I've checked Google Reader 18 times today.  Will someone PLEASE write a blog.

This is all I've got:

My Thoughts on Eggs & Chickens:

• When I was growing up, we never bought eggs.  We collected them.  My mom had chickens and Abe, Ty, Ande, and I hated them.  We hated them because we were the ones that took care of them.  We watered them, fed them, and collected their eggs.
  
• The bane of caring for chickens is 3 fold:
• Chicken poop on your shoes.  It's sticky and watery and doesn't come off by merely dragging your feet across the lawn.  You need a stick and a garden hose.  It's also impossible to go into a chicken coop and come out with clean shoes.  The chickens lay booby-traps.
• Breathing in chicken infested air.  My mom's chickens have always lived in an old shed turned coop.  The chickens go in their coop, scratch the dirt and stir up dust.  The light that does make it into their coop shows all the dirt, germs, and dried poop floating in the air.  I used to hold my breath when I went in.  Now, when I go out with my mom to take care of them.  I stay outside the coop.  Even if you don't touch anything, you come out of there feeling dirty.
• The Rooster.  I once saw our rooster chase Ande across the whole lawn.  I was in the house when suddenly I heard a BLOOD-CURDLING scream.  I looked out the front window and saw Ande not running, but sprinting for the garage door and screaming the whole way.  Ten feet behind her was the rooster charging at full speed.  He had his head pointed straight forward and looked like an arrow.  He had K-I-L-L written all over his face.  That's why there's sometimes a pitchfork by the chicken coop door.  If you go in unarmed, they will attack.
  
• Our neighbor has a chicken (just one).  A few months ago I saw her out working in her flower bed.  The chicken was standing right beside her, and our neighbor was feeding it bugs and weeds she found in her flower bed.  It made me romanticize and even want chickens.
  
• Martha Stewart has her own chickens and she LOVES it when guests that come on her show mention how WONDERFUL her eggs look.  Once, a cooking guest on Martha's show commented on how fresh the eggs looked.  Martha responded with something like, "Of course they do.  IIIIIII got these from myyyyyyy chickens."
  
• I learned this year that you should always visually check your eggs in their carton before you buy them. I saw an old lady picking all the best eggs out of the different cartons and putting them in her carton, putting all the bad ones in another carton.
  
• I've also learned that if you see a carton sitting all by itself on the egg shelf at the grocery store, that doesn't mean that it's a carton of bad eggs.  Sometimes they're just unique eggs.  I found this one at Costco two weeks ago.

The special egg nobody wanted

• And last, my mom's chickens are racist.  Or at least, they aren't color blind.

I like that rooster.  He's the most beautiful rooster I've ever seen and he's... CHICKEN.