Pysanky, part two: New market for eggs

Every art teacher hopes that what they teach will catch fire with a kid's creativity. That's what happened when Peg taught Marcy to do Ukrainian eggs. The girl can't stop! She loves doing intricate designs. And we certainly have plenty of eggs for her to use.

We are lucky to live within biking distance of the Ukrainian Gift Shop, on Fairview. Marcy has been biking over our eggs and trading for dye and tips. The women there have been wonderful, and each time she stops in, they teach her something new. Plus, they love the eggs. They told us store-bought eggs are washed with a chemical that doesn't work as well with their dyes. Ours are straight from the chicken and are green, peach, small, large and give them lots of variety.

Which chicken are you?

Stevie Nicks: Beautiful. And LOUD.

Which chicken are you?

It's been a very busy week for Nina Totenberg, what with the Supreme Court upholding Health Care Reform. Lots to report, lots to check in on, lots of investigation.

Nina Totenberg turns out to be aptly named. She is always the first to peek around the corner at me when I check for eggs. When I open the door, she's the first to hop in from the run to see what's up. She's always checking up on her fellow hens. Busy, busy, busy. Hard to get a photo of her that's not blurry.

This blog post brought to you in Smell-O-Vision

What's that? You don't smell anything, you say? That's right, because we cleaned the entire run today. I believe it's called mucking. In any event, we dug down deep, threw it over the fence, put down diatomaceous earth and fresh wood shavings. The hens are happy and are taking dirt baths like crazy. We needed to do this for a while now. The earth in the run had become compacted and was not smelling very good on rainy days.

I had been thinking, that once my daughter goes to college, I'd like to get some land somewhere, and some alpacas. The amount of work yesterday's cleaning took, however, changed my mind. It felt good to do it and get it done, but we are sore today.