Visitors

I mentioned before that we have a feral chicken in the neighborhood, who frequently visits our back yard (probably because of the abundance of our organically grown bugs) ... Well, after returning from our road trip, we saw her once, then she disappeared. We already resigned ourselves to the sad fact that she finally must have become dinner for a hawk that had been eying her for a while, when she showed up again last Thursday. And she brought company:

Nice-looking rooster, eh?

As you can see he’s quite handsome: nice, shiny colors, and, of course, a healthy “cock-a-doodle-doo”. He’s much more scared of us than Henrietta, but like her, ignores the cats. Where this rooster came from, we have no idea – we live in suburbia. I'm wondering whether Henrietta visits a coop in the neighborhood, and breaks out other chickens. We don't know yet what to do with him, because we certainly do not want to breed chickens in our backyard. (Does anyone know any good rooster-catching techniques?) But they do make a good-looking pair:

Henrietta and Henry

Our deck is almost done: the sides still need to be enclosed, but we are already using it. It is much bigger than the old deck, and much sturdier:

New deck

Oh, and our old water heater broke – it started leaking, so we replaced it with a boiler – which is much more efficient. I hadn’t realized how corroded the old one was – now it takes me only a third of the time to fill my bathtub.

And on the knitting front: I hope to finish my Summer Sampler Study Stole today!! During the last two weeks I forced myself to just keep knitting the border and not stop every time I become bored with it (which would happen very quickly). It's fairly big, because I used Alpaca fingering-weight yarn, not lace yarn, so I will have to block it on the carpet. Then I’ll move on to work on Orenburg-style shawl samples to prepare for the workshop at the Lacis Museum in February.

And we just found out that my father-in-law will be visiting us in 10 days ... off to do some cleaning ;-)

Till next time.