Chickens are roosting but no eggs for sale!

Back in my college days at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, I had a friend, Marie, who I came to know in my German classes.  I was majoring in German and she was a German minor, English major, so we always had two or more German classes together every semester.  In all our classes our German teachers referred to us as Fräulein Larson (me) and Frau ______ (her last name--she was married), and to this day we still call each other by these names.

As I said, Marie was married and lived in a big farm house in a little town a few miles north of campus.  I went to visit her once sometime just after we graduated and by then she had a son and...chickens!  And we went out to her chickens and collected eggs, and I was hooked.  I wanted chickens!  

Now for 35+ years I've been mentioning to anyone near and dear to me that I want to have chickens.  So for Christmas I opened up a big box to find...chickens!

Using gourds that Leann's sister, Kristi, had grown out in the Red River Valley of western Minnesota, Leann cleaned up the gourds and painted them into all sizes of chickens for me.  The wattles(?), combs and beaks are made out of baked Sculpey clay.

And then the chickens needed a "coop."  Sometime last fall we had dragged an old funny-color-green kitchen-type cabinet out of the basement of the old house.  Back in the day, 1940's and before, my grandparents and family did much of their day-to-day living in the basement.  The dining room and the "parlor" were only for company or church meetings.  So my grandmother had a cook stove down there, and this cabinet with a matching long table and benches, most likely homemade.

Leann cleaned up the cabinet, reconfigured it a little, painted it up white and now it is a chicken coop on our front porch.  She had to devise a way to attach the chickens to their straw nesting material or the first big wind would blow them away.

So now I have chickens.  And I don't have to worry about coyotes or wolves or eagles carrying them off either.  Trying to get eggs will be a challenge, however!

So how are things here in way-north Wisconsin?  This is the view looking our front door...just over from the chickens.  That's a snowdrift and that thing sticking out of the snow is a yardstick.

Zooming in to the yardstick we see this:

And we are supposed to get another 6 inches or more of snow tonight.  

NOT April Fool's!