn’t force us to change any plans.

At about 9pm or so the power came back after being out for about 4 hours. Not bad actually considering the damage to the power lines. I guess all the grid upgrades SRP has made over the past few years actually paid off.

Today things are back to normal, except for the only casualty of the storm: our front tree.

We give our tortoise Red plenty of time in the sun so here are some pictures from the other day when she was roaming our back yard munching on some of the delicacies it has to offer.