My belly is cheeping

Mi panza está piando.

There are three birds inside my t-shirt, a little yellow female duckling, and two chicks, green and purple, of unknown sex. They are hiding from the cold world as it rains outside, and as the gross color of city lights on smog replaces the stunning blue of the daytime sky (okay, it's only stunning if you look straight upward, because from any more oblique angle you can see the sewage-coloured film of smog between you and the stratosphere even on the clearest of days...).

I think the duck just pooped in my belly button. I guess it's a shower night.

Today's post is about livestock management. Clearly, integrated livestock management in the city involves two important details:

1. Reading the newspaper a couple times a week, and
2. Eating more greens.

And sharing your t-shirt with infant poultry, of course, but that's just a bonus. The newspaper element is all about substrate: it's the floor of their "corral" (aka wooden fruit crate I shamelessly dug out of the garbage-- more on the dumpster diving schtick later), plus I shred it up on top so that they have something semi-comfy to sleep on/search for food under, which is their favorite pastime, other than escaping and consequently freaking out. The part about greens is good for your health but also about creating lots of stems and funky gnar leaves for the chicks to eat (which is amusing to watch as they have not mastered the technique and spend a lot of time throwing around the tiny bits of green stuff). I feel like it's good practice for the steady diet of scraps they will soon be getting.

In economic terms, these animals are not at all expensive: initial investment of animals + a kilo of feed ran me fifty pesos, a bit over four bucks. I'm still using the same feed. Since the corral was dumpster dived, the infrastructure has cost me zilch (though during the day I put them in one of my planter boxes on the roof so they can have some "fresh" air and a bit more space... regardless of which I will not include the cost of building that planter box in the analysis), but the newspaper investment is not negligible: i pay ten pesos (slightly less than a dollar) per paper (for good quality reporting and quality and quantity of newsprint: the cheapest bullshit newspaper you can get runs at three pesos, but it's about a third to half the total paper of La Jornada, Mexico's best newspaper, the one that all the intellectuals read and it's kind of crappy quality paper, all color-printing too, so NOT absorbent), and I've got to buy one every three days or so. So we're talking about thirty pesos a week and I haven't figured out what to do with the used paper. Right now it's all rolled up in another, smaller fruit crate that both chicks are very capable of escaping from. Ideas would be appreciated; otherwise I'll have to throw it out. Maybe I can find something to mulch. Furthermore I don't know what to do for nesting substrate once they get older. I'm planning to build them a little laying hutch in one of the wooden things, using the wooden tray (1m x .5m, 5 cm deep) as the nest and then constructing some kind of angled roof out of wood and Congling the sucker with Tetrapak milk cartons. Thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

Finally, the topic of the richness of the garbage. This is a middle-class neighborhood, so people throw a lot of shit out. At about ten AM on weekdays, you can hear the chubby ponytailed garbage guy holler, "BASURAAAAAAAAAA" in the parking lot, where he waits around with his little garbage cart. with big objects tied around it, from which blessed apparatus I have scored the following:

1. A coffee table
2. A strange and ugly piece of furniture of which I will eventually post a photo and which I use as a nightstand
3. Three fruit crates (a little one and two big ones)
4. a stool base with no seat
5. a giant waterbottle which is now a pot for salad plants.

The Universe provides. Marcos and I are scheming of ways to get into the dump (which is right across the street) to go on more advanced dives. Further updates as information becomes available.
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Okay y'all, that's the latest on Hacienda Mixiuhca. Be safe, be courteous.