Too Many Mamas

This was the scene in the nesting box with all the eggs yesterday morning:

The Black Australorp looks very put-upon.

I sat with the chicks for a bit yesterday. I stand by my initial assessment of five roosters and 12 hens. One of the roosters is a purebred Buff Orpington and we’ll probably sell him. It would be too confusing to have two purebred Buff roosters. The largest rooster chick is from a Brahma mother, which makes sense because Brahmas are sizeable chickens. (They aren’t the most prolific egg layers but I do like the breed and I’d be inclined to keep that rooster.) The chicks seem to have worked out some kind of pecking order and I am seeing a lot less arguing.

A few years ago, Elysian started a tradition of sneaking things into my garden. The first year, it was some sunflowers. Last year, it was a mystery tomato plant. This year, she gave me a packet of seeds and told me to plant them and see what came up. With all of the rain, they sprouted quickly.

I suspect they are some kind of radish, but we’ll find out! It’s fun to trade plants and seeds back and forth.

We had a couple of cartons of weeks-old eggs, so I broke open the eggs and mixed them up to give to the piglets. When the pigs are older, they’ll get whole eggs, but right now, they are still on baby food. After a few minutes of coaxing—so many new things!—they figured out the eggs were tasty and hoovered them up.

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Even though it finally stopped raining yesterday, it was too wet to work outside, so I finished quilting the construction equipment quilt. I’ll trim it this morning and add the binding. I’m still on the fence about what project to start next.

I bought a small rolling cart for my embroidery supplies. I decided that was the best solution for organizing the bits and bobs that were getting lost on the end table next to my chair in the living room. It holds my bins of thread, pincushions, needles, books, and current projects. The plan is to keep it in my office and roll it into the living room when I want to sit and work on something.

I continue to pare down my social media interactions. I left a sewing group on Facebook the other day—and ended my financial support of its content creators—because they put up a post I found highly objectionable. They exhorted all “white sewists” to go around the internet looking for particular kinds of comments by people and then to respond to those comments. Examples of the kind of comments to look for and responses to make were given. I understand that they saw that as a way to provide allyship to people of color, but I refuse to participate in any kind of policing of other people’s speech, objectionable or not. If it happens in my presence, I will speak up, but that’s different than actively searching for it. Also, it was a sewing group. I belong to sewing groups for sewing information. I have other outlets for activist work.

I am seeing more and more of this “thought policing” and I don’t like it. Totalitarianism can arise from lots of places, and not all of it comes from the right. (Read that again, slowly.) That was part of why I closed my Ravelry account last summer. However noble the goals may be, I think that some people are going to be surprised what is at the bottom of this slippery slope we seem to be accelerating down.