Killing Snakes, Chickens, Minuets

I feel like I should start with a snake update. While I was delivering a sick chicken to the UC Davis lab last week, I brought in the remains of the dead snake in a jar to be identified. Turns out it was not a rattler, but we killed a gopher snake. OOoops! We actually need those gopher snakes. Aside from eating gophers, they also eat rattlers ... should one appear. (Let's hope they don't!) Alas, no new boots for the fam. Although, I feel like I would like another pair so I can go stomping around in all the brush/weeds/poo and whatnot of the yard. Too often I do my work in sandals and my feet are just caked with ... organic material. So, yes, I was bringing a sick chicken down to UC Davis to have them do a "look see" follow up to a dead chicken I'd sent in the week prior for a necropsy. The results are in: I killed my chickens by accident. (Just two of them ... so far). Here's how it happened. I looked at my flock of birdies and thought to myself, "Well, they are getting table scraps and treats, but not so many greens." It being a hot summer here with no rain (typical of our summers here) the baked earth was not pushing up the greens in the chicken yard. But, as we were watering the compost and some plants out near the orchard, I had a bumper crop of very tall bermuda grass. Because I am oh-so-clever, I thought I would just rid myself of the bermuda grass and provide greens to those birds. Lesson learned: Long ropey strands of greens thrown to chickens turn to long ropey greens that bog up the crop and entire GI tract of chickens causing a very painful and miserable death. I'm lucky I've only lost two ... so far. I'll be right back. I've got to go pick up my farmer of the year award. Really, does this person look like a trustworthy farmer to you?

Okay, I'm back! Yesterday Blue Oak (the girls' school) was invited to perform choral, recorder and strings pieces at the Chico World Music Festival. With little notice, the music teachers hastily put some pieces together and our kids totally did a great job. Here they are warming up in the grass behind the stage.

And here they are on stage just before the performance:

Although Rex has moved on to the junior high school, he still comes back to play in the community orchestra at the girls' school. Our fantastic strings teacher pulled together a small group of students to play Minuet 2. They did a great job! They killed it! Here's a few moments from the actual performance:

We thought we might pop down just for the performance, but we ran into so many people we knew and wound up seeing come concerts put on by local artists too. Rex spent most of the day playing games offered by Blue Oak near their booth. Here Rex and his friend Kieran are trying to knock eachother off the balance beam with padded boffers. I'll be they are both tired today!