Those of you who check the Chicken Feed regularly have no doubt been wondering what happened to the chickens. It's been two weeks now, and they've not been outside.

Well, the fact is that the chickens have gone. The Pirate and I have been thinking about the next step in the Co-Prosperity Sphere's evolution, and we've decided that what we really need is more vegetables and fewer chickens. Makes sense, right? But the problem is that our little acre (and that's almost exactly what we've got here) has only one area that gets enough sun to grow anything - the chicken yard.

We were looking in a recent Lehman's catalog and saw this swell laundry rack. The cool thing about it is that it hangs from the ceiling from ropes that run through pulleys. You lower the rack to put clothes on it, then you raise it up to let everything dry while it's up and out of the way. At about the same time, I saw this story from Ode Magazine about people around the world line-drying their clothes instead of using dryers.

The Pirate and I have been playing the video game "Plants vs Zombies" lately. So much so that I finally declared a one-week moratorium on the game, just so that we could catch up with sleep and chores and regain our children's affections.

But yesterday, during Day Without Electricity, I felt like I was back at it again - fighting a neverending battle wherein every time I thought I was getting ahead, something else popped up to thwart me.

Let me back up.

In the past week, the dogs have gotten even more enthusiastic about ratcatching. Esme has caught five out of six rats, and Dagmar has gone from being scared of the chicken house to being excited about going in and getting rats. The one that got away was excusable, as it was dark and they were out of practice.