I finally managed to get back out to the office today. My plans last weekend were thwarted by the flu! I had flu starting on Sunday and was out all week from work. Which meant I actually worked at the paying job on Friday to try and catch up. The heating guy called on Friday and wanted to know if we were ready for the heat pump to be installed. Now I don’t have power yet but we did get the wall finished last week so Annmarie told them yes. The inside unit was able to be installed in a couple of hours. This has prompted me to make the big push to get power up and going in the new box. Today I went out and wired all the rest of the switches and outlets on the finished walls. This only leaves me four outlets on the unfinished wall to complete. I got the workroom light installed and hooked up to the switch. I even managed to tear open one of the track lights for the main area and get it all set up and ready to install. The plan for tomorrow is to get the three lights installed and the three terminal boxes in the attic installed. As soon as I cut the power to the current box I can pull the three wires into the attic, wire them into the boxes and move the power supply to the new box. Viola! New box will be installed and then I can get the last wall covered.
We did get some snow, then a chinook wind and now a lot of mud. It’s supposed to get down to the low teens next week and snow some more. This time of year we bounce all over the place.
Mr Rainman came out today! He agreed to come out and help me get caught up on the office for a few days. He brought a helper who is willing to help finish winterizing the place. I have dubbed him Mr BeardMePlease! He needs a lot of work to get that beard to fill in. He dug right in and got the gooseneck hitch installed in the pickup and got the raspberries and blackberries trimmed and tied up for the winter. The pickup kept dying, but it has not really even been driven for almost two months. I need to rotate rigs driven to work on a more regular basis. Each vehicle should not go more than two weeks without getting driven.
Mr Rainman and I worked on the office. The plan was to get the East wall completed today. Unfortunately, this did not occur. We had a hard time getting the two top boards in place. There was much hammering and cussing. We ended up having to sand the board in place over the door opening. This took quite a bit of time. I worked on building a window box for the casing. My lack of attention to detail caused the pieces to be cut three different times and I had to tear the box apart once due to a piece going in wrong side out. I did finally manage to get the box constructed and installed. Once I had the frame in place and nailed in tight Mr Rainman decided that I needed to use squirt in foam around the window to get a good seal. We are out of optimum usage temperatures but I did it anyway. This meant it was going to take forever to dry. We ended up plugging in a heater and closing up the room.
The black walnut tree I went and picked up this summer got cut up into lumber today. Mr Rainman and I went over and picked it up. There was more wood there than I realized when we dropped off the tree. Unfortunately, there was not room in the old chicken coop for the wood to dry out there. We ended up putting it in the barn! This meant that we could not set it up so that we could band the boards together. We got it all snickered and laid out flat and tomorrow we will pull down some of the long boards stored in the barn and pile them on top of the walnut. I figure a few hundred pounds of weight on top of the pile should help keep everything straightened out. All of the boards are cut to 1.5” thick.
They took the pickup home with them and hopefully will come out tomorrow with an excavator. I want to get the new ditch in field #1 finished before the ground freezes hard. Mr BeardMePlease will be cutting up all of the fallen tree branches in our yard and cleaning up the yard. Once that is done then the back bridge to the wood shed can be cut up so it doesn’t get washed away in the spring rains. I will reinstall it after the spring runoff. Hopefully, we can get the East wall done in the office and the second window installed.
The puppy, Chance, looks cute but she can be a terror. We are still working on potty training her. She has not been easy.
I really need to finish finish reinforcing the berm and digging a secondary ditch in field #1. It has been cold and now the rain is coming again. Instead I am going to focus back on the office! We had company come for Thanksgiving. So our old office is back to being a bedroom until after the holidays now with people coming and going. This means if I want to get the office stuff out of our bedroom then I need to finish the office! Mind you the office was only supposed to take a couple of months so we didn’t really organize the old clean out of the in house space and just moved it all into our master bedroom. This was a mere six months ago, minuscule on the house remodeling time scale, but still annoying. So Doom helped me out in the office on Friday. I messed up big time when I started that wall. I am installing tongue and groove and you always want to start at the ceiling and work down! Do not violate this rule. I for some unknown now reason did violate the aforementioned rule. This meant I needed to cross the door in the middle of the room. I have not idea what I was thinking when I did it! I have managed to cuss myself out several times in an attempt to fix my blunder. You know it’s bad when you have to cuss the previous contractor/remodeler and its you. Nothing is level or square, the house is at least 120 years old and only this room sits on a rock wall foundation. I have to compensate all the time. I know this, I am still dumbfounded that I made this decision. Anyways, after cussing out the noob again, Doom and I decided that the only way we were going to get the thing corrected was to just split the wall in half over the door frame. By the time I trim out the door and trim out the ceiling there will only be about two inches of the wall visible and the trim will draw your eye away from my blunder. You have to look closely at the picture to tell what we did. Sometimes it is all about being able to cover up or handle the oddities that an old house presents. I was working on the trim near the machine work room I made and the wall is so crooked that I had to lean the board up, and just trace the angle. I used the table saw to just follow the line. Without a tape measure your eye really does not notice the one inch difference, because the line is straight. I have learned that if I can look at something, figure out how to accommodate it and after install step back and it looks good/normal then the technique I used to cover up the oddity worked. Since I am installing wood with color variations and defects that helps a ton also.
The feeder sheep have finally decided they may need to actually come in and eat some hay. They have been out free ranging on the hillsides and bottoms and have not wanted any supplemental feed. Even the three bulls will go out and free range during the day. I don’t worry too much about the sheep not being able to get to the feed. They always find a way.
I got another raccoon. It had been living in the barn but it has been mighty cagey. So the count for the year is Predators 15, Farm 6. The predators are winning. I got six adult chickens online. I think one is a rooster! It was not obvious when I brought it home but it was a fairly juvenile bird. I am going to give it another month. If its a rooster then I will keep it and kill my old rooster. He is not accepting the latest batch of chickens. He gets a fungus on his feet and makes them look all weird. Sarah looked it up and it is a delicacy in some countries. The coyotes can have him from the bone pile. We are only getting 1-2 eggs a day now. I thought it was the raccoon, then the lack of light, but now I am unsure why no one is laying in the henhouse. So I am looking for another dozen laying or soon to be laying chickens. We have just enough eggs for us, no one else.
We were watching a movie last night. Our daughter took this picture of me highly engrossed in the captivating film. Putting up Christmas decorations just tuckered me out.
Last weekend I was very productive! I am still in winterizing mode and there is still plenty left to do. On Friday last week, I cleaned out the machine shed to make room for both tractors. I need to be able to park them out of the weather. Annmarie, let me know we needed to get the lavender trimmed up, another winterizing chore. I broke out the new DeWalt battery hedge trimmer and started in on the task. This turned out to be a little more difficult than I imagined. The lavender had shoots super low and I had to lift them up to cut them and the huge tree keeps dropping small branches into the lavender making it necessary to clean out the lavender bunch before trimming. I only got half the patch done before it got super cold and for sanity reasons I needed to go back into the house.
On Saturday it was cold, very cold. I put on neck warmer, wool shirt, carhart insulated bibs stocking cap and thick insulated gloves. I wanted something warm to drink, my go to drink is coffee. Coffee is the perfect drink and solves most of what ills a person. I was in a hurry and ended up just boiling some water and throwing a tea bag into the thermos. I wanted to get out and finish the ditch up in field #1. I keep trying to get it finished before we get a hard freeze. I was able to get another 200 feet dug up, reinforced. I found a 20 foot section of the embankment that had been washed out in the last flood. It took quite a while to get this section built back up. It was cold, so I broke out the hot tea. Yeah, it’s tea, simply not a substitute for coffee. I only tried it a couple more times out of thermoregulatory needs, it was cold! The oddest and best part of the day was that my coat smelled amazing. The lavender I had cleaned up and removed from the patch ended up rubbing some lavender oil on my coat and when the wind let off or I had to wipe my nose I could smell the lavender. It made for a nice surprise.
Sunday I decided to start feeding the cows out of our overflow hay in the corral. Each bale weighs around 40# and I fed 16 bales to the upper cows and 16 to the lower cows. I can get 8 on the tractor at a time. I have learned to cut off the net wrapping before I load them onto the tractor so I can just drive them out and dump them off. Its way faster this way and I can contain the wrap. This year I have started putting a bag of used wrap in the trash can weekly. I don’t want to have a huge pile by the spring. I went back to the lavender patch and got it all trimmed up. I pulled weeds and raked the entire patch. The only thing left in the garden to do is to trim the raspberries. I pulled out the prime rib from the freezer. We are going to have it for Thanksgiving
I seem to be doing one of these updates weekly now. As we go into winter things definitely slow down. Our kittens came back to the wood shed this week! We have been feeding them out in the wood shed but would like to get them to come over to the garden so we don’t have to cross the bridge. I will hopefully get to cut the bridge down in the next two weeks. I will need to make some 2×6 crossing for the kittens so they can get over the water to food once the back creek starts running. It doesn’t need to be much to allow the cats to cross.
Between Annmarie and Donna the alpaca are getting pretty tame. Annmarie keeps apple flavored treats in her car for them so they like seeing her come home. They are not all compliant with eating out of her hand. Our blind one is definitely blind and still a bully. I saw him today tearing up to another alpaca at full speed, chest checking it then start neck wrestling. I was hoping that injury would slow him down.
I asked Annmarie what she wanted for Christmas and she stated she wanted a little shed for the bee supplies and her drip system tools and spare parts. So we found one online and had it shipped. I did not want to assemble and install the shed in January. I realize this may be an early Christmas present but it is only realistic if we do it now so I can get it assembled. It came this week and I spent a day putting it all together and creating a gravel pad for it so that it would not rot out the bottom. I just need to bed the back fence toward the yard and I should be able to attach the shed to the fence to prevent it from blowing over. I found a metal cable and used it to temporarily hold it down. I just need to get the spare drip parts out of the wood shed. So they are all in one place.
Chance, the puppy, is getting bigger. She is not as focused as mouse when it comes to the animals but she does like to chase things. After her run in with the front gate last weekend she has been limping. We keep telling her to take it easy but a six month old puppy does not know how to do that. Yesterday, they got out of the yard when I was working on the shed. This was exhausting so diner time was spent laying down and eating. The puppy is now limping on the other leg. We are starting to take her out on a lead rope around the sheep. I will be taking her out to the barn in the evening to expose her to more animals. She is sitting well for us and holds until released for food.
This week I went and picked up six more adult chickens from someone on Facebook. I was down to only nine hens, the raccoons have been slowly picking them off. I am reluctant to use live traps as I get tired of catching the cats and chickens. But Friday night Annmarie woke me up and said something was trying to get a chicken. This was obviously a stupid chicken as it did not go into the coop at dark. I had to run outside in my underwear and boots in 23 F weather. It is not comfortable! I spotted a raccoon under the old house but failed to hit it after three attempts. It is much harder to hit something in the dark. The next morning I ordered new batteries for my pistol laser. Someone told me there are traps that are dog/cat proof and will only catch raccoons. I got three of them and set them out yesterday afternoon. Today at 1000 I heard the dogs throwing a shit fit over by the chicken coop. They just would not let up. So I went out with my pistol and there was a raccoon that was trying to get into the coop during the day! There is one less raccoon on the farm now.
I went up to the bone yard, dropped off the carcass and proceeded to go up to field one to work on the ditch. I was able to get about another 120’ of ditch dug. I am over 2/3 done with the ditch. I still need to cut the tree out of the dry creek bottom so it doesn’t push the water out of the banks. I am hopeful that I can get this all done before it does a hard freeze and stays frozen.
Stewart Creek Somethings 