Those are great shots! Your mom is obviously one busy lady.
Lucy is a fluffy little cutie. Does she have some Cochin? ...that little ball of a body makes me think of them. Those Polish are a riot! Talk about bad hair days.
The baby geese are cute, too. I've never had geese. I bet a goose would teach your kitty a thing or two about poultry!
Norbert's quite a big boy alright! What's his personality like? Do iguanas interact with people, or just tolerate them? The only iguana-personality stories I know of come from people who never should have gotten iguanas in the first place, so they don't really count.
The landscape is absolutely beautiful...and your shot of it only enhances the look. I love the way you've used the slanting golden light, and the combination of sunlight and clouds!

Since my mom has had Norbert for over 4 years and Sabrina for at least 18 months, they have both socialized to humans quite a bit. They both take handling, and will come for scritches and ALWAYS for misting. They are highly warm blooded and spend a LOT of time on their heat rocks, or directly under the heat bulb in their cages.

Norbie was quite the challenge to dislodge from his cage suddenly. He was dug in pretty firmly, and his claws are easily half an inch long. They are mostly tree dwellers, and climb rapidly and agilely.

There is a young lady my mom is helping out. As you can see, the WC is directly next to Norbies cage. Jamie swears the first time she sat down, Norbie came over and Licked her!!! He has been evidencing much more curriosity and willingness to interact. He had not been fed well (the stories I most OFTEN hear about iguanas are bad diets) and tended to be a lunger when you did feed him. He has always been big enough that he makes you a tad nervous. He molted at least three times the first 12 months she had him, just because she researched what he ate, and kept him well fed. Sometimes we even get Norbie 'Spring Greens' salad, if we've exhausted all the other choices.

They tolorate (and pretty much enjoy) baths in the tub. You have to be careful to keep the doors shut when handling them, once they are loose... Oh My!

And the schnauser (hmmmm, how DO you spell that?) is very intent on herding, chasing, eating just about anything that Mom keeps in those wire boxes all over the place.

These geese are the knotted type, and VERY aggressive. We had a few conversations with a bucket or two, and a shoe, until I learned to ignore them. And hideously noisy. Anyone came into the barnyard, you couldn't even talk. You would have to pause and speak through the honk chorus. Geese are not tidy, easy to keep, or friendly. She had given them all away, and her DearDH took a call to adopt more. She seems to be the local Farm Yard Rescue station, and is getting quite well known around the vets and the stores. Folks come in trying to give back their whatevers and they hand out moms number. She has already gotten two rabbits back that she sold last Easter, with cages and gear.

She also kept all the trees sprayed this year, so all five apple trees, the Asian apple pear, and the pear trees produced Very Well. So, yeah, she stays pretty busy.

Oh, hey. Look! Theres his head!
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You will NEVER belive what his name is? BHD... wait for it, which stands for Bad Hair Day!!! Did you borrow my mothers mind, Jen?
This is how he crows!
{{gwi:64845}} That is one of my other girls, right behind him, all three sisters, so pretty much interchangeable.

These are fast moving Seabrights, very clean black and white markings. Lovely really, for a fowl.
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Three of the adults, and check OUT that attitude!
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The whole gaggle!
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And thats it folks, for vacation pix. Your feet and legs didn't even go to sleep!

So is that your Mom's place? Where does she live. It looks like a ranch. It looks like a fabulous place to live. What a riot that your mom has those outrageous pets. I must admit I muttered the word yikes as I do not think I could manage those green things let alone my mother.

I am curious about your new pets. Do you live in the country. Do you raise them for their eggs or to eat or do they just peck around your home. I really am fascinated by different kinds of chickens. The chicken barn is my favorite place to spend time at our county fair. I fantasize that someday I will have peacocks and Lammas, but I really doubt that that will ever happen.

I loved your pictures

Your pic's are a hoot Cena! Long time no chat. Your Mom's place is like something out of a book. OK. perhaps more like a Stephen King book with all those green things roaming around, LOL!
And your mom is gorgeous! I hope I look like that when I'm her age!
C~

I live in a metropolis within a large world reknowned city. I have only hens, nothing that crows.

My mom lives in a small suburb of a larger, but still small, little known, Colorado town. I was born in this town, and she was born a mere few (20) miles away. It has tripled in size in the last 10 years, those Dam Californians, moving in, building mansions, houses that eat up all the water, no reguard for anyone else...

The Iguanas are NOT loose. They inhabit the cages you see in the background. Never, ever have they been loose, in my knowledge. She was told in the very beginning, that was a BAD idea, as they move fast, and climb well. If they got free during Summer, they would head for the door, and climb the nearest tree they saw. Hang it all up, after that!

My chickens are all Barnies, meaning they could have been a species amoungst themselves, once, but they got tossed in with the rest, like the Polish top knot rooster, and inter bred.

I am trying to go Green, and find that a real live solution to a pest problem is ever so much easier than dealing with chemicals, results, measurements, residues... I prefer the live bait/trap solution. In the bare week the chooks (Austrailian term for chickens) have been here, they have groomed a good 20 square feet of yard, eaten their weight four or so times over in grubs and kitchen garbage. They will produce eggs, but in the quantity they exist in, I could never 'count' on fresh eggs for ANYthing. Four hens, maximum production, wind blowing right, 'love is in the air', creek don't rise, I might, MIGHT get four eggs every day (I doubt it, very much!) and they don't have a solid record yet with me. No eggs in 7 days time. No record at all.

They do vacuum bugs at an alarming rate. Then there is the sour milk, kitchen scrap thing. Seems it just goes 'poof'. Then again, I don't have the 100 chickens my mother is blessed with...

Diane, check out Murry Mcmurry, or some such spelling. They are a large hatchery (recently seen on Dirty Jobs, with the chicken sexing bit) that does a huge mail order business. They will send you a catalog with 'drawn' illustrations rather than photos. Still will make your heart go 'pitter patter' when it comes to chickens!

My mom lives on less than four acres, with at least 300 different birds, quail, pidgeons, doves, pheasant, geese, ducks, and lots and lots of chickens. There are nearly 80 rabbits, the week I left, they just had 41 rabbit babies... Don't ask me more, I avoid them, as they are the only thing I KNOW I'm allergic to. Babies and young, I can hold. Adults and juveniles make me sneeze non-stop for hours and hours. Then there are the 9 horses. The cleaning business. The orchard, five or so apple tress, 2 or 3 apricots, same amount of plums, pear trees, and an Asian Apple Pear. She cans AND makes wine from the orchard. There is a berry patch, and an herb garden there somewhere. She is an active puppeteer, crochets avidly, and grinds grain to make bread from scratch...

I so much hope that I look like my mother when I am her age. Thank you, I have ALWAYS thought she was beautiful. She wears her journey well.

Chickens are NOT!!! allowed in our growing town. Someone down the street tried to get the city to let them try raising chickens in town. I was really surprised that all of their neighbors showed up at the plan commission meeting to voice strong concerns against this. I have a huge yard in town-because my house was on the town square where cows and horses used to graze. Evansville is an old farming town-but not anymore.

Your Mom sounds just incredible and her home is just fabulous. What a great place to visit!

I wonder whether the California expatriates in their mansions grumble about the water the horses and rabbits suck down. I am so glad I live "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife," and in a land of ample rain!.
Diane- Raising chickens is a whole different deal than keeping a few hens! Hens, on their own, are much quieter than, say, children. BTW -- Have you ever heard a peacock scream? I bet that would get the neighborhood excited!
Cena- I bet keeping busy helps keep your mom young. I wish my mom had a little more of that spirit in her. The puppeteer thing fascinates me. I've made some amateur puppets and helped kids put on productions in school and church, but other than your mom I've never known of anyone specific going into it professionally--- yet I remember you mentioning her going to a convention a year or two back, so there must be a well-organized pro bunch. I think that's really cool! Does you mom mostly work close to home, or does she wind up going far afield? Does she work with marionettes, hand puppets,...both? On your next visit, if you think of it, it'd be really great if you could get some shots of her work to share with us.

Her first exposure was to marionettes. She got a couple of strange, long legged/necked ones at yardsales, and started playing with those. She has ALWAYS been a ham, and at one time her and her mother were very active in Senior Visitations. So, my mom would stroll out to her car, and 'walk' her puppet back in as if they both were there to visit someone. These are Grown People, sometimes only 10 or 15 years her senior, but they would hold entire conversations with that critter attached to strings attached to her hand. They KNEW it was all make believe and for fun, but it just slips their mind...

When she started working with the church group, they use mostly Big Mouth puppets whose head splits nearly in half with thier mouth. Last year they did two B.M. shows, and a Pants show, which is full size torsos, and make believe pants on a blackstage line in front of them. Mom also works with the Charlie Macarthy type puppets. She has two ADORABLE monkeys, one a chimp and the other an orangutan based on that model. She seems to me to be best with them. And she will make you forget she is even there! She also has a high quality CM little girl doll named Audrey (her middle name) who tells everyone in the family just how the cow ate the cabbage. That rotten puppet tells family secrets and picks fights right there, and family is too stunned to hear such truths to sputter much about it. Mom also has four or five 'voices' that she works out regularly. Part of the conference was to learn ventriloquism. Turns out there is a yearly conference in Las Vegas that I am trying to talk her into attending.

There are an entire series of videos, Scorch and his person being one of my favorites, that are being made available through Christian puppet ministries. They start with basics such as developing the 'other' of your puppet, voice, projection, having conversations as if this 'other' were an entire person, how to shave your speach to make throwing easier, many, many seperate issues that make that puppet appear to be a whole 'other' person. Stuff we, unless we are dealing with a young child, just never even think about. The 'magic of illusion' stuff.

The other puppeteer that my mother had been working with, who has all the sets and such, had her adult son commit suicide in the early part of the year. They have not done a formal show, or practiced since then. I hear rumbles that will start up again soon, out at moms.

For the most part, the work is done in their church, or churches close by, and often affiliated with their church. Sometimes they are requested for a specific show (or message) and they go out to other churches for those.

Because of her farm and natural ability with animals, she gets asked to do odd things from time to time. This Easter at the pagent, she was the donkey handler and she told EVERYone she 'lead Jesus' ass all over town'!

did I mention she has an outrageous sense of humor???

This is so funny-I hate to let out this secret. This morning I was cleaning in preparation for turkey day. DS has a puppet in his room-it's a fowl creature sort of thing that is all legs. I had music blasting to make my cleaning more enjoyable. I had to move the puppet-as I was rearranging plants. Well the puppet could really shake a leg. I was dancing with him and had just the greatest time and thought what a great date this puppet could be-a little short for me but when he danced on the table, he was just perfect.

Isn't it great how life and the garden web can relate