Jeff 'n' Rusty's auction adventure
Since it was a University Holiday, on a Friday (usually Stephen's day off, so hard to arrange off), we thought we'd go to the Rogers auction and flea market to try to rebuiild our flock. There were several problems with this. One was that it was snowing badly enough that people were running off the roads. I misread the map, which put us on Hwy. 7 instead of 11, so it was a slow 2-lane trip. And we left at 2, figuring that we'd take in the flea market. Rogers in the summer is quite impressive; you could walk all day and not see everything. Rogers in the winter is not that, and such venders as there were had already started to pack up. We had considered bringing Sara, our granddaughter, but we didn't want to wait for her to get out of school, and as it turned out, there was no room in the car once we got the chicken cage in. We might have taken the pickup, but it's traction on snow is dicey at best, and its shocks are dead enough that it bounces all around; making a hour-each-way trip, loaded, in snow didn't seem like something I wanted to try.
We killed enough time and went in to the auction. I hadn't seen anything too impressive, but things started coming in last-minute. There were some fencing materials outside that Rusty had her eye on; she bought 15 6 ft heady steel fence posts for $20. After going through apples, chicken waterers for too much, pigeons, pheasants and bantams, we got to the heavy hens, and there were some barred rocks that looked good. fortunately, they were sold "choice" instead of, as usual "bid by piece, buy by coop". Rusty kept on whispering "stop" as the bidding got perilously close to "meat value", but I won at $7.50 and took all 5 Barred Rocks. There was later another coop of 2 BRs that we didn't bid on, and we didn't take any of the New Hampshires. Nothing against them, though they can be a little volatile, but we want to bunk these in with the "old girls" and be able to tell them apart, and those NHs looked a little spent. we stuck around for the little 4-leggeds. A bunch of Jersey bull calves went for $13, goats in the $30-50 range.
The adventure came when we went to load the car. The only way the fence posts would fit is if part of the back seat folded down so they would extend though the trunk. This meant taking down the cage and reassembling it to cover the posts and folded down seat. All this was complicated by the presence of a child's wagon in the trunk, which Rusty had insisted on bringing to transport the cage (which would only fit through the door disassembled anyway). Then there was this teenage girl who had gotten the other coop of Barred Rocks and wanted one of ours, and was willing to trade her one plus $8 for that particular one. As Mr. Beck reminds us, values are personal, individual, and her love of Ms. Perfect Hen equaled my love of cheap chickens, so the swap was made.
As we got to the southern 'burbs of Youngstown, it was 8, and we were hungry, so we hit Bob Evans, with me in my bibs and chore boots. Rusty did her usual trip to the young man who was seating, "Two...smoking please". He twitched, I burst out laughing, and when he took us to our table, I said, "They're so cute when they twitch," which had Rusty rolling on the floor.
chores were done and we were in bed by 10:30. The new girls are in quarantine in the little barn; besides, we want to see how they lay. There's still soup weather...
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