Archive - 2005 - Story

Every Christmas for the past 15 years or more my family has engaged in the seasonal sport of satsuma bowls. This is a keenly fought contest, loosely based on lawn bowls, the rules of which have been progressively developed and fine tuned. I have to confess to making the assumption the same would be happening up and down the land each winter when satsumas and clemantines become available in the shops. Google says not - apparently a satsuma bowl is an Japanese decorative antique!

There was a clear need to have satsuma bowls recognised as an official sport. To achieve this I have set out the rules of the sport as well as a bit of background information such as how to choose the ideal satsuma bowl, jack selection and scoring systems.

One thing I have noticed since moving out of London is how little the weather previously affected us in the inner city. November seems early to have such a harsh frost and the ground has been frozen for the best part of a week. I haven't really seen a frost like this for many years. I went out early one morning to take photos of all the ice cystals covering the plants. The chickens weren't as taken by the beauty of everything - one foot on the frozen ground and they hopped up on my back for warmth. The other thing you really notice is the stars. In London a clear night meant you could see the stars. Out in the country a clear night means you see thousands of stars of different size, colour and intensity and some of them really do twinkle!

I was never quite happy with the old phpnuke site. Much of the site took a lot of php hacking to get it to look and function right. There were also ongoing concerns about security. I've been hunting around for a while now for the right replacement and fortunately came across a blog that mentioned drupal was worth a look. And here it is.

Since installing Fedora Core 3 on my laptop I have been unable to access web sites with Firefox on an intermittent basis. The usual pattern is that google and most search engines produce a 'Connection refused...' error. What's doubly annoying is of course the first thing you do on getting an error like this is to google the answer! How many times did I try to do that - doh!

There were certain other sites I couldn't access too. I downloaded Knoppix and ran linux from a CD but still had the same error.

It's an often repeated piece of trivia that the longest ever recorded chicken flight is thirteen seconds - apparently the furthest flight was 301.5 feet. I can't find what type of chickens these were but I think Millie & Katie are warming up to take the record. They love to fly up on to me especially if I have some grain. I have also found them up trees, on the roof of the cottage and on the back wall. On one occaision Millie took off from the back wall at a steep angle until she was way above my head - I would guess between twenty and thirty feet. She then splayed out her wings and not entirely gracefully dropped down by my feet. We have decided not to clip their wings as they seem to like flying and have so far stayed within the back garden. I guess they have a better chance of escaping predators with intact flight feathers.

We decided to get an automatic door opener for the chicken house as we realised it won't be long before we get back from work in the dark. It installed quite well and is so far functioning without a hitch. I shall write up the details on my projects page and I can see this developing in to an "ultimate chicken house" project!

Further evidence of Katie's adventurous (show off) tendancies. Whilst lining up for a shot of Millie foraging in the back border who should appear in the viewfinder but Katie wanting to show off her growing beard and muff feathers!!!

What has amazed me is how very different the characters of our chickens are. Katie has always been the baby and will at any opportunity bury her head under Millie's wing or undercarriage. Before they started to roost they slept on the floor and she would sometimes push Millie right up in the air in her attempts to bury herself under Millie. The same occured to a certain extent on the roosting bar but would normally result in one of them falling off. Despite this, Katie is far more adventurous - always first out in the morning, always first in at night, always first to do anything new. Millie often seems to watch on perhaps with a protective eye. You can see in these pictures how Katie discovers the plum tomatoes and jumps up to help herself whilst Millie is thinking "I'm not sure we're allowed to do that!"

The chickens' new home has arrived. It took a while to put together but they seem pleased with it. They slept on the floor for the first few days but are now roosting on the perch.

Like a number of the posts on this site, this entry is intended to help others seek the information that took me an awful lot of googling to get to. The chickens have been doing black oily droppings that are somewhat pungent in smell. The question of what causes black chicken poo has been posed several times on the web but there are no definitive answers. Usually it appears to be caused by consumption of darkly coloured berries but a hunt around the ground and bushes did not reveal any culprits. The two remaning causes are not good. Firstly that it's a sign of severe malnutrition (seems unlikely). Secondly that it's blood passing through the digestive tract signifying an upper gastrointestinal bleed (melena or melaena). In view of the smell I fear the latter. Neither sound good and the literature suggests they will die within a couple of weeks.