Poor Blott and Hatred of Stranded Ribbing

I'm home today - sent Tom off to curl - because it was 12F when we woke up and tht is too cold to let out the chickens.  I hauled food and water in to them and will let them out at 18F or 20F.  This will, I hope, keep them from getting frost bitten.  The chickens with long dangling wattles and big combs have the worst problem.  Their bare skin gets wet when they drink, then the wind comes up and at these temperatures it doesn't take long to freeze.

Below is Blott, who may or may not make it.  She is, as you can see, one of the bare hens.  But that isn't the problem.  Blott became egg bound yesterday, which means that an egg got stuck inside of her, or broke trying to come out, or perhaps broke when roosters pounced on her.  I found her all huddled up in the coop and brought her inside to take a look.  She won't eat or drink - which is a very bad sign.  We rarely pull a chicken through that has stopped eating and drinking.  I oiled up a finger with olive oil and probed around and got a lot of egg remains out of her.  We are force feeding her olive oil and water a couple of times a day.  She looks a little perkier this morning, and pooped a bit, but not enough to account for all the olive oil we have put done her.  So there is some sort of blockage somewhere that might or might not be related to the egg binding.
Blott is a Salmon Faverolle and one of our dumber hens. 

I'm knitting the interminable stranded ribbing, K2 P2, on the latest Fair Isle vest.  I hate purling stranded!  hate hate hate it.  That much purling hurts my hand and for some reason carrying the two strands is worse than ordinary single strand purling.  And it is very very slow.  Have to fight with each stitch.  Maybe it will get easier/faster with practice?  I'm using fingering weight wool and cast on 376 stitches, so that is a lot of stitches to fight.  I keep telling my self that it really is no bigger than knitting 4 of Tom's socks at once - and I don't consider that a big deal. 

This is the vest kit from Nancy's Kit Knacks . I did my usual trick of inputting the pattern into an Excel spreadsheet so I can have colored squares to follow rather than just black & white symbols. Much easier for me to follow.  No, the colors in the spreadsheet are not the colors of the yarn.  I'll take a photo again when there is more to show and will make it a closeup so you can see the various colors interplaying.