Last night the chickens were chasing each other around, smacking into each other and generally making a racket. They were playing a bit more roughly than I liked, so I tried singing them a song, very softly, just to see what would happen. I wasn’t through the first line of “Paddy’s Green Shamrock Shore” before they’d all lined up silently, beady black eyes watching me closely. No one could ask for a more attentive audience. It was almost unnerving. As I kept singing, they settled down in the corner of the box beneath me, groomed their new little feathers, and dozed contentedly.
On I went through “The Cruel Mother”, “Jack O’Diamonds”, and “Traveller’s Prayer”. They cozied up to the wall of the box and snoozed profoundly. When I was done, they blinked a moment, picked themselves up, and started wandering around dazedly.
I haven’t been able to replicate that experience, but the Delaware does reliably come over and settle down when I start singing.
If I’ve done this right, clicking on any of those images should get you a shadowbox slide show. (Looks like it worked. Now I just have to get the admin interface to flickr photo insertion cleaned up a bit. I’ve modified WP-Flickr to work with Shadowbox JS and Mbedr.)
The chicks are about five days old now. They’re developing quickly. Each of them can stand on one leg without falling over, and they all run very speedily now. If you put your hand in the box, they run over to investigate; and if you reach in with a piece of paper toweling, the Delaware or Welsummer chick might play tug-of-war with it. (The Orpington chick is steady and not very curious.) Their calls are changing, too — not so much “eepeeepeeep!”, more whistling, soft tweeting, and trilling. One call sounds to me a lot like the old Macintosh “water drop” sound.
The Delaware seems to be prone to paste-up. Wouldn’t you know that’s the same chick that really hates to be picked up? Oh well, chick, too bad for you.
I just got a notice that the domain registration is coming due on houseofcranks, which means it’s been almost a year and we haven’t done anything with it. With all the happenings here at the House of Cranks this year, it may be time to remedy that. So I wiped and reinstalled WordPress. I’m still working out what plugins/themes I want, but here’s a running summary as I go along:
Plugins
Star Ratings - lets us add ratings, like this: Rating:
Gravatars2 - gives us user avatars in the comments
Wordpress Flickr Manager - easy integration with Flickr
Although I’m not sure how it’s going to work when both Cam and I have Flickr accounts. Maybe we’ll have to make a group pool for cranks stuff.
To do:
Cross-posting. It’d be nice to either syndicate posts from sculpin and elsewhere or cross-post entries from here to there. There doesn’t appear to be a wp to wp crossposter yet, though. Weird.
