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I’ve just started the process of trying to convince my family that we need backyard chickens. It’s legal where we live and we have a nice back yard for them. I bet the eggs will be better than grocery store eggs, too.
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I hadn’t been paying enough attention to realize natural gas prices were skyrocketing like that until I received our energy bill last week. Yikes! In retrospect I probably wouldn’t have used the gas fireplace so much during the holidays if I’d known.
Anyway the smaller of our two dogs just got a new sweater yesterday.
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Tip: let them wander the yard and hunt down bugs as much as possible. The extra protein makes ’em good! When my mom had chickens she made a habit of walking the yard and flipping over rocks to expose bugs while the chickens followed behind her.
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Do they fly over the fence, though? We’re in a decently crowded suburb, and I’m not sure what our neighbors will think about visiting chickens.
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You can ask others who have more experience but my parents live in a normal neighborhood and didn’t have a problem with it. Apparently chickens don’t tend to have much desire to run off and explore new places if they already have their basic needs met where they are. The only reason that my parents locked them in the coop at night was to protect them from predators.
And weirder. New layers will come out with torpedo shaped eggs, mottled texture, and more than a few double yolks. It’s interesting. They seem to normalize in the first year of laying.
Ours did. I’ve been told the trick is to make sure it’s a solid fence so they can’t see what’s on the other side. We had wire fencing. 
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Think of the pavlova
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Um, everyone’s talking about the eggs, but can we talk about this? How in the hell does anyone get a $1000 gas bill? I lived in LA for 23 years in an uninsulated house and never saw anything higher than about $200. Now I live in Canada and we had a spell of -30 weather in this area, and my gas bill hit $250 CDN (about $180 US). Neither of these were small houses, either. Both had gas heat, gas fireplaces, gas stoves, gas dryers, and gas hot water.
I’m not judging or criticizing here, I just genuinely want to understand how someone gets a $1000 gas bill.
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They will be so much better than store eggs that you’ll always be disappointed by any other egg afterwards.
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Not living in LA, but my gas bill in Chicago is literally twice as expensive ($400 vs $200 in winter) as last year despite using the same amount.
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I don’t know if “therms” is a universal measurement of gas volume that’s used in Canada and elsewhere around the world but the price per unit is more than triple what it was this time last year. Per the SoCal Gas company website:
I don’t use that much gas at my house but some folks have big homes and like to keep the thermostat nice and comfy, I suppose. And who knows, maybe a few folks out there like to keep pools heated?
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Given that it’s the author’s personal bill, all I can guess is that he means his annual bill? Even at over $3/therm, average household usage in CA is 40 therms/month in the winter, so $1,000 for one month seems way out there. Although now I’m having fun trying to imagine how someone most likely living in an average sized home would use 10x the average. I’m thinking jacuzzi, maybe a grow operation…outdoor gas-fired pizza ovens? Digging the lifestyle.
@frauenfelder - if you would like any energy efficiency tips, we have some good contacts out your way 
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And if they are not, that is a whole project that you can take on to make them better. Which is super attractive to me…
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