The Bonafide Farmer and her farm dog are on the move! Tucker and I are road tripping through New England. We spent the last few days in Connecticut and are now in Vermont, a state that I as of today get to check off my visited list—a lifelong dream come true. More to come as I figure out Wordpress’ mobile app…

Frosty morning hike in the beautiful Delaware Water Gap in the Pocono Mountains.

One of my lavender orpington pullets came online today and laid her first egg. That extra light in the morning must be working. Here’s her egg on the right, next to Iris’s daily contribution. Not bad for a pullet egg—and she even managed to get it in the nest box! I am excited to see the other young hens start to contribute to the daily egg count.

In other news, I ran out to the garage this evening—in my slippers—to retrieve something from the car. On my way out I looked down and saw this:

Looks like I’d smashed this black widow on the floor! That’s pretty close for comfort…weird too as last Friday night I dreamed I was bitten by something on my foot, I saw two marks and dream-assumed it was a snake bite but maybe it was a spider warning!

If you had any doubt, I flipped this lady over to show her identifying red hourglass. She was pretty good-sized!

Tonight’s our first taste of the coming winter. It’s in the low 40s and grey and rainy. My house is about 63 degrees without the central heat yet on and I am eying the woodstove with longing. Too many other things to do tonight to get involved with the first fire of the season, so that will have to wait and in the meantime I am in triple layers of wool and sheepskin. Plus, it’s supposed to return to the 70s later this week!

I spent the evening taking photos of this and that, only to download them tonight to find the files damaged. Not sure why, as I’d formatted my memory card as I always do prior to shooting, and the replay of the images in the camera was fine.

Tucker, Verging on Warhol

Too bad as I had some nice shots of a golden orb spider I found in the field, and of my dahlia and vegetable harvest.

Nonetheless, I did find that the corruption on the memory card created some images that I really like. In fact, I haven’t felt this level of photographic surprise for more than a decade, back to before the advent of the digital camera when I was still shooting film. Sometimes exposure or processing would yield unexpectedly delightful results, and tonight a shadow of that joy came over me as I saw these strange creations.

It was definitely enough to offset my annoyance at losing an evening’s worth of work. Here they are, with minimal postprocessing.

In the last couple of weeks Cora, the maimed hen, has taken a shining to me. I first noticed when I was servicing the food and water in the coop and she ran across the floor and jumped on the roost to get closer to me. Since then she would try to follow me everywhere in the coop, even out the door, and when she was outside in the run she’d throw herself at the fence if I was on the other side.

Tonight I had taken care of the birds and was standing in the coop watching them. It was dusk and they were quiet and starting to roost for the night. Then all of a sudden Cora flew off the top perch of the roost straight for my arm, which is where I’ve let her perch in the past. She misjudged her landing by a few inches and scrabbled at me with her claws. So now my left arm looks like I’ve been in a bear fight, but I have no doubt of my chicken’s affection. I guess a scratched and smarting arm is what I get for saving her life!

Found this little girl dead in front of the garage door when I got home tonight. I think she’s a female downy woodpecker, and I suspect she flew into the glass window in the garage door. So sad to lose this pretty lady.