I felt like I was kinda cheating today.. well just maybe a little bit. And it was all because of our chickens! Now granted I know that every year when the weather turns cold, so do our chickens. They kind of do this sabbatical thing and really cut down on laying eggs. Now this hasn’t been a problem in the past and honestly I was expecting it to be a problem this year. Yea, well I was wrong! This time of the year is always a busy baking time and when you bake you also can pretty much count on that you’re going to need eggs. Well I looked at how many eggs that we had in the refrigerator and we had one. No big deal right? I’ll just head out to the chicken coop and get the other 3 that I need for my recipe. Do you know how many our 20 + chickens laid? 5? or maybe 10? Well if you guess ONE you would have guessed right. Yup… one. As I was standing in the coop looking at the chickens and they were all just kind of walking around looking back at me – I was thinking that it was a good thing that they were cute otherwise we’d be talking about a lot of chicken soup for the winter! So the only thing that I could do was to go to town and buy a dozen eggs. Now I haven’t bought eggs since, well I really don’t have any idea the last time that I bought eggs. Maybe a couple of years ago? So as I’m picking up some other things I finally get to the cooler and there the eggs are. I was going to buy the ones marked large eggs and when I opened up the carton I thought that maybe I should buy the extra large eggs instead. These large eggs looked a little puny to me. But when I saw that the price of the large eggs was $1.99, I couldn’t even bare to see what the price of the extra large eggs were. So into my cart the eggs went and I was ready to head to the checkout counter. When I put my groceries on the belt for the checkout person, I must admit it was pretty weird looking to see this carton of eggs going into my grocery bag. But unless the old girls don’t start producing, it’s probably going to be a more familiar sight as the winter goes on. So how did the eggs work? I guess they were OK. They seemed quite a bit different that what I was used to, but the food tasted the same. But with the egg layer feed in the coop and keeping a light on for them in the winter months, I’m thinking that I’ll just have to get used to this until they start laying again. 
While I was in town I went to one of my most favorite places to visit around Christmas time. The place is the nursery where I get our Christmas garland for our front porch. It literally is like stepping back into time and I just love going there. The outside of the building looks probably like it did 40 years ago and I’m thinking the inside looks maybe the same also. The owner was sitting in his over sized wooden desk chair that he is always sitting in and this time they had the radio on listening to the Iowa/Nebraska football game – no fancy flat screen TV’s in this office! I noticed that on top of a tall heater in the corner there was some bricks with a piece of wood on top of it. It looked like they put their work gloves on it to maybe not only dry them off, but maybe to keep them warm for the next time they’re going to wear them. Yup, just a cool place to visit. As I was getting our garland, I noticed a new color of tree that they had flocked this year. With all the kids just loving the movie ‘Frozen’, someone was having a Frozen themed Christmas and wanted their tree blue. Now I’ve never seen this movie before, but this blue tree really rocked it! And I’ve chosen it as my photo of the day. 