Hello Reader,

The caller ID on the early morning phone call read "US GOV'T."

That'll get your blood pumping first thing in the morning.

Especially if you're a slightly neurotic, people-pleasing, rule-following first-born daughter.

Never mind the fact that I'd gone to bed the night before expecting the call. You could honestly say I was eagerly expecting it. My brain had spent at least part of the night processing my expectations via dreams that might make an interesting, but trippy, children's feature film...more on that later.

I answered the phone, spoke to a man who was much less scary than his phone ID might have suggested, and assured him I'd be right down to pick up my special delivery that had arrived at the Post Office.

"Looking for your babies?" He asked when we arrived and handed us a chirruping box of chicks.

It was Christmas in September.

Back at the barn we opened our package to start welcoming the tiny little fuzzballs to Pemberley Farm and get them settled into their temporary nursery.

This was considerably less complicated than the version my sleeping brain had rehearsed the night before, in which hummingbirds arrived instead of chickens, escaped from the brooder, and some of them turned into blue fish that swam through the air.

Anyway...

Long-time readers may remember that The Regiment has taken losses in the last few months. Additionally, we are discovering some opportunities to share our farm eggs with local friends and acquaintances and thought it would be a good idea to expand operations at the same time we replaced our missing ladies.

With that in mind, I eagerly placed an order with an online hatchery I've been browsing for several months.

Let me tell you, friends. Selection was a process. I'm not going to say it was quite as rigorous as the NCAA Basketball Tournament selection process, but I will say that I almost broke out an Excel chart for this. And I don't do Excel charts.

The trick was that there were several criteria to be considered. The perfect group of chicks would be:

1. Visually varied and interesting. No offense to folks who love a particular breed or who are loyal to a certain look, but I adore the motley crew. (Not the band. Not anymore.)
2. Capable of producing the right balance of brown and colored eggs. This is super picky, and I completely acknowledge it. But I have fallen in love with the palette we have with our daily egg collections. We have a spectrum of browns, and then a couple pops of cool colors in the blue/green family and a few BOOMs of those dark brown eggs. I wanted to keep that look as much as I possibly could. No guarantees, of course, and the practical 85% of me knows perfectly well that an egg is an egg is an egg. But good golly, I like the pretty.
3. Weather hardy and good foragers. I want to let these girls free range and we live in Kansas. Enough said.
4. Populated with a few more chicks of the breeds I already know I love, in different varieties if possible.
5. A reasonable number. I am not allowed to own 800 chickens. I’m pretty sure.

We installed 24 chicks into the brooder box this week. I chose thirteen of them specifically, and I'm very excited to see them grow, develop, and lay. All but two of them are new breeds or new varieties of breeds we currently love.

Ten of them came in a "Brown Egg Layer Assortment," and one is a mystery freebie, and that group is going to be the gift that keeps on giving for the next several weeks. The hatchery promised at least three different varieties in the brown layer group, and so I'll get to try and determine their identities as they go from down-covered nuggets to speed demons with baby feathers to juvenile chickens to adults.

The hatchery doesn't know it, but they've given me the gift of an irresistible puzzle that will force me to spend a lot of time paying attention.

And I can certainly use that gift right now, and the reminder that this is part of what I want to spend my time doing.

We have come upon a season where the list of things to be done at the farm is getting longer and the hours of daylight are getting shorter. I'm feeling the pressure to hurry up and knock things off my task list.

The sheep have started breeding season, which involves a lot of population shuffling and organizing and reorganizing of the areas where the sheep are and will be spending their time. We are due for a massive barn clean out, which means I really need to get the compost situation organized and ready because we are about to make a massive deposit into it.

We just shifted Seal Team Six out of their wee house and into Barracks One and need to get Barracks Three ready for when the new recruits outgrow the nursery brooder and the wee house. I have a feeling that time will come faster than we think it will.

There are repairs and other odds and ends that need to be done. Straw needs to be fetched, hooves need to be trimmed, and there's always a minor emergency lurking around the corner, right, Frederick?

And so even though I adore every single part and piece of this, it is still easy to shift my focus from experiencing it all to just knocking out the tasks.

So this morning, as I was examining the chicks, looking at new feathers popping out, trying to see if one chick might have four or five toes, wondering if those are cheek muffs or just baby down, delighting in the absolute absurdity of their sheer existence, I took a huge breath.

This is what I want.

I want to pause for an undefined "while" and watch these ridiculous baby chickens.

I want to watch Mr. Knightley hang out with Emma and Lizzy in his enclosure and enjoy seeing them together again, all grown so much bigger than the last time they were together.

I want to spend time scratching Mr. Darcy's cheeks and telling him how handsome he is, and that he'll get to spend time with his ladies in just a few weeks.

I want to pay attention.

There is so much around me to be fascinated by, and yet it's so easy for me to forget to do the one thing that pretty much guarantees I'll be sucked in by the wonder of it all.

Pause. Just for a bit. I may not have hours in this busy season, but I bet I can find a moment.

Greg's Got Questions

Thank you to those of you who participated in the poll last week.

The winning question: How are you feeling about Samson’s interaction with the sheep so far? Is it going as you expected? Have you been surprised by anything?

Samson is crushing all expectations. I am floored by this dog.

I know you asked about the sheep, and I'll get there in a minute, but I have to mention the chickens first. Samson is so calm around these chaos monkeys that I would be worried he has no "guardian" in him at all if I hadn't seen his turbo drive kick in when he spots a cat. He lets the birds commit highway robbery of his own kibble right in front of his face. No reaction. None. It's amazing.

I have loved watching him with the sheep. He has been calm and curious from the beginning, but with no chasing or even a hint of aggression. I think the only things we've worked on have been discouraging the "want to play?" stance he has taken a few times and initially, giving Mr. Bingley a decent bubble of space to prevent him from losing his tiny pink brain and blindly crashing himself into his furniture.

The biggest surprise to me happened last night when we watched Samson and Mr. Bingley share a relatively calm nose boop at Bingley's enclosure, near his food container, with no brain evaporation or furniture crashing involved at all. That was amazing to see.

This Week's Questions

(As a matter of procedure, the poll function takes you to another page to submit your vote, so if that happens to you, you’re on the right track!)

Question 1. How does your call from the “US GOV’T” experience compare to that time you were called by the “Federal Marshal” who demanded that you come to the courthouse on a Saturday to do whatever he was trying to convince you to do and was playing every card he had to convince a “slightly neurotic, people-pleasing, rule-following first-born daughter” that you were in BIG trouble if you didn’t?

Question 2. I know you couldn’t get your first choice of the chicks because some were out of stock when we finally decided to add new recruits to The Regiment. How many of which breeds did we end up with and how does that compare to what you originally selected?

Question 3. What’s the plan for that compost we’re going to be creating once we get to that delightful task of cleaning out the barn?

Happy knitting!

Kiersten J

P.S. Pemberley Correspondence is beginning its first season this fall. Each month I’ll tuck a handwritten letter and a few small pieces of Pemberley into an envelope and send them your way.

If that sounds lovely, I’d love to have you join us.

P.P.S. You can find this and more of my knitting journal entries at KierstenJ.com.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reply to this email! I read every one!