It's a St. Supery and Chicken Candling Kind of Night

I know I know. I have been gone awhile. This heat we have been experiencing makes me wanna shrivel up and do nothing. The garden............ gone. I stopped watering it a few weeks ago. Austin is in the middle of a serious drought and I'm doing my best to conserve H2O. My hope is that the fall garden will be a tad more successful than what I had going on the past couple of months. Yooooooowser.


So today is day 14 of Little Shit setting on the eggs. If the way she guards those eggs says anything about the kind of mother she is going to be, this feisty lady is going to win Mama of the year, no doubt. She puffs up, ruffles her feathers, and totally gets annoyed when you mess with her to get the rest of the eggs, but surprisingly she has yet to peck me. Sweet girl.


Anyway, I was starting to wonder if there really was anything brewing in the two eggs that I snuck under her on July 4th. I wasn't quite sure how to tell. I was just being patient, waiting for day 20 to see if anything hatched. So I did a little google search and who knew there was such a thing as chicken candling.  I didn't.  I read up about it and tonight I grabbed my flashlight(not the fancy set up provided on the previous link) and headed out as soon as it got dark.


Huh.


I am not quite sure what the hell I was looking at when I shined that light on the eggs. Granted, I did have a couple glasses of the Supery before heading out, but all I saw in my eggs was a black blob. This could be normal at Day 14, or it could mean that it's just a rotten egg in there. Some people say that if they aren't growing chicks, they will smell rotten. Well, they didn't smell. I sat there smelling them like I was sitting in the middle of a rose garden. They smelled fine. So, my optimistic self is remaining hopeful that these eggs will hatch in 6 days.


If not, I have plan B(no, not that kind you crazy kids) up my sleeve. My plan is to get some day old chicks from the feed store and slip them under her. She will never know the difference and she has definitely earned the deserving title of mother in these past three weeks.