We’ll refine blog party dates in a day or two, several have been eliminated. I ask on Facebook as well as on here, so a number of replies come in.

I haven’t updated you on the chicks, mostly because it’s been quite sad. We just have one left. The weather was very mild until a couple of days after they hatched, which encouraged me to think they’d be all right in outdoor coops. More fool me, it’s been awful for weeks now. Wind, rain, cold – no snow, but everything else. The chicks, with their inexperienced mother and foster mother, couldn’t cope. So now Foster Mother and her one chick are in a coop in the greenhouse and she’s quite fed up. She really wants to come out and scratch around, but she can’t. But the chick is all right and is being cared for. Slapper rejoined the others once her chicks died and seems quite all right. I just hope the chick is a girl, which will make all the worry worthwhile. Not that I need more hens but that another cockerel will be yet another problem.

It so often feels that a step forward is matched by one backwards, which makes it hard to keep my spirits up. I do try, very hard, but there seems to be so much to discourage. Still, blessings are counted and appreciated and the rest is just trivial detail, if I can put it in context. It seems, however, from a book recently published, that one becomes happier from the age of 58 to 82. I’ll report back, in the unlikely event that I get there. No one in my family even lived to 80, so I think I should aim for peak happiness on a daily basis for the rest of my life.