More hot air

Missing Items
Now the camera's gone missing.
Presumably in the same place as the toothbrush charger (missing for over 3 weeks, the key to the garage (we have a spare) and one of my gloves.
I tend to put things away in safe places on days when the building work threatens to be particularly dusty.

A Crash Landing
And boy, could I have done with having the camera on me today as I went down to give the chickens (a generic term to include ducks, geese and guinea fwol) their afternoon feed. The guineas were going mad and I couldn't quite work out why, at least not until I looked over my shoulder into the field behind me to see a hot air balloon scraping along the ground, burners desperately trying to lift it back into the air. It did so for a few seconds, but then back down and it wasn't long before the balloon sagged and deflated.

A hare raced across the field and five roe deer flushed out of the dyke where it landed, then stood at the end of my land for several minutes looking inquisitively toward the strange invader.

It was just too far away, and I was a little too busy, for me to do anything apart from be a rather amused onlooker before continuing with my chores. We do seem to be on a fairly regular hot air balloon evening route and one has gone down before, but not this close.

Big Eggs, Small Eggs, Blue Eggs, Brown Eggs, Duck Eggs...
Vying with this for my attention was a rather late second collection of chicken eggs.

Late because I did a Wisbech run today. We are pretty much in the middle of nowhere, between Spalding, Wisbech and Peterborough. I try to save up all my jobs to do in one town, to minimise on driving. So today it was the pound shops for cheap seeds, the bank for cash, Topps tiles to ask some technical quesions, which they couldn't answer (but I did meet a tiler), and B&Q for tile adhesive and grout.
I was also following a tip-off on another blog that Aldi are selling fruit trees for £3.99 each - a ridiculous price. Even if one in three doesn't make it, it's still a good deal. So I purchased another apple tree (Gala), another cherry (Morello) a Greengage and a Peach tree, as well as a trio of long-stemmed raspberry canes. The trees were going like hotcakes, unlike the ready meals!

Anyway, back to the chickens.
They're laying in all the houses at the moment. You're never quite sure where you'll find the next egg nestled. And they come in many different colours now. The Crested Cream Legbars have finally started laying rather small but very blue eggs. We separated the trio off from the others in anticipation of the females coming into lay, but more urgently because the cockerel has been having some rather drawn out and bloody battles with Cocky, the established cockerel who rules the roost. They keep getting out though, so half term's work will be patching up the fencing and doors and clipping all the chickens' wings.

We got our first dark brown egg from Chocolate for a while today too. I don't really understand why she started laying, laid an egg a day for four days, then not another one for several weeks. Maybe the weather? Maybe that's just how things work.