the quail are coming

Somewhere out there in Georgia there lives a woman who probably works a full time job and is a bit quirky so on the side raises quail.  She sells the eggs on E Bay because her husband says she already has too many weird hobbies.   
Somewhere out there in Florida there lives a woman who probably works a full time job and is a bit quirky so on the side she wants to raise quail.  She buys them on E Bay even though her husband says she already has too many weird hobbies. 
In the wee hours of the morning a few days ago I was sitting in my office with my dog and a boy asleep at my feet while I wandered into a dangerous section of E Bay, the farming section.  Like a middle aged man with a porn addiction (sorry for the graphic nature, but I have a problem) I stared wide eyed at the screen.  Then I did the unthinkable and typed “quail hatching eggs” into the search fields.  It was the exact right combination of words to bring up, not eating eggs, not quail egg crafts, not pictures of quail, but the actual listings for fertile eggs that one could actually place in an incubator and hatch out their very own amazing little quailies.
Math is not my strong point so I spend a great deal of time figuring out just how many eggs I wanted.  I would like to end up with 1 male and 6 females.  So if roughly half of my eggs turned out to be male and half female I would need approximately 12 eggs right?  I figure some might not hatch so made an attempt to read the reviews from previous egg buyers to feel out the probability of my hatch rate and got overwhelmed, so just assumed maybe four wouldn’t hatch.  Then I just figured that since this is my first time around and I’ve never actually been the captain of an incubator there is a decent chance that user error would maybe cause some to hatch but die shortly thereafter or maybe be still born.  Can that even happen in quails?  I do not know.  You may be losing faith in my ability to come up with an accurate set of statistics or actually raise quail altogether but rest assured that 24 is the magic number of eggs that a family my size should order.  Statistically I would have had a better chance of getting the number of eggs correct if I would have just drawn a number out of a hat instead of putting an hour of half witted predictions into some made up equation where half my input was not logical and several mathematical errors were made.  But 24 it is.   
Next I sifted through buyers until I found a handful willing to sell in quantities of 24.  I located a seller in Georgia, read the listing and then…  Clicked the Add to Cart button.  I’m sure many of you have added quail to your shopping cart.  This sounded perfectly reasonable to me and the sleeping boy and the sleeping dog did nothing to stop me so I went ahead and paid for my purchase. 
I have been wanting quail forever.  In the way that a mother longs for a baby, I have had their little coop set up for months and walk by it everyday staring at the empty hutch imagining little quailies hopping around.  I’ve always had an excuse for not being ready.  An upcoming vacation which would require a quail sitter, a job that required me to travel for weeks at a time leaving my less than quail enthusiast husband home to care for my babies etc.…  I was never ready and then the other night I pulled the trigger. 
It’s done, the quail are on their way.  We can’t undo this.  It’s happening.  I am really gonna be a quail momma (assuming nothing tragic happens).  I also have to figure out how to operate my incubator, build a brooder and figure out how to possible dispatch (that means kill to any newbie farmers like me) all the extra males.  Oh yeah and figure out how to clean them, cook them and stop crying long enough to eat them.  I had a long talk with my mom about all the things that could potentially go wrong.  She brought up some valid points like 1 year olds that might squeeze fragile quail and a dog that may eat them.  All things I will consider however, I prefer to live in my little farming fantasy world and am predicting that this adventure is gonna be fantastic.  I can hardly wait.