my little cock-fighters

we live in the city.

but that doesn't matter. you, apparently, can take a man out of the campo, but you can't take the campo out of the man. 

amalio had been itching to live in a house with a yard since i've known him. city living is okay, but did he really have to do it in an apartment? 

as soon as we got a comfortable balcony, he got birds. clipped their wings and let them wander around. he got the backyard lust pretty bad near the end of our apartment living-time and he showed me quite a few dumps - let me rephrase that: he expected me to cede to really bad houses so that he could have a backyard. 

desperation looks like a clapboard shack with a rusted tin roof, completely cemented backyard and a deteriorated cistern door. as in, my kids would fall through it and die if they even looked at that trap door covering up 2500 gallons of water. but hey, the house has a backyard.

we got lucky with the house we live in. it's in a nice area, close to both of our jobs and sits on a double lot. (and oh.my.goodness. it is cheap. not just by american standards either. i really believe this house was sent to us. because it's nicer and bigger than others in the area for a fraction of the rental cost. i'm not a fan of divorce, but the owner's divorce did us good). 

the first thing amalio did when we got the boxes off the truck was to re plant all of our plants. no lie, it took me 3 weeks to unpack the house, but amalio had every.single.plant in the ground in 2 hours. and we have a lot of plants. 

after the plants were in the ground, he set out to find some chickens. yep, chickens. 

and here i was thinking the kids would hate chickens.  

 not so much. this is henry. the (very fertile) rooster. he (and the other chickens) are a small breed of fowl, "perfect" for our backyard. we also have a rooster named janet (jackson) and two hens named chicken-chicken  and michael (also jackson). between them, there are too many little chickens. but they're too small to eat. (and i wouldn't eat them anyway). we'll see what happens with them.