God Willing and the Creek Don't Rise...

our confirmed closing date on the property is next Friday at 10am!!

Tired...

So other than the quail, we have been bottling wine, working in the back yard, building a quail run, and just generally running around like crazy people. To say we are tired is an understatement.

We still have not gotten the property. It is sitting with the lawyer at the title company. I’m fairly certain that he is taking his sweet time because he got chewed out for basically being incompetent. That probably didn’t help our cause. Now he won’t respond to the seller or our phone calls. Nice. It is taking everything in my power not to wish some very bad things for him.

I JUST WANT OUR PROPERTY!!! I know that everything happens for a reason…that all of this waiting has given us the opportunity to learn a lot and prepare and generally have a really good idea of what we are going to do once we get out there…but I am so tired of telling myself that. This is getting just plain ridiculous! Doug tells me that there is nothing we can do since they are the only title company in Wilson County . There has got to be some Banditos that will work for a fifth of Tequila.

I am at the point where I just want to cry about the whole ordeal. There is nothing else that I can do. The only thing that keeps me from going bat-shit crazy is the fact that one of our friends spent a year trying to get his property. Sooooo…it is what it is and we continue to sit around and wait, and wait…if any one has any ideas of how to help this process along (aside from chewing out the one guy that can hold up our paperwork for a year)…I am all ears.

Annoying Mother...

So I think I may be one of those annoying new mother's that just walks around showing of pictures of her baby. Well...I have more than one baby and my pictures are only on the innernets...

Quail Update...

I want to start off by saying that all of this is very new to me. With the exception of our cats having kittens when I was a kid, I have never raised anything from birth. I certainly have never taken an egg and incubated it from a yolk and white into a living, breathing being. It has been nothing short of amazing.

My mother came running into our bedroom at 6:00 this morning yelling "WE HAVE BABIES!!". Doug and I, being dead to the world - because we hadn't slept at all from watching the eggs, did not respond. My mother shook me out of a fitful sleep to tell me the news. I proceeded to beat the crap out of Doug gently wake Doug up to tell him the news. We all ran into the guest bedroom and were greeted by chirps and squirmy little black things floppin' about like fish out of water...

After several hours of worrying about the temperature and the humidity, we finally moved them into the brooder to get them to dry off.

We needed to show them the food and water so Doug went in to teach. This little guy jumped right into his hand. When I say that they are tiny, I am not joking...


We still have a few eggs in the incubator that are still moving around. We are going to leave them in there for now. We started out with 29 eggs. Three of them never developed (we could tell from candling them - by the way, NEVER use a lighter to candle an egg...you will burn your fingers...p.s. no eggs were hurt in my idiotic attempt to candle them with the lighter). Out of 26, we had 15 that hatched and three that did not make it out of the incubator. So there are 12 little guys kickin' it in the brooder, we hope that some of the others hatch.



It was tough to loose those three. I know that mother nature doesn't always let every creature live. I get that. My biggest issue is that if they are going to die, I want it to be because mother nature knew it was right for them...not because I did something wrong. I still have to think on that to make it right in my head.

We Have Babies!!!

The quail and mother nature finally decided to put me out of my misery and come out of their shells. This was of course after I had finally given up hope and decided I should move back to the big city. Wait I haven’t moved to the country yet. Oh well!!

I will post some pics and updates later…