A couple days ago my eldest asked if she could stay up to watch the lunar eclipse on Sunday. Um, yes! I found out later that she also gets extra credit points in Science class for taking a picture or bringing a parent note that she went out and looked at the eclipse. We found out that the next lunar eclipse doesn’t occur until 2022! So I pulled out my good camera, the tripod, and coats, and starting at about 10pm, we started going out and taking pictures every 10 minutes or so.

This was particularly exciting, because before our move our luck seeing stellar events was not stellar. The haze, humidity, clouds, and light pollution meant that we hardly ever were able to actually observe much in the sky at night.

Now we are more country, there is far less light pollution, and we actually had a fairly clear sky! Happy dance! And as the lunar eclipse progressed, we could see more and more stars. We were able to identify Orion (which was the only constellation we could see at our old house regularly), Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, and the Big Dipper. (Now that we can see so many more stars, I think it is time to get out the charts again and learn our constellations!!)

This morning I opened up Adobe Photoshop and did a collage of the best of the images (there were many very blurry pictures, hmm, need to work on my moon pictures too apparently). Enjoy!

seems a very good way to start our foray into chicken keeping! We have ordered day-old chicks to be delivered at the beginning of April. Specifically, we will be getting Salmon Faverolles, which are a dual purpose bird (good for eggs and meat) and reported to be very docile. Being docile is good for my eldest who wants chickens to sit on her lap, and for my youngest, who loves the idea of chickens, but is still a bit afraid of them. But being docile also means that they are on the bottom of the pecking order (yes, the phrase originated with chickens because it is a real thing!) in a mixed flock, so we will only have Salmon Faverolles.

My husband is in the process of building us a coop. A hen mansion. A chicken Fort Knox. A little over a year ago he accepted a new job offer and we moved to north Texas. We had a long list of house wants, but top of the list was the ability to have chickens, fast internet, and a good school system. Harder to find than we anticipated! But find one we did, and set about our plans. My Dad gave us a trail cam and we started recording the local wild life: rabbits, armadillos, deer, skunk, opossums, raccoons, fox, coyote, and bobcat all live in our area. If we were to have chickens, they would have to be well protected! As much as the little coop houses available at TSC are cute, they won’t protect a flock from a bobcat. My husband is also 6’5″ and the sheds sold at the local hardware supply stores don’t have doors tall enough. So building the coop became the plan. He has built sheds before, so is embracing the challenge. Here is a photo of the coop in progress.

As you can see, we still need siding and a roof. We have some time before the chicks are here, so here’s to hoping the weather is nicer than today (with wind chill it is 19 degrees F, super cold for us Texans!) No outside work today. Brrr.

So thank you for joining us and reading along with our adventure! Life is crazy, so I make no promises, but it has been fun to get this blog started. Here is to more posts! Prost!