I needed to get all the baled hay from the neighbor’s place moved into our barn. The real problem is I needed to move the hay from two years ago out of the way first. We have an overhead walkway in the animal area that I keep “straw” on for the barn floor. We have just started to use the oldest hay for the floor covering instead of buying straw. It works pretty good and keeps our costs down. The only hard part is getting the bales up onto the walkway! I cut a bigger hole from the walkway to the second storage room and just started grabbing bales from the top of the last two rows. As you can see the raccoons are having a fine time in the barn and have created another huge poop pile. They are so annoying. They make a mess of the barn. I will need to get up there in a couple of years, next time the hay room is empty and clean all of that poop off the stacked wood. What I should really do is just remove that wood and stack hay on top of that hallway. The raccoons don’t do that in the other hay room because I store hay on top of the walkway.
I only managed to smash my head twice on the roof beams. Luckily, I did not knock myself out. I only had a cloth tied over my bald head so I ended up with two big abrasions to the top of my head. It is too hot to wear my safety helmet. Honestly, I did not think it would be possible to hit my head while I was on top of the pile. I got the overhead walkway about 80% full and then moved all of the old hay in front of the doorway. It will be the first hay I will be able to pull for feeding. I may even just pull about 15 bales once I have the floor cleaned off so the sheep can spread it around and I don’t have to pull it from the overhead walkway!
There was a lot of sweating involved for this old man to get it all moved around. I still have a pile of netting that will need to be taken out of the barn and tossed into the trash. I gotta get all of this old hay moved around before I can bring any of the new hay from this year into the barn.
I do need to go around and fix my 12v overhead light system. The damn raccoons pulled some of the wires loose. I need to use those zip ties with screw heads so I can anchor the wires in place. This needs to happen this summer as it was very inconvenient not having lights in the hay rooms.
There are times when a week of little things turns out to be an amazing week of accomplishments. This is not normal but it is fulfilling mostly due to its novelty. This week was such a thing. My air plant is blooming which is a first for me! I usually have a hard time keeping them alive but this year I have managed to keep six kicking and one doing well.
On Monday, the plumber came out to look at our instant hot water propane tank. We have been getting an error code for months now that will turn off the propane so there is no hot water. We figured out that stopping the demand or limiting it minimized your chance of losing hot water. Eventually, you just needed to shower faster so the hot water did not disappear. It was at a point where it needed to be corrected. I had dug some carbon out of the exhaust but could not figure out how to get inside of the heater. The plumber tore it apart and discovered that the squirrel fan that blows the air was full of dead flies. Not only was the fan full of dead flies, there was a paste of dead flies inside the fan housing and on the sensor unit. All of that was cleaned and reassembled and the hot water heater has been amazing ever since! This is a way cheaper fix than replacing the instant tank.
Tuesday, Sarah called in the late afternoon to say that one of the sheep had been attacked and something was hanging out. I came home and walked out to the ram pasture. Yep, one of the lambs, 5 month old, had crawled through some metal and cut open its stomach. It unfortunately had knicked the bowel also so I had to put it down. Not a great outcome but it is no longer suffering. I took it up to the boneyard that day. It’s too hot to leave anything dead near the house.
Thursday, I started working on converting the 20V DeWalt charger into a 12V power supply base. I gutted the charger and then had to cut holes in the plastic for the 12V regulator to be visible. Cutting holes in plastic with the a Dremel tool resulted in a lot of melting cuts. My only current problem is the screws are not designed to go through two layers of plastic. As dusty as the barn is I need the top clear piece installed. I will have to go to the hardware store and see if I can find longer bolts. The only thing left is to remove the solder from the battery terminals so I can solder on new ones to convert the battery to a power supply. I just need to finish that last piece and then I can mount it in the barn and start wiring the barn for 12V LED light strings. I am going to have five strings and they will be controlled from a switch bank next to the battery. I also picked up three Banty hens from a neighbor who died recently. We agreed to take care of them.
Friday, Annmarie called about a new pellet grill she had found for 50% off. Most people have already purchased their summer grill and ours had just died last week. So we got it strapped down into the back of the pickup and Annmarie told me to just use the tractor and a pallet to move it around.
Saturday, I cleaned off the back porch and pulled out the dead grill. Once I had a spot cleaned I got the tractor and pallet level with the tailgate and rolled the grill onto the pallet, strapped it down and brought it around to the side yard. I was able to roll it right up to the back porch. There was some finagling to get it up the three stairs by myself but I got it done without dumping the grill over on its side. I then had to start it up and do a 30 minute burn to clean it all out. I tossed the old grill in the trash. We had a 1.5 yard dumpster delivered this week and I filled it up from the net wrap in the barn. I have the big barn cleaned out and have started in on emptying the lamb shed but I ran out of room. I was also able to find the skirting table that had gotten stashed out in the old chicken coop. I had been looking for the thing all week and that was literally the only place left to look.
Sunday, I set up two leg traps in my mother-in-law’s front yard for raccoons. She has several coming up to the front porch now to eat cat food. So we will see how the traps perform. I cannot have them come up to the house and start snacking on our chickens. I set up the skirting table in the yard so that Annmarie can wash alpaca fiber and lay it out to dry. I also cleaned the main windows downstairs inside and out. I like looking out them. It’s really too hot to be outside for any length of time. So I went upstairs and glued on all the magnets for our fabric frames to cover up the storage closet. We should be able to start working on those this week.
All in all it was a lot of things that got marked off the to do list and I am happy.
Stewart Creek Somethings 