How Do I Homestead My House

Your 2 cents: Being a teacher is a tough job

cynicinmarlboro: My heart bleeds. Let me take out my violin. Try being in a position that puts you on call 24/7/365 — even on your vacations. My work has never ended at the office after upward of 10 hours a day. And I don’t get paid much more than a tenured teacher. In fact, I have not had a raise in a few years and pay more for my health care yearly. Walk in my shoes for a day. NJRooster: If property taxes in New Jersey didn’t include school tax, of which nearly 85 percent goes directly to salaries, benefits and pensions, no one would care about the cost of teachers. Truth is, most people want to earn a living and make enough to enjoy what hard work buys you (like a home, car, annual vacation). But unfortunately for all of us, that’s not how New Jersey works, and people and towns (through foreclosures and a loss of tax revenue) are going broke and taxes are a big part of the problem. So it doesn’t take walking in another person’s shoes to understand how hard the job may be. Roselynde: There is a huge dropout rate among new teachers, who just find it too exhausting, too daunting and too labor-intensive to hack. They go on to find other occupations they are better suited for — eventually. Among those who survive, they develop into wonderful teachers, who, unfortunately, have to listen to many of these people who think, because they graduated from high school, they possess the entire sum of knowledge of the life of a teacher, however narcissistic and delusional that may be. It’s time to let the professionals work out the difficulties. I’m sick of leaving it to politicians and Board of Education members who know nothing about education whatsoever, and to parents. Education is the only profession where the inmates run the asylum — and we wonder why it’s broken. What do you expect? Huckfinn21: I have walked in your shoes for 40 years. The majority of parents are satisfied and appreciate the job their teachers are doing for their children.

Homestead Hints ~ Where Did My Egg Go? - Little House on the ...

Walking through the soft, sometimes crunchy grass you head up the path to the chicken barn. The path under your feet is starting to get well worn from your shoes walking it everyday. A slow breeze lifts the hair off your neck and tangles it up a bit as you get closer. The grasshoppers are already singing their summer song and a bird and it’s friend fly out of the tall grass on your left.

You finally reach the chicken barn and you pull open the old wood door. The hinges complain just a bit as you open the door all the way. You can hear the faint clucking of the chickens outside in their fence and the few that are in the chicken barn give you a quizzical stare.

You reach the nests, piled high with soft wood shavings. You get closer so you can reach in and collect the eggs but then to your surprise….there isn’t any.

Your thoughts are:

Let’s move through these one at a time. (minus the first one)

1. The chickens stopped laying. Although unlikely in this case that the chickens would stop laying all at once, after a few years it does happen. If your chickens are a few years old and you are noticing egg production waning, it’s probably a good time to get rid of the chickens. It’s good to rotate your chickens about every 2- 4 years, depending on if they aren’t laying or have slowed down on egg production. Chickens can lay longer than 4 years but if you planned on butchering the meat won’t be very good, it will be too tough and stringy.

2. The chickens are laying the eggs somewhere else. This is also unlikely in this case because they wouldn’t all start doing it all at once. Although I have found eggs in other places than the nest it doesn’t happen very often. If you’ve created a good nest for them with wood shavings or something soft they will keep coming back to it and laying their eggs there. However, if they don’t have a good nest they will find somewhere else to lay and it’s not a pleasant surprise when you walk through the tall grass and step on a pile of eggs.

3. This is the most likely scenario in this case. It’s hard to stop them when chickens start eating their own eggs but fortunately there are several different things you can do to prevent this from happening, and hopefully to stop them if they’ve already started. First, never ever feed chickens egg shells. Chickens do need calcium in their diet to create the shells on the eggs but feeding them their own shells is not the way to do it. Buy a bag of oyster shells at your farm store. They are only around $12 – $14 for a 50lb bag and that will last a long time. In fact I think we bought ours over a year ago and we still aren’t out yet. Just mix a little in with their regular feed each day to get them to lay nice, hard shelled eggs. This will also prevent them from accidentally cracking if they eggs get dropped too hard when they are laid, and when a chicken finds a cracked egg, they will peck at it and eat it. Eating eggs could mean that the chicken has a lack of protein in their diet. You can check this problem by looking at the color of their beaks. If they are purple or have a purple tinge to them you can be sure they need more protein. Free range chickens have less of a chance of getting a protein deficiency because they are outside and can eat more bugs. To get more protein in their diet you can also feed them clabber, which I talked about in my article about making clabber from milk .

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A treatise on the law of wills, including also gifts causa mortis and a summary of the law of descent, distribution and administration