This morning my husband's grandmother passed away. I'm so glad he took the kids to visit her this past weekend to see her before she died. Now Tony is trying to scramble to line up a shift change that will allow him to go to the funeral (3-4 hour drive there, and again 3-4 hours back) without missing enough hours of work that he gets his bonus taken away. He already swapped days to make sure one of the kids could get to an appointment this week, so I'm not sure he's going to be able to work this out.
Today I candled eggs again and pulled out five that were either infertile, or had stopped developing ("quitters"). I replaced their spaces with eight more eggs - three chicken eggs from Henrietta (will be black sex link chicks), two Indian Runner eggs from Quiche and Omelet, two Rouen cross eggs from Dashi, and one guinea egg from Iris. Tony brought home a still air incubator. The cheap kind with no frills. I plan to set that one up as a hatching incubator for the last three days of each egg cycle. This should keep us hatching eggs in a staggered fashion throughout summer (or as long as we remain interested and have the space). There are a couple more eggs in there right now that I think need to come out, but I want to give them a few more days yet. I still have two open slots for eggs. With the first hatch date being 5/13, that means the eggs should be moved to the other incubator 5/10 to get ready to hatch. This means that starting tomorrow I can start collecting the eggs from the barn and they should still be viable to put in on the tenth after the other eggs get moved over. That way I'm not moving just a few eggs constantly. If I stagger them every 7-10 days from here on out, I should have enough eggs at any given addition to assure at least a minimum hatch of two so nobody is all alone, and I can remove eggs as we go that either aren't fertile or have stopped developing, which will hopefully keep some spaces open as we go. My biggest issue? That duck eggs take a week longer than chicken eggs to hatch, which means less space in the incubator due to the additional incubation time. I guess you could say it's a slower turn over rate (pun intended).