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You keep whinging because we don't call enough. For heaven's sake, stop! We can't call because we're busy. Just look at what we're doing. Does it look like we have the time to sleep? Eat? Breathe? Let alone communicate with the outside world! We're building empires! We're winning hearts and minds! We're forging ahead, confronting our demons, marching victoriously toward a grand and glorious new era! And we're doing it all from the comfort of the backyard hammock.
We gave up our chickens a couple of months ago because we have huge landscaping plans that involve taking down the old chicken coop. I thought it would be a relief. The chicken chores do take up a certain amount of time every day, every weekend and I thought that it would be a burden lifted from us.
It turned out that, while it did save us a few precious minutes every day, and a couple of hours on the weekends, there's a lot more to our adjustment.
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Those of you who check the Chicken Feed regularly have no doubt been wondering what happened to the chickens. It's been two weeks now, and they've not been outside.
Well, the fact is that the chickens have gone. The Pirate and I have been thinking about the next step in the Co-Prosperity Sphere's evolution, and we've decided that what we really need is more vegetables and fewer chickens. Makes sense, right? But the problem is that our little acre (and that's almost exactly what...
It took about a week to apply the three coats of spar varnish to the laundry rack, between my day job and the cold weather. I did get it done, though, as I really wanted the garage back before the rains came. The tools required for the mounting step were a ladder, a stud finder, a pencil, a drill, a screwdriver, a tape measure, a pair of pliers, and a pair of scissors. The parts were eight eye bolts, four "S" hooks, two single pulleys, two double pulleys, a cleat, two screws, and a spool of...
We were looking in a recent Lehman's catalog and saw this swell laundry rack. The cool thing about it is that it hangs from the ceiling from ropes that run through pulleys. You lower the rack to put clothes on it, then you raise it up to let everything dry while it's up and out of the way. At about the same time, I saw this story from Ode Magazine about people around the world line-drying their clothes instead of using...
About two weeks ago, we gave away nearly two thirds of our hens. Let me just say, nineteen hens lay more eggs in a week than we eat in a month. The only way we could possibly keep up is if we were doing lots of farming or lumberjacking and using only non-powered hand tools to do it. Plus, November was approaching and 20 chickens make a lot of manure. Never mind that they eat a heck of a lot of feed.
So, we gave away 12 laying hens, keeping Lucy, who's now four years old and laying...
The Pirate and I have been playing the video game "Plants vs Zombies" lately. So much so that I finally declared a one-week moratorium on the game, just so that we could catch up with sleep and chores and regain our children's affections.
But yesterday, during Day Without Electricity, I felt like I was back at it again - fighting a neverending battle wherein every time I thought I was getting ahead, something else popped up to thwart me.
Let me back up.
In...
It rained yesterday. A tree fell across the driveway, blocking Peaches and Granny in. A tree fell across our road, a mile from our house, blocking me from getting home and cutting them out. The wind blew the carport over, flipping it off the truck. The wind also blew the gazebo around on the deck. When we all managed to get home, we put on grubbies and, in the failing light, cut a path wide enough for the cars to get through....
In the past week, the dogs have gotten even more enthusiastic about ratcatching. Esme has caught five out of six rats, and Dagmar has gone from being scared of the chicken house to being excited about going in and getting rats. The one that got away was excusable, as it was dark and they were out of practice.
Dagmar now owns her team role of game flusher, yipping and chasing the rats. Esme follows her around and then shoulders her aside to dive in and grab the rat. The other night as...
The Pirate and I carpooled on Friday, so we stopped off and did a little shopping, then got home and turned off the power. Burritos ensued, and then one of the most satisfying...
While we're still working on other things, a certain mania has hit the CPS. Brain mania. This is the project I mentioned in the last post, and although I first had the idea several months ago, the wheels are finally...
