death, overachieving

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So yesterday was chicken processing and I’m gonna lead off with a funny bit but there’s a sad anecdote at the end I’m gonna put behind a cut, so like– tw animal death for the usual, but also for unusual.

Processing went smoothly, and then in the afternoon we did the packaging, as usual. This time that went better– it was smooth enough last time, but too slow, with all inexperienced people, and we all almost died of exhaustion. But everyone was faster yesterday, so that was better.

As we started packaging, we did the usual process. FS: how many are you cutting up? BIL: well how many do you need to put in the fridge for preorders? FS: How many do we have? BIL: Today’s number was 291. FS:[tallies it up, they decide on 15 for the farmer’s market, oh yeah 10 for the restaurant, 10 for that farm stand…] OK 150 into the fridge, that’s fine. BIL: So I’ll cut up 40, and that will leave 1 extra. FS: I can cram one extra into the fridge. BIL: Great! Then the lack of space in the freezers is no problem and we don’t have to worry about the farmstand fridge being down. FS: Exactly. Great.

Alert readers may have seen the problem here. I was within earshot and had a moment as I pondered 151+40=291, but I am, after all, extremely math-disabled, so I figured there was some obvious thing I was missing.

About 100 chickens later, FS was like “…. wait a minute we have a lot of these left” and then she got this look on her face and stormed in to where BIL was cutting up chickens and presented him with the math again and he was like “… oh yeah”

Anyway we solved it by prepackaging the restaurant, farmer’s market, and farmstand orders into coolers and cardboard boxes we then stacked in the walk-in fridge. It fucking sucks that the glass-front commercial fridge they bought for A Lot of Money in May of last year is out of commission in all this heat, but it’s also not the end of the world.

Then just as he was finishing up with the cutting up, BIL got a phone call from the post office. We’re scheduled to get a shipment of day-old chicks tomorrow, overnighted from the hatchery which is just too far away to drive to– I think we’ve had to switch to a place in PA, it’s like 100 miles. And now I’m gonna cut for the sad story about baby chickens.

“So we’ve got 50 boxes of day-old chicks here,” said the person in charge of the loading docks at the Albany depot, “and three of them are yours, and, well, these boxes are not peeping as much as they should be. We recommend you come get them now, if at all possible, rather than waiting for tomorrow morning.”

Some delivery driver had made a mistake in the heat. One of the boxes, not ours, was not peeping at all: one hundred percent of the hundreds of chicks in that box was dead. The rest of the boxes, for a dozen or more other farms, were more like ours:

Our boxes had contained 330 chicks when they set out.

The first one my sister opened, when BIL got home with them, had contained 80 chicks. 10 of them were alive.

All in all, out of 330 chicks, 170 of them were mobile when we got them out of the boxes. A further 20 were… alive, but not for long. The rest–

It’s not about the money, really– the hatchery will send more chicks, though not on schedule; there may be some small refund from the Post Office– but it’s about those poor critters. I know, we were only going to kill them anyway, but they were going to get to be alive first, they were going to get to eat grass and bugs and be in the sunshine and– well, anyway, it’s very sad.

Some of it is climate change. It shouldn’t be 90 in June. But it was also driver error, because it does get this hot here throughout the summer and we do get chicks without incident. The live animal trucks are supposed to have some kind of climate control. The problem is likely that they were loaded stacked too deep and too tight together, so there could be no airflow between the boxes.

Poor fucking critters. (Your picture was not posted)

luthienne:Nikki Giovanni, from “Mirrors”[Text ID

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luthienne https://luthienne.tumblr.com/post/637359975089504256/nikki-giovanni-from-mirrors-text-id-but-it :

Nikki Giovanni, from “Mirrors”

[Text ID: … but It Cannot Be A Mistake to have cared … It Cannot Be An Error to have tried … It Cannot Be Incorrect to have loved] (Your picture was not posted)

a palate cleanser

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Here’s a tiny not exactly antidote to the story of yesterday’s chicks.

I took Farmkid a couple miles down the road to drop her off for her usual Thursday hang at her bestie’s house. (They do remote school there on a rotating schedule– half here, half there.)

While I was there I got a text. From BIL. “Can you get chicks from post office.” Confused, I wrote back, “Now???” “Whenever you come back,” he answered. How are there MORE chicks???

So I went, and had to knock since the PO isn’t open yet, and the lady opened the door and I said “I’m here for the–” “Oh! Ducks,” she said.

“Ducks,” I echoed. “No, I– ducks?”

“Come on,” she said, and brought me to where the box was sitting on a desk. She curled back a corner of the lid and a small fierce face with a distinct bill poked out, eager to meet me. Not the color of a chick. Not the bill of a chick. Much larger than a chick.

{photos and explanation behind cut NOTHING SAD YAY}

“Well that’s not a chicken,” I said. [image description: a live animal perforated cardboard shipping box with the lid slightly folded back to show two small yellow birds peering out of it, with large broad pink bills and black eyes.]

I brought it back to the farm and BIL met me there, and I said, “Ducks??”

He laughed. “Geese! Christmas geese. An experiment this year.”

I remembered that it had been bandied about, but I hadn’t realized it was really happening.

Anyway: I am delighted to report that goslings are SO FUCKING CUTE you guys.

[image description: a small yellow and gray bird, very fuzzy, stands in a pile of wood shavings facing the camera. Its tiny webbed feet are visible and it is very round.]

I am fully prepared to get the shit terrorized out of me by these guys in a couple of months. (Your picture was not posted)

bandvn: arotaro: Bad joke time It can be frustrating

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bandvn https://bandvn.tumblr.com/post/174515351973/arotaro-bad-joke-time-it-can-be-frustrating :

arotaro https://arotaro.tumblr.com/post/173242372931/bad-joke-time-it-can-be-frustrating-when-people :

Bad joke time

It can be frustrating when people confuse “aromantic” with “aromatic”, but hey, you know what they say: Aros, by any other name, would smell as sweet.

First of all, how dare you (Your picture was not posted)