Carole made a beeline for the pile of loose sand by the pond and took a long and relaxing dust bath.

Watch her bathing (in which Rosie gets bored partway through and goes to see what the other chickens are up to):

Joan was intrigued by the idea of the pond, but not enough to do more than peck a little at the curly rush.

But mostly they followed me around cooing and chuckling as I weeded, cleared leaves from beds, and so on.

And when I'd had enough of them underfoot, I gave them a handful of scratch to enjoy in their chicken gym:

But this captures the "OMG, the aquarium is on fire!!" cognitive dissonance of the volcano best:

The live effect of the volcano is somewhere in between the two photos. It is mighty fine.

The fish are, predictably, scared out of their ever-living minds at the thing, and have been trying desperately to swim away from it. But soon they will come to appreciate the volcano and we can all be happy.

Edited to add:

Ted was a good boy, an enormous sweetheart of a dog who could be a pain in the butt, but was very dear to us. He loved to come over and look at the chickens, who fascinated him.

And he felt very at home in our house, from numerous daylong play sessions on weekends to the occasional overnight stay (when his people had a baby, and when they went on vacation).

At the very end he was sad and sick and miserable, and we're all glad that at least he didn't have to suffer.

We've agreed that Ted will be buried in our yard, once his ashes are returned. I chose the spot by the gate where he always peed as he arrived. The gate meant good things for Ted: coming into the yard to play at the beginning of the day, and leaving to go home and eat and lie down after a long day of fun.

But today Carole laid her first egg, and I don't think we will have the same trouble.

From the left: Liza, Joan, and Carole.

Carole's egg is so large it doesn't really fit in our egg carton (saved from some large eggs from the store). A big egg from a big chicken.

I immediately went and gathered several snails for her from the hydrangeas. I see a much less-chewed garden in my future.

Our first egg. Funny blue speckles on it -- maybe she'll end up laying bluish eggs, or maybe not. And they will probably get bigger as she lays more often. Nothing's perfect the first time. But this weekend the pancakes will be a little closer to home.

Joan was also acting weird but apparently did not produce an egg, so we may get two tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, Goldie had a bout of Kennel Cough, which is basically a dog chest infection. She was very under the weather and spent one afternoon outside with me in the garden, while the chickens were out and about. They all did very well together, and after that, dogs and chickens seemed to reach a certain detente. In part because the dogs realized that chickens produce chicken poop out of their butts, and chicken poop is much better than feathers.

So we get a lot of this:

OK, it's gross. But it's also much less worrying than the dog lunging at the chickens as if to kill them all the time.

Also, the chickens are larger and more able to defend themselves (including the occasional peck on the nose), so the dogs are less inclined to get too close to the pointy end of things.

So now they are locked up for the night, and with any luck we will not have any more losses. It's a real bummer to go out and see only three little faces in the yard, though.

It works very well, indeed. Especially on Rosie's extra-thick coat.

It was a trifle dramatic. I got home just in the last bits of sunlight, and they were all huddled on the concrete slab making lots of noise about how unhappy they were. When I picked them up, one by one, to put them in the house, they squawked and flapped and acted as if they were being killed. For ten minutes after I put them in the house and shut the door, they made quite a bit of noise, but eventually they settled down. When I let them out again this morning they were all worked up again.

Well, getting used to new things is always hard.

They are liking their yard, though, and especially the compost piles, which are full of bugs and seeds for their consumption. Here're some photos:

Here are Debbie, Carole, and Liza on the narrow perch. They are getting too big to be able to balance well on the narrow edge of the piece of wood, but they try it anyway, flapping and teetering.

Then they were exploring the compost pile, eating bugs and looking at stuff.

Liza was the last one off the perch, still trying to get the hang of balancing with her larger size.

One of their favourite places to perch is up on the edge of the compost bin. I think because it is well above dog level (and Rosie has been harrying them obsessively; I'm about to break out the heavy guns on untraining her from that behaviour). They climbed up, settled down, and chattered at me for a while.

And some movies, too:

The girls on the compost bin, with bonus dog pouncing at them:

The girls on the compost bin, then they start hopping down:

This is Simon. Simon has cancer. We had a tumor removed from one of his boobs last year and at the time the vet said that it might already have metastasized, and that has proven to be true; the tumor came back and lately he's been coughing a lot, too.

There are options for treating cats with cancer, but in this case they aren't right for us (us being the combination of me, Noel, and Simon). Rather than put an elderly, skittish kitty through a lot of surgeries and treatment (which he hates more than anything) we are trying to keep him comfortable and letting the disease take its course. When it gets to be bad for him, we will have him put down.

He now has an enormous tumor. It's under his left front leg, and you can sort of see it bulging here. He seems mostly comfortable except the tumor seems to get in the way of his lounging. I may take him to the vet this weekend to get some pain pills, because he's starting to act a little achy which means he is a lot achy.

This is the last cat we get Ana. When Mikey died, we got her Simon because she was inconsolably lonely. But this time she will have to just Get Over It, because there is a limit to the number of cat graves I want to dig in the back yard in the next few years.

On the other hand, there were cute little goats.

They were pretty playful at the end of the day, when the sun was going down and they heat was fading.

I made some movies of them playing.

This one started with us looking at the goats eating from their feeder, then there was a dramatic goat-fight on the pile featuring one of the finest GWF (Goat Wrestling Federation) moves ever.

And this one shows more of what was happening most of the time we watched them.

Everybody is looking very chickenesque these days. You can see here that Debbie's getting her belly feathers in still, but most of the rest is all feathery. She's about five weeks old now. I love the little earmuffs.

With a few visits to the yard under their feathers, the girls are much more exploratory than they had been. Today they dust-bathed in a different spot (one of the piles of soil from the fence post digging), and explored around the larger compost bin.

The bin is made from three pallets lashed together with brass wire, and it has a certain population of insect life thanks to about two years of service. This was of great interest to the girls.

For reasons I don't totally understand, they seem to all fixate on one area and try to get right there, rather than spreading themselves along the length of the bin. Maybe they think there's something special there. Maybe they're right.

It was mostly Debbie, though. I think those little white dots are bug eggs, and she was eating them.

Eventually Carole figured out that she could jump up and reach higher.

And then Joan joined her.

They're still getting the hang of perching -- check out Joan's death-grip on the slat she's standing on there -- but they're mostly good at it. Occasionally they will try to stand somewhere and just fall over, at which point they flap their wings and try to pretend they intended to fly down anyway.

A recent addition to the equipment is a lid for the transport box so the girls will not fly out halfway across the yard. This meant that the dogs could come over and look, which Rosie was very interested in doing.

And finally, I added a bunch more movies, of which this is one: