Day 94

I am a firm believer that you should always be open to learning new things. Sometimes that's something pertinent to the job you do and/or the everyday life you live- and sometimes it's something random.

This week, I learned about chickens.

And as silly as it may sound, I have been super-excited by what I have learned. I can't believe I have gone so long in life without having a clue as to how something as simple as an egg makes it to my breakfast table.

One of the women I work with has chickens and brought in a video on her IPAD of her baby chicks hatching. Although she has had chickens for ahwile, ths is the first time she has actually hatched her own. Curious, I started to ask questions about the process of raising and hatching chickens-and discovered how little I actually knew.

I learned that chickens lay an egg approximately every 25 hours. That part alone astonished me because she only has one rooster....so she then informed me that chickens don't need roosters in order to lay an egg.

What?!

Yup. Chickens lay an egg every 25 hours, just like us women shoot an egg out of our ovaries every 25-31 days. Their eggs just happen to have shells around them and ours don't.

Well. No wonder they seem grouchy and are always pecking at stuff. The poor things are in perpetual PMS!!

Secondly, all of the eggs we buy at grocery stores are "nonfertilized". Which means they came from a farm where there are no roosters- just chickens. Therefore, you will not find any baby chickens inside the eggs you buy from the store. Whew. So now those of you who didn't know that can stop cracking your eggs with only one eye open...

If you do have a rooster and want to try hatching eggs, there really isn't a good way to tell if an egg has been produced out of purely hormones or Rooster Romance, at least at first. You just have to put a bunch of them in a box and wait, crossing your fingers that you haven't wasted a couple days worth of omelettes or quiche. After a while, you can do a "candle test", by holding the egg up to a flashlight and looking for a sillouhette of a baby chick inside.

So, now I know something that I didn't last week. And to top it all off, today I got to bring home a dozen brown, organic eggs that cost me $1 less than what they are at the grocery and will last a month since they are fresh. I can barely wait for breakfast tomorrow!

Today's pic salutes lifelong learning and the chicken- a bird that doesn't get the respect it deserves! I will never complain about the disocmfort of ovulating once a month again..