Let me start with my being thankful that my daughter only has one appendix - which was removed a month and a half ahead of schedule on Friday - because we may now stay out of hospital for longer than a week before going back.

I was considering what to do for an update for today and realized that the only thing that is happening in my world right now is chicken documentation. It being the traditional month for novel writing, I have dedicated myself to producing 400 words a night on the research - and ran into a brick wall on Monday night. My word count is where I want it to be, but it’s not good work, it’s confusing, jumbled work.

The problem is that I have a lot of information spread time-wise from the Roman Empire to 1602 and covers Europe and parts of the Near East. I can tell you about how chicken coops were similar in Rome and in Palestine during the same period of time, and that the coops described in thirteenth century France were about the same. I can tell you that the way that the Romans understood how to feed chickens (differently for meat and for egg laying) was the same understanding that medieval people had throughout the entirety of our period of study and even somewhat agreed on what was best to feed chickens for each purpose.

I can tell you lots of things, but not in a way that moves gracefully from time period to time period. I have decided to scrap my original way of accumulating data and have moved to the 3×5 card method, which has already yielded a bit more order and has created a few segues from time period to time period that I am more pleased with, but it is still in the frustrating phase.

So, there will be a lot of fits and starts of my research paper here. I have a solid grasp of the information, it’s just not forming itself well enough to be meaningful to anyone, including me, so I will share with all of you while I go through the process of writing the paper.

So, some more frequent updates for a while and until life gets entirely back to normal - Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up for us, which will make my schedule exciting again. There should be more food experimentation as I also have a dish that I am entering in the same competition as the research paper and need to write the documentation for that, which is a much easier prospect because it’s food documentation and that’s familiar and makes sense.

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