The chicks are doing well without the light from the window.  No one is eating anyone’s tail feathers, and no one is bleeding.  We are all happier!   I will probably un-curtain the window it in a couple of days and see how they do, though they seem quite happy with just the light from the heat lamp.  They are eating more than I thought 10 chicks could.  And already their wings are changing from fuzzy to pretty feathers.  So quickly!

Today I decided to ‘Do What I Want To Do.’  It was fun.  Ignoring the kitchen and laundry, I just worked on my 101 goals.  That was satisfying.  Four of them got some good attention, and I laid groundwork for a couple more.  I got wood to paint a barn quilt, and we chose a pattern. Also, I learned that using very fine steel wool to clean paint off of laminate is good.  Using fine steel wool to clean paint off of a metal electric plate cover is bad.  It’s bad if the outlet is live, anyway.  Big arc.  Steel wool catches on fire.  Who knew?

I’m still working with goal #6.  Going from estatic that this tact seems to be working for me, to dispair that I can’t possibly do this!  I am using the hunger scale, which – interestingly enough – I undershoot as well as overshoot.   The activities in 100 Days have been thought provoking, and I have been journaling my responses.  This is good!  My hope is that laying this groundwork will bring me success.

This blog may turn out to be mostly about facing and dealing with weight issues for the next 1,000 days.  With some gardening, farming, and cooking thrown in!  We’ll see. 

So here’s the latest on goal #6.  I have started on  the ‘If I’m so Smart’ book, and the first issue she addresses is paying attention to your body’s hunger/fullness messages.  A hunger scale is the way to do this.  Pay attention and don’t get too hungry, pay attention and don’t get too full.  That doesn’t sound very hard!  Ha!  I remember now!  It IS hard.  Paying attention is hard.  Stopping eating on purpose is hard. 

That being said, my goal for today and the next few days is to: 1. Pay attention, 2. Differentiate between physical hunger and wanting to eat for other reasons, 3. Eat when I’m hungry and keep within the hunger scale boundaries (-2 through +2 on a scale of -10 through +10), and 4. Write down what I am learning, the emotions/issues I feel when it’s not real hunger, what all the numbers on the hunger scale feel like to ME so I can identify them better.  – That sounds like a list that could take me 5 years to really get down!!  Hopefully not.  Hopefully less than 1,000 days, and hopefully I’ll learn a lot in the next 3 or 4 days.  I’m not going to move on in the book until Monday.

New Subject:  All the chicks have made it so far!  Once we ordered chicks via mail, and we lost nearly half of them in the first 24 hours.  That was rough.  (It had taken them an extra day for them to reach the post office, that may be why.  Meyer’s Hatchery said loosing that many was not the norm. ) We have gotten chicks from Tractor Supply before and have not lost any.  That extra 2 or 3 days growth make a huge difference.

Tala, our English Shepherd, watching the chicks.

I let her get close to the chicks last night to see what she wants with them. (I have seen what a Husky wanted to do with my chicks, so I was careful.)  She just sniffed and licked.  And one chick thought the dog would make a great new mama!  Fuzzy, warm, and brown.  Apparently Tala met all the qualifications!

Our Chicks in a box

We got new chicks today!  10 of them from Tractor Supply.  And I learned that ‘pullet’ means a young hen. (I thought it had something to do with meat chickens.)  We got a mixture of breeds, 5 brown egg layers and 5 white egg layers.

We have them in the old washer/dryer room which is small and has a door so they can stay warm.  After putting a sheet on the floor and topping it with two bales of pine chipsand hanging the heat lamp in the corner all that’s left is the food and water on something firm so they don’t kick in too many pine chips.  I’m looking forward to hearing them cheep!  Having them in the house is fun – for a while.  They make so much dust!  Our farm collie (English Shepherd) is so very interested in them.  She comes over to watch them everytime we open the door.  She tries to herd the adult chickens, so maybe that’s what she wants to do with these chicks!  Not in the house!

On to goal #6 – which for me is loosing weight.  I want to lay down my current plan.  I have struggled with my weight all of my adult life.  Which is part of why my target weight (which I am not sharing here!) is still high according to the charts.  Reasonable is good!  Like most who struggle with overweight issues, diets haven’t had a lasting effect for me, so that’s not the direction I am going to take. 

Commitment Number One: I have read _I Can Make You Thin_ by Paul McKenna. His premises are great, they just take work! Very simplified: Eat when you’re hungry.  He offers tools for recognizing hunger, etc.  This addresses one of my biggest diet struggles, feeling deprived and panicing.  Eating when I’m hungry is comforting and do-able.  I can do that!  The work is knowing when I am hungry, and stopping when I’m not.  Going through McKenna’s book and working with his ideas is commitment Number One. 

Commitment Number Two: Work on the other side of the hunger issue – eating when I’m not hungry.  Many of us have issues with using food to feel better, I’m right in there with that battle.  So I have chosen a highly rated book _If I am so Smart, Why Can’t I loose Weight? Tools to Get it Done!_ by Brooke Castillo.  I’ll let you know how the book works.  She addresses the WHY of eating for non-hunger reasons. She coaches: face the emotional issues that cause the problem in the first place.  This should be a painful book!  There is a lot of writing and introspection to do.  I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know about the tools she offers, but the questions I scanned through seem to be good. Commitment Number Two is to face some of the issues that I usually avoid through “If I’m so Smart.”

By the way, both of these books are on Amazon for not too much $.