Happy Thoughts on a Sunny Monday

My sweet-if-a-tad-challenged Dot, the White-Crested Black Polish hen:

...laid her first egg yesterday (that's it, in the middle):

It was a perfectly formed, white, extremely oval egg, bigger than my smallest eggs, but smaller than my biggest eggs. It weighed in at precisely 1 ounce:

My very pretty, but extremely loopy, girl:

...wanted to sing about it afterwards:

How do I know it was she who laid the egg? She is the *only* white-egg-layer of my entire flock! Remember how cute she was as a chick?:

We visited Velvet's Baby, the donkey I adopted out, at his new home on Saturday:

He lives in a wonderful place, is a happy boy, is now named Elvis, and plays with balls:


This barn smiled at us as we were driving to see him:

Back at home, the old roost in my chicken coop kept falling down, so I decided to try my hand at building a new one:

It's bit steep, but the chickens seem happy to use it and I now know how to make the next one even better:

I made potato salad using Yukon Gold potatoes I grew in my garden (that's Roxy, my pup, drinking from the hose):

and with eggs my hens laid for me:

It was yummy, too:

I saw the biggest Angus bull of my life at the county fair yesterday. Bubba is 3,400 lbs of masculine mass:

My dairy farmer/hay provider friend picked up the GRAND CHAMPION award for his dairy cows at the fair:

I think one of the calves I gave that penicillin shot to is here somewhere:

I'm having great fun with berry season. Every afternoon when I go to pick my daily bucket of raspberries, my chicken friends join me:

Bippity, the Barred Rock, is very good at pointing out the ripe ones:

Look! Twin raspberries:

I have about 10 quarts of frozen raspberries at this point:

And...last but not least....the laptop that I managed to drown in April:

has been repaired and was delivered to me just fifteen minutes ago:

Happy thoughts on a sunny Monday: