Lincoln Locks, an Old Wheel, and 12 Drunk Narcoleptics

O'Kitten Goes on an Excursion

I spent the afternoon at The Spinning Loft again yesterday. I am completely enamoured of all the Lincoln fleeces that Beth got in.


She washed some, and I had to take pictures of the curly locks, with such a rainbow of colors. You may think it just looks like a pile of hair, but I am in love. I had to get myself a pound to bring home.


Plus she got some new hand-dyed yarns. I managed to resist that temptation. After all, I have Lincoln locks to wash.




She also got an antique spinning wheel from somewhere very far away. I'm sure she'll tell you all about it, so I'm only going to give you a little preview. I couldn't resist; it's just so lovely with its hand-crafted parts that show all the years of wear, and the exquisite hand-painted details.





An Odd Bit of Mathematics

I admit, I was warned to keep Gort away from the incubator. (You may recall the trouble he caused last fall in the pumpkin patch.)

Now here's the math. I began with 24 eggs on May 13, a nice, even number. (We can even confirm this by going back to blog documentation--photo of 24 eggs.) Now:
24 eggs minus 8 eggs = 16 eggs (May 20)
16 eggs minus 2 eggs = 14 eggs (May 27)

Okay, so far so good.

Well, tonight I have 12 chicks, and 3 unhatched eggs.
12 plus 3 = 15
15 does not equal 14, at least not when I took math. Then again, they were trying to confuse us with the metric system back then, so it's possible I missed something. (And I'm almost positive I took two out during the second candling--I like even numbers--instead of just one, but to be perfectly and absolutely honest, this is the only fact I can't completely confirm because I didn't write it down anywhere.)

So I think Gort meddled in the incubator, and we must've had twins.

Sometimes we do get double-yoked eggs, but I couldn't imagine one would ever hatch.

If you doubt my counting ability, we did open the incubator this evening to give the chicks some water and a bit of chick feed. Count was confirmed by two witnesses in the form of my parents, and it doesn't get much more trustworthy than one's parents. Twelve chicks, and three as of yet unhatched eggs (one of which is trying very hard to hatch as we speak).

But never mind my confusion. Back to the hatch. Some action shots through the plexi cover:

You can see the beginning of something beginning to emerge from the egg on the left. The occupant has already vacated the shell on the right.

Just emerged, and, as you can see, thoroughly exhausted.

Same chick waking up a few moments later.

A different chick.

The first chick has dried off a bit now, and the two chicks have found each other.

The funniest part is watching the chicks begin to find their legs. It's like watching wee drunken narcoleptics as they stagger and reel about, stumbling and falling and crashing into one another, and then suddenly dropping off into a sound sleep. Stagger, stagger, stumble, crash...sleep. Then suddenly they wake up and the drunken reeling begins again, until they all fall over a few moments later into a stone cold snooze. Hysterical.

ZzZZzzz...