Snoskred Pets

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Sunday Selections Week 40

19 Comments Posted on October 4, 2015October 4, 2015 by Snoskred

I think for the foreseeable future, we will make the first Sunday of the month Garden Check In day. The Dianthus in our older planter pot from 2014 are flowering again.

About four weeks ago we did some new planting and two weeks ago I posted this update post.

The flyscreen wrapped garden box is doing very well. We’ve had a praying mantis which has been hanging out on top of it.

The sunflower seeds have turned into tiny plants.

The Nasturtiums are having a wonderful time in their new home. The chooks quite often stand on the hardware wire but they do not eat the plants. In a couple of weeks I will feel secure enough to take this ex-kitty door off.

As you can see, the jasmine has climbed high up the arch. It is smelling awesome!

Next time I will show you the progress of some new plants we have purchased, including my first ever succulent – Portulaca. Here they are as I was buying them in the garden centre.

And a close up of the Portulaca. There were 6 seedlings in here.

The chooks have been getting plenty of free ranging time, and Kitty Supervisor is on the job. I’ve kept that pot on the table for a couple of weeks to make sure the sunflowers get a decent start without a chook eating them incident, but that meant the cats could not eat the cat grass. It was good for the cat grass because they had been chowing down on it, and it needed a break from kitty teeth! ;)

Kitty Supervisor can watch them down here from a side window which is good, because they like to venture down here to some very old lawn clippings and leaves which were left here for a couple of years to turn into bug filled mulch – AKA happy meal time for chooks! There is a gate which shuts this area off if and when new clippings are left here – however that has not happened in some time, the bag catcher is broken.

Weekly Wrap Up –

Daylight Savings starts today here in Australia. Normally this is my favourite time of year because in previous years I have suffered from SAD – that is Seasonal Affective Disorder – however this past winter I did a lot better than usual. I’m crediting the evening candle show, an LED light changing shower head, and LED lights throughout the house for that improvement.

So today I am a little bit sad to be saying goodbye to 5-6 hours of candle time a day. I’ll still be burning candles of an evening and I think that is a long term change for the better for me, it will just be candles for a shorter amount of time each day, and more time outside in the evening for plant watering and chooky chores.

In scheduling news, I already have two posts scheduled for 2016. All my Wednesday posts are written for the rest of the year, and I am scheduled out to November for the other blog days. I like to write ahead, and sometimes posts come up that are time sensitive and the other not so time sensitive posts get pushed out further.

There Was An Incident –

Grumpy is extra grumpy this week. She did something to her eye – we are not sure what happened to start it off, but she was squinting a lot and somehow her bottom eyelid was turning in as a result. After making a vet appointment for Monday we were trying to get some photos to show the vet because we could fix the eyelid – turn it out the right way – and sometimes it would stay fixed for a decent length of time, so we could not guarantee it would happen when we were at the vets with Grumpy. Happy did a little photobomb.

I did manage to get a decent in focus shot which showed the vet everything she needed to see, plus after I showed her the photo the eyelid started to turn in while we were there. That was the last time it turned in and I hope it never happens again!

Ever since Grumpy had that terrible Kidney Shutdown of 2014, she has not been a fan of vets at all. The only person that can hold her when we are there now is The Other Half, and he is the only person who can hold her when she needs to be medicated – which she has needed twice a day this past week for a tablet and ointment in her eye.

We went back to the vet on Friday for another eye dye and blacklight look. It seems like progress has been made, not just on the eye front but also a trip where the only thing that happens is dye in her eye might help her a lot with her vet fears.

We’ll keep up the ointment for another 7 days then take her back again next Friday. This time Happy will go along for a check up as well. I fully anticipate that once the vet finds her melty spot, she will lie down on the table, purr a lot, and ask for belly rubs. :)

The Martian –

The Martian Official Website

We went to see The Martian this weekend. I’d started reading the book a few months ago. The book was something I knew The Other Half would deeply love, so I made him start reading it – and he finished it before I did! That is the fastest he has ever read a book in his lifetime.

I read the book again this week in preparation for seeing the movie and loved it just as much the second time. I was curious about a few things – would the movie begin with the same line as the book, which contains a pretty serious swear word? That would be fine in Australia but I really cannot see the US audience enjoying that. And how would they handle the night soil stuff?

The truth is, I suspect this might be the best space movie ever created, or at least a tie for first place with Apollo 13. Yes, there was some swearing. Yes, there was vacuum sealed poop. Yes, I did cringe at the whole poop thing being a germophobe, but I actually cringed more at Mark performing surgery on himself. There was nothing in the movie that I did not deeply enjoy. Matt Damon was brilliant as expected, so was everyone in it.

So if you have not read the book and you like science, space, Matt Damon, NASA and/or movies set in space, go and see the movie. If you like the movie, read the book. The movie runs for 2h20m, and it felt to me like it went for 30 minutes maximum. Sephyroth wrote about The Martian too. Beware though his post contains some spoilers if you have not seen it.

garden, Home, kitties, movies, Sunday Selections, weekly wrap up

Wordless Wednesday – Oops I Forgot!

9 Comments Posted on September 9, 2015August 23, 2015 by Snoskred

To put my tongue away and fell asleep instead!

kitties, photos, Wordless Wednesday

Sunday Selections Week 36

15 Comments Posted on September 6, 2015September 6, 2015 by Snoskred

I had zero plans to garden this year. Three Sydney Funnelwebs have been found on this property since Autumn. For those of you not familiar with this creature, it is extremely venomous and quite aggressive. Never fear, there are no spider images here. I would not do that to you! Arachnophobes know better than to post certain pics as a surprise to other people.

But then, I saw these gorgeous gloves at Aldi, and I re-thought my zero gardening plan. Maybe I would feel more comfortable wearing a pair of substantial gloves. We tried them on – The Other Half got large ones, my hands fit perfectly into medium.

My zero plans were quadrupled into “no *#@!&*%$ way am I gardening this year” when two absolute nitwits posted images on a local community group of Sydney Funnelwebs they had found out and about after the floods. UNSUBSCRIBE ME URGENTLY! I left both groups. Life is way too short for spider images on my Facebook feed. The damage was done, though. My skin crawled for an entire week. Not cool at all!

These people had put these creatures into plastic containers with sawdust, which implies keeping the creature long term. That freaks me out. Plus I feel like it is a bit cruel to the spiders. Not quite as cruel as what my chickens do to them which is dead them and eat them. But if they are found on my property, I’m backing the chickens 100% – dead them and eat them, girls!

Gardening this year was back on my agenda despite the images, because the chooks have been getting plenty of free range time and they have been spending a lot of it in the garden bed. I’ve compromised with a – sort of – gardening plan.

I decided to put some baby spinach, silverbeet, and brussel sprouts into the large planter box. I’m not sure how it will go because last year the kale was a massive failure in there – many moths laid eggs on it and they never grew the way they should have. I might end up screening this planter box in, if that happens again this year.

Into the large garden bed, I planted two Nasturtium plants. There is already one Nasturtium down the back and when the chooks are in the garden bed they mostly leave it alone. There are bugs to dig for, ain’t no chook got time to be eating plants! If I pull some out and throw it into the chook pen they gobble it up with great glee, because they have usually already eaten all the bugs in there before midday. I will buy any new varieties that I see of this plant because I love the flowers *and* humans and the chooks can eat it.

The chooks are on the lay again – on average I am getting 3-4 eggs a day. When I make my snacks, I sometimes mix a Manning Valley egg in with the girls small eggs, which are the largest ones they sell.

If I were *not* an Arachnophobe, I would post a picture of this little orb weaver which I see every single day when I check the chook coop for eggs. It has found a tiny home in a small screw hole on the chook pen and every day when the sun rises, it folds itself into this teeny spot.

I’m ok with certain kinds of spider making a home around the chook pen – they help with catching mosquitos and flies. Once I know where the web is, I am not likely to walk into it by mistake. The only thing that spider has to worry about is the chooks, who will eat any spider they see. Luckily they cannot reach where it is, nor could they see it unless he moved. It is well camouflaged. My little friend will find many tasty treats this spring and summer.

If I see one of those scary aggressive venomous creatures, I’m probably going to want to be on the next flight to Antarctica. I’m certainly not going to be putting it into a plastic container, nor will I be trying to kill it myself, and there will be a lot of screaming.. You’ll hear it, wherever you are.. :)

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

Weekly Wrap Up –

Loads of goings on here at home, but nothing especially exciting that has not already been turned into a future blog post. My readers who have zero interest in Mr Robot can skip this next bit because it is a Mr Robot Finale Festival! ;)

The Mr Robot finale was awesome in some ways, but also slightly disappointing in some ways. I think the extra week of waiting meant that my expectations were very high..

Alan Sepinwall said “What a fascinating, off-kilter, 100% “Mr. Robot” way to end this season” and on reflection I have to agree with that concept. I have not re-watched it yet purely because I did not feel ready to – I’m letting it sink in first. One thing I do know, that scene in Times Square was an enormous explosion of colour in a usually quite muted show colour palette.

I’ve collected up a roundup of interviews and linkage for you. SPOILER ALERT – there are spoilers in these interviews. You do not want to click unless you have seen the entire 10 episodes of Mr Robot.

Interviews with Rami Malek

‘Mr. Robot’ Star Rami Malek on the ‘Emotional’ Season Finale (SPOILERS)
Rami Malek of USA’s ‘Mr. Robot’ | ‘The Andy Greenwald Podcast’ – This interview is older but was deeply excellent. Grantland has a lot of Mr Robot content – Grantland – Mr Robot
Rami & Twin Sami on Jimmy Kimmel – Having a twin is a great way to figure out what you would look like with a beard and a different hairstyle.

Interviews with Christian Slater –

Christian Slater weighs in on Mr. Robot twist and season finale
Mr. Robot Speaks: Christian Slater on ‘Mr. Robot’s’ Shocking, Roanoke-Delayed Finale and Season 2

Interview with BD Wong –

BD Wong on Why Mr. Robot’s Portrayal of a Transgender Character Is Radical

Interviews with Sam Esmail –

Sam Esmail Joins Andy Greenwald To Discuss ‘Mr. Robot’ First Season This is an hour long video interview – it was brilliant
Mr. Robot’s creator ‘did everything in my power’ to telegraph the big twist
Mr. Robot finale: Creator Sam Esmail answers burning questions
‘Mr. Robot’ Boss Talks Finale and Season 2: Elliot “Is Past the Point of No Return”
Mr. Robot Creator Sam Esmail on His Plans for Season Two and What the Show Is Really All About
‘Mr. Robot’ Finale: Series Creator On White Rose, The Wellicks & Elliot’s Memory Dump In Season 2
So… what did you think? – Sam Esmail asked what people thought over on Reddit and he also replied to a few of the comments.

Opinion re the finale –

How the Mr. Robot Finale Tumbled Backward into Its Most Piercing Social Message Yet
How Mr. Robot Killed the Centerpiece of Prestige Television: Capitalism
How Mr. Robot Became One of TV’s Most Visually Striking Shows
Mr. Robot had a perfect season on Rotten Tomatoes

About the mail program Elliot uses –

‘Mr. Robot’: How A New Product Feature Was Incorporated By ProtonMail After Discussions With The Producers

Over To You –

Anything interesting happening in your world? :)

Chickens, garden, Happy Snoskred, Mr Robot, Sunday Selections, weekly wrap up

Improbable Kitty

14 Comments Posted on June 26, 2015June 15, 2015 by Snoskred

Whenever I am working in the kitchen these days, I have a kitty supervisor. Happy the little kitty jumps up and sits on the bar stool on the opposite side of the kitchen counter. She closely watches what I am doing, in case I might be making her a snack. 99% of the time, I am *not* making her a snack!

In recent times, she has begun to display the most hilarious expression while sitting there. There is a combination of doubt and disbelief in her eyes.

It is almost as if she is mentally asking me..

What on earth do you think are you doing now?

I like to call this particular expression “Improbable Kitty”. As in, what you are doing presently is “unexpected and apparently inauthentic” plus, “not likely to be true or to happen”.

Alternatively, she is transmitting the thought – it is totally unbelievable to me that you are not making me a snack right now.

So the other night I was making dinner while The Other Half sat on the barstool watching me. I had just placed my chicken into a bowl with lime and lemon juice, added some white wine, and went back to add in some more lime and lemon.

I looked up, and he had this bizarre expression on his face. It made me say “What? I’m just marinading my chicken?”…

and he replied.. “I’m Improbable Kitty”. And I lost it and laughed for many, many minutes..

You can tell from my reply, he got that improbable kitty impression 100% correct.

Happy has been such a wonderful addition to our household. She makes us laugh every single day.

Happy doing Improbable Kitty while Grumpy lurks in the background

Improbable Kitty is not her only talent. At night, she impersonates a sandbag on the bed most effectively. This is slightly less funny to The Other Half, who gets woken up when he can’t turn over because there is a sandbag in his way.

kitties

Carter & Happy – WW

12 Comments Posted on June 24, 2015June 19, 2015 by Snoskred

Carter has new headgear and a lap rug

Carter, Home, kitties, Wordless Wednesday

Buying Pet Food Online

14 Comments Posted on May 22, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

Big Kitty

In early December 2013, we lost our oldest cat – Big Kitty. In mid-December 2013, we took our younger cat Grumpy in for her yearly vet visit and vaccinations. During the visit her ears were cleaned out, somewhat roughly both of us felt at the time. Unfortunately this rough treatment led to a punctured ear drum plus an ear infection. This led to antibiotics, and that led to complete kidney failure..

Grumpy spent 7 nights at the vets on a drip. You can see via the above photo, she was not very happy about this.. Neither were we! We were both very upset and for a while there, it seemed like she might not make it home. The Other Half went in twice daily to feed her as she was quite difficult with the vet nurses. At some point she turned a corner, and got better.

When she arrived home, she spent over 2 months being syringe fed two to three times daily by The Other Half, and I can categorically state that without his nursing care Grumpy would not have survived.

He has a lot of scars for his efforts, as well, because Grumpy was not a big fan of being syringe fed. She did not seem to have any appetite or drive to eat by herself for a while. Eventually, she did get hungry again and was willing and able to eat on her own.

We were told by the vets that she would need to be on a special diet and a kind of food called k/d Feline Renal Health by Hills Prescription Diet was recommended to us. That is a kind of food you can usually only source from vet clinics, and as a result it can be very pricey. We were paying over $90 for a bag of kibble.

Both of us were not happy with the vets we’d been going to after this experience – in fact we both felt that if the ear cleaning had been done more gently, none of this would have happened at all. I asked around to find out who was the best cat vet in our area, and that is who we see now.

We were already seeing a totally different vet for the chooks because I’d asked around to find out which was the best chook vet. It turns out the best cat vet works in the same practice, so we decided to buy the recommended cat food via that vet clinic and cut all ties with the previous vet. The new place stocked the kibble at a lower price of $72 per bag, so it was a win all round.

That clinic closed earlier this year, merging with a new vet practice. At that time they switched to a new brand of vet only food. We got a sample and Grumpy did not like that food at all. She LOVES the k/d kibble.

So, we had two options – find another local vet which stocked the k/d kibble, or try to find a place we could buy it online. I did some googling and we found a place that looked promising, so when the time came, we crossed our fingers and placed an order. We ordered Thursday night, the order shipped on Friday, and Monday Morning the box arrived. Below you see Happy inspecting it.

Shipping was free. The kibble was the cheapest price I have ever paid for it, coming in a huge $12 less per bag of kibble than what I had been paying. The website has a huge range of pet related items many of which are quite difficult to find in local pet stores.

Plus, they sent us a lolly bag and a welcome voucher for $10 off our next order. The kitties approved the food immediately!

We feed one tin of wet food a day shared between the two kitties, kibble is always available to them, and they have a water fountain. The vet said feeling k/d to the younger cat would be fine, and she likes it, so we’re sticking with that plan.

Having a browse around the website, they have the largest range of cat food that I have seen, ever. There are some cat foods there which our local supermarkets and pet stores stopped stocking – eg the Applaws range which our cats enjoyed – and they stock some foods which I had never heard of before. They stock some Fancy Feast flavours I have not seen in a while, too.

In case you were wondering, nobody paid me to write this post, nobody gave me anything for free.. I just felt this was a great experience and I wanted to share it with you. I know I have readers who have pets and who might find the My Pet Warehouse website useful.

With all that said, I would totally accept free samples of cat food if they were offered to me, but that is only because I don’t like paying for new cat foods and having them rejected with great prejudice by our kitties, who are the harshest critics of pet food. Understandable, seeing as they are the ones who have to eat it. :)

Grumpy performing a pose we like to call monorail cat.

We don’t know how much time Grumpy will have with us. The vet says that her life expectancy may be reduced as a result of her kidney issues. Anything we can do to extend her time with us, we will do it, even if it means we have to budget a little more for cat food by cutting back in other areas. In the meantime, we deeply value the moments we get to spend with her.

This pose I like to call morph ball with a half pike – great leg extension!

Grumpy is sleeping on Carters lap in that last shot, by the way. Carter is in the perfect position for winter, right in front of the gas heater. Plus, he does not move, unlike those humans!

kitties, looking back, moving forward

Vale White Sussex

7 Comments Posted on May 2, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

White Sussex was taken to the vet this morning and the difficult decision to euthanize her was made.

For a long time, White Sussex has been the queen of the chook pen. Top of the pecking order, and she was the girl who made a lot of BagerK-ing whenever one of the girls was laying an egg. Her Bagerk-ing could raise the dead, even me when I’d been on night shift and was dead to the world sleeping during the day.

She was also an excellent broody chook and when the time came to kick the broody out, she took it like a good chicken, not trying to remove your hands with her beak, just meekly accepting that you were going to pick her up and kick her out and take the eggs from under her.

She was the most enthusiastic bug eater and loved the white curl bugs I would dig out of the garden and throw to her. She was a wonderful chook, and she will be greatly missed. Even her Bagerk-ing!

As I always post when this happens – there are 6 other chickens in the yard for whom life continues. They live minute by minute, sucking the most joy out of each and every moment, whether it is a dirt bath, finding a bug, eating a treat from the humans.. all we can do is love them while they’re here, protect them the best we can from predators, know when it is time to let them go, and remember them when they are gone.

Chickens, country life, Vale Pets

Vale Mary

3 Comments Posted on April 15, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

Mary was found dead in a corner of the chook pen this morning. She was in a place the girls hang out in the morning, where the early rays of the sun meets one of their favourite dust bathing patches.

We could not find anything wrong with her visible to the naked eye, but back when Twiggy was euthanased and sent off to be necropsied, we discovered that Twiggy had some serious nutritional deficiencies which I wrote about here – Chicken Merge & Vale Twiggy – and seeing as all 4 chooks came from the same breeder, the vet suspected that the other 3 girls would have the same problem.

Lizzy and Kitty seem like they have thrived in their new conditions, but Mary was always that little bit smaller than they were. She has always had a bit of a sneeze though the vet could not find any specific reason for it and was sure it was nothing to be concerned about, especially as it did not come with any other symptoms.

She has now been buried under the lemon tree in the garden the chooks love to free range in whenever they get a chance. She will be missed, especially by Lizzy and Kitty with whom she was most close..

Kitty, Lizzy and Mary

Good nutrition for chooks is quite an involved process. Just yesterday Terry from Henblog wrote a post about how laying hen pellets are made. Our scratch mix includes hen pellets and I never see any pellets left behind, but we are now considering changing it up with more pellets and giving the grain as a less often treat. Especially as there is a seed in the scratch mix which the girls do not seem to eat.

As I posted when Ancona was euthanased in Vale Ancona – there are 7 other chickens in the yard for whom life continues. They live minute by minute, sucking the most joy out of each and every moment, whether it is a dirt bath, finding a bug, eating a treat from the humans.. all we can do is love them while they’re here, protect them the best we can from predators, know when it is time to let them go, and remember them when they are gone.

Given this experience with Twiggy and Mary, the chicken auctions will be unlikely to be a place we source chickens from again. We would be more likely to try and find a reliable breeder in future..

Chickens, Sad Snoskred, Vale Pets

The Broody

1 Comment Posted on April 13, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

All three of our new girls have taken a turn at being broody now. Above you see Lizzy, who was named after..

Miss Elizabeth Bennet, from Pride and Prejudice. Yes, the resemblance is uncanny, is it not? Perhaps you have to see her personality in action to see how truly alike they are.

Lizzy was fiesty when broody, and any attempt to move her would be met with a stern peck and some squawking. She was very successful at collecting up the eggs, because this is what we found when we kicked her out!

10 eggs. IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a broody hen in possession of a good nest must be in want of eggs to sit on.. :)

Chickens, Pride and Prejudice

The Catching

3 Comments Posted on April 3, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

We have a bit of a rodent issue in our yard. Some people would say that chooks and rodents go hand in hand – in our case we have two very elderly people who live at the back of our block and their block is completely overgrown, full of weeds and rodents. If we can’t fix that, it is very unlikely we are going to fix the rodent issues on our own.

If you go out there at night, you can hear the rodents scampering and squeaking on what was once a tennis court belonging to the elderly people but is now an overgrown mess..

Traps do not work for these creatures, either because they are way too smart or they don’t like what we’re putting in them. Usually peanut butter has worked for us in the past. Maybe we’ll give cheese a try.

However the other half bought an ultrasonic pest controller which might be stopping the rodents from going near the traps at all.

What we are catching instead – without even trying – is some very poisonous arachnids. And here I will put a read more for those who do not like eight legged creature tales to come as a surprise. Click through to read a fascinating yet terrifying story.
Continue reading →

animals, Chickens, fears, Home, spider