Child with Zeke (wife taught him to sit on furniture)

We sold another lamb and the processing guy came today and took him away.  In a couple of weeks our customer will have grass fed lamb ready for the dinner table.  I came home early to seperate out the sheep and get boy #3 in our holding pen.  I wanted a live weight on him so I spent five minutes chasing him around in the barn before wrangling him and carrying him to the scale.  He weighed 85#.  I let him go and he ran back to join everyone else.  I then spent another 10 minutes sorting him into the holding pen.  Zeke tried to help me sort the sheep in the holding pen, but he got rolled again by one of the Baker ewes.  He held his own this time, snapped and barked back.  He is getting wiser and more mature.  He did run out of the holding pen and would not come back.  He is scared to go through the sheep side of the barn.  After getting ambushed on multiple occasions he has learned to be leery of enclosed spaces with lots of animals. I had to bribe him three times to get him to run through an empty room.  He scrambles up the haystack like a champ now.  I now tell him we are going to “work” when we go out to work with the sheep.  He already knows the times we take care of the animals and waits by the door for us.  He gets anxious if we don’t go out on time.

We found the body of that missing lamb buried in the bedding.  I moved the body near the opening so I could take it up to the bone yard in the afternoon.  When I went out to feed this evening it was gone!  I know a cat didn’t take it the thing weighed the same as a cat.  Amazing how things just disappear and reappear. 

Computer stand made out of scrap pile.

Annmarie wanted our computer monitor to sit a little higher on the desk. She wanted me to make an upside U.  I thought about it, looked at the monitor which sits on three legs, and made a boomerang shaped shelf.  It works great!  I am still amazed at how much can be accomplished with a table saw, compound miter saw and table top sander.  It took me an hour to dig around, find some right size scraps, cut them to length, sand them and screw em together.  Job accomplished and wife is happy. 

Only time the computer desk will be clean.

First green egg of the year.

Color on the walls, still need to pull down dividing paint tape.

I came home this evening to the headlights of the old wheat truck lighting up the driveway.  I happened to be on the phone with Annmarie and told her I thought her brother was finally out working on the truck.  I promptly forgot about it and went out to the barn to do the feeding chores.  When I came out of the barn Annmarie had a flashlight and was telling me that no one had turned on the headlights.  They magically turned themselves on and when I opened the door I could not get them to turn off.  Now mind you, when I was getting hay I couldn’t get the headlights to work!  I had to disconnect the battery to get the lights to turn off.  So now the truck needs brakes and a new light switch. 

I finished painting the spare bedroom today.  The final coat on the ceiling was the only thing left.  Luckily, the ceiling only took one coat of paint.  The walls are so dark that they took three coats of paint to get a nice deep even luster.  Tomorrow I will be able to take the tape off the walls (I used it to keep a nice straight line from the ceiling color) and it will be done!  I still need to strip a little paint off the door trim, but I am leaning toward just using the palm sander to finish it off.  I will start emptying the room so I can lay down a coat of paint stripper around the edges of the room.  They painted the outside edges around a large central piece of linoleum.  Once I strip that paint off I can start sanding.  I am hoping to get started on sanding next week.  I am going to cut the shelves to the right length tomorrow.  Once the floor is finished I will be able to just pop the shelves in and load them up.  With all the fresh paint I won’t sand until next week to give the paint some time to cure.  I really want to make a storage/laundry closet downstairs in the laundry room.  It will go in our current unused corner, the bottom 18 inches would be a spot for all our boots.  Then four divided bins for our laundry (whites, lights, darks and delicate).  This would be 4 feet high for a total of 66 inches tall, leaving 25 inches left to the ceiling.  I can get two more 12 inch shelves above the laundry.  The whole thing can be 18 inches deep.  Since it is that deep I may even be able to shrink the laundry storage height.  I would like to squeeze in one more shelf.  I have the whole thing designed in my head.  I even know how to attach it to the walls and add a floor just off the tile. I even have most of the lumber out in the old house…

The light in the chicken coop is working.  We collected 10 eggs today and the first green one!!  Totally cool.  I have been waiting for the green eggs to start back up.  Zeke finally learned to ring the bell today consistently.  Too bad he only rings it so he can run out and eat thrown out food in the compost pile!  Damn dog is too smart for his own good. 

We had another baby lamb.  One of our first time moms (#15) had a single baby girl one day while Sarah was in the hospital.  They are both doing fine.  Annmarie bought me an animal grease pen.  We have so many babies it is hard to keep track of who belongs to whom.  So I am going to write the mother’s number on the baby’s side. 

Our child is in the hospital sick again, so we are just maintaining.  I have been coming home and taking care of the animals.  Yesterday, I got Zeke to run up a very steep hay pile and hang out 12 feet off the ground on top of the hay.  This let me throw bales off the top and not crush the puppy.  He is getting better.  I am trying to get him to understand the word “guard”.  When he watches the open door and keeps the sheep from passing I tell him he is “guard”ing the door.  Works so far.  I did mount a new chicken light to a wooden pedestal on Thursday.  It has an enclosed glass cover and then a strong metal wire basket over that.  I wired it to an extension cord directly and screwed it to the ceiling in the coop this morning.  It was working great when I got home.  Amazing how much more light there is when it comes from the ceiling.  Now hopefully, we will get more eggs.  I recounted last night and we have 29 laying hens and are only getting around 7 eggs/day.  Some of them should be old enough to lay this month.  I am going to have to get our friend Doom to make me a few more wooden eggs.  The chickens have lost two of the wooden eggs and are now currently laying in the same nest boxes.  So I would like to put 2-3 eggs in the upper boxes to get them to move into the upper boxes.  We will see if he has the time.  No new baby sheep recently.  We still have at least three more pregnant ewes.  Two of those look like they are going to pop any minute.

Well, the spare room is going to need a third coat of gold paint.  The dark color is very hard to paint on and get an even coverage.  I dug out the step ladder and went into the attic, dug around and found our back porch light.  This week I want to get the back porch light wired and the outside outlet working.  We have not had this functioning yet.  It will be a nice change to be able to turn on the porch light and actually see outside. 

I got a night vision camera for my birthday.  Just need to get it hooked up so I can start spying on the chicken predators.  Annmarie just told me there can be no streaming video to website.  We don’t have enough bandwidth to support that.  I don’t want to give up any bandwidth.

I wired a new chicken light today.  I have a metal shielded glass covered light.  The chickens will bounce right off it without breaking anything.  I wired in an extension cord so I can just plug the light right in to an outlet.  This should help with my egg production issues. 

I started some grape starts today.  One of my generous coworkers brought in a bunch of purple grape cuttings in to work and let me take them home.  I trimmed them up and put them in some soil on the breeze porch.  I have over 20 starts going.  Hopefully, I can get at least 15 of the plants to start and root.