Chicken update

It has been about 5 days since we got 400 chicks delivered to us, and I figured enough has happened for an update.

First, the expected points:  Three more birds died last night, probably smothered by the others in a quest to keep warm.  I do have a fairly powerful heater running, but for some reason, a good bunch of the birds like to pile up in one corner, quite far away from the heater.  That's where I found the bodies.  They are piled again like that tonite, even though I chased them away, they just went back so we might have some more bodies again tomo.  Not much I can do, I will be picking up a second heater in the next few days, to run overnight.
Now, the unexpected:  During the day, the birds don't seem to be as sensitive to cold as I had thought.  The tempurature is nowhere near the "37 C" that pretty much everyone agrees it should be, but the chicks aren't piling up against each other, except at night, and they run around and seem quite active.  I suppose the sunlight helps, but most of them are not in the direct sun, and it was also quite windy yesterday, so I guess maybe they're a bit hardier than most people think?
I thought a lot about the upcoming website, the webstore, and how I'd like to conduct business.  I will of course be selling at the farmer's market, along with whatever veggies I have left at that time, but I think having a preorder option on the webstore would be great as well.  I'll just come into town on a predesignated day, and you the customer will simply come and pick your product up!  I might even deliver for larger orders, maybe 5 birds or more.
I can hardly wait to taste the difference in these birds, for all my life I've been eating garbage chicken raised on garbage feed.  No more!

OTHER

Have you ever had a day that you just couldn't find motivation to do ANYTHING, even though you have a zillion things you could do?  Well I have, but today was not one of those.  I replaced the outlet for the garden hose, cleaned up the yard, took the garbage to the dump, got a tank of house-water, and replenished the water in my batteries (waaaay overdue).  And now I'm blogging.
I will almost certainly have another post within the week, I do have a LOT of weeding to do in the garden, but the chicks have become almost an invisible routine.  I'm thinking now that I will probably next year buy some bucket calves, and put them up too.  I need some cattle, but they are quite costly.  Not like chicks that cost $1.50, even weaned calves are around $500 each, and it takes a year to get them to market weight.  It is worth it though, grass fed beef is worth it's weight in silver!