It’s Friday, y’all! (Can you tell I’m in Texas?) I am still out traveling for work, so am making things up on the fly. How have I been doing so far? It is 5:30 in Austin and I’m headed out to dinner soon. Sue has been really good at keeping me updated on the goings on at home. Unfortunately, the AirBnB that my friend Jeanie and I are staying at is having issues with its WiFi. So, I’m trying to work on my iPhone Hotspot, but my connectivity here in the city is really spotty. So, I think I’m going to have to type this up on my laptop, and then finish it on the phone. Please bear with me. Continue reading
friday update
29 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
Hey, y’all! It’s spring time around here. Blooms are blooming, grass is growing, roosters are crowing. Stuff is happening. Of course, spring time means spring cleaning and Sue has been hard at work doing all the coop cleaning while I’m gone. Thanks, Sue! Dustin broke out the lawn mower and the weed whacker and cut down the “lawn” around the dinky house. If you don’t stay on top of it, it becomes a jungle – especially by the time Monsoons hit in July. So, it’s a good time to get a jump on these things. This post will mostly be photos, I’ll explain them – as best as I can – while we go through them, but most of these were sent along by Sue this week. 
Saturday morning dawned on moving day, again. We took the RCW for quite a long ride to get it to its final destination. This first photo is where the RCW had been for quite a while. Those little campers probably thought they’d never get out of the wagon. This time, I took a video that actually came out! I am – at this minute – uploading it to YouTube so I can embed it at the end. I am just taking it on my cell phone, so there 
is nothing fancy about it. Dustin was able to help us out with the hook-up, and I didn’t even think about documenting that,n and I really should have, because it’s a pretty funny process… I only got the moving part. Oh well. One day I’ll remember everything. Anyway, this second photo is of the area they will eventually end up. The RCW has never been this far up into the upper pasture land. We’re hoping they can stay up here, in various areas, for a good while. 
Fri-yay! Yep, it’s my favorite, favorite day! (I chose that little graphic because I thought the creature looked a bit like a chicken… now I’m second guessing.) Long week is over and it’s time to spend some days outside! Well, not tonight, but hopefully starting tomorrow for me. Sue did spend a great deal of her morning outside today; a new apparatus arrived and she spent some quality time with it today. Care to guess? I can give you a couple of hints… it was purchased to fill the gap left by the high weed mower that, literally, blew up, as well as the hole that the 30 year old lawn mower left when it promptly died after she had it worked on and tuned up. Give up??? 
Quick words for today. Sue worked her fingers to the bone today in the coop. Cleaning it up and taking down the wood that she had previously worked so hard to put up. She was afraid that by putting up the wood panels inside the coop then stuffing them full of straw for insulation, we inadvertently provided a protected mice mansion. Kind of like rent control apartments for mice… they had the perks, but didn’t have to put up with any of 
the danger. Danger being hunted by the chickens. I asked if there were lots of mice and she said they were running all over – the chickens were picking them off as they scurried about. A concern about having mice in the walls was that we’d have another snake take up residence – and Sue didn’t want to go through that again. Hoping that eliminating the mice will cut down on that possibility. So the photos here are of the newly naked walls. Of course, this also means we won’t be finding chickens trying to lay eggs inside the walls any more. Always a good thing to keep your walls free of chickens. 🙂 
It’s Monday – we often use today’s post to talk about what went on over the weekend. Let’s hold to that tradition, today. You know, there just aren’t that many cool graphics out there for “weekend wind-up”, we’ll just see if we can’t remedy that sometime in the near future. On with the post… 
Guess what, guess what, guess what??? We had some great visitors last night! Our friends, Ron and Kathy, brought their sweet nieces for a visit. They are visiting from out of state, over spring break – I think? They can correct me if they read it :). Jill and Heidi are their names. Very sweet, incredibly intelligent young women (thanks for liking our page ladies!). Ron and Kathy brought them over to visit our little farm. We tried to entertain, but there’s not a lot to do. 
I find it interesting that sometimes a thought will be running round and round in my head and then a friend or family member will bring up the exact same thing. Happens with Sue and I a lot – probably because we live together, happens with Mom a great deal too, and often with my admin at work. Now, I find the connection is still there with friends back home. Case in point: when I was growing up, we had a retired Navy Chaplain in our church, Rev. Ted Herman, who never needed a microphone when he took the pulpit. I guess all those years preaching on the deck of ships at sea just gave his voice resonance. At the end of his services, as his pastoral blessing, he would intone a special prayer, the tenor of which had been rattling round in my head a great deal lately, but I could only recall a few specific words, “this troublous life…” and then vague ideas surrounding that sentiment. I think it had been in my mind so much lately because of – you guessed it – the horrendous winds we’ve been struck with. THEN, today I had a message from our friend Tracy, back home, asking about this exact same prayer. She was trying to remember it, but could only think of “grant us safe lodging… and peace at last”. So I just gave in and finally googled the few words I remembered with the addition of “Prayer” and found it. It’s called the “Prayer of Blessed John Henry Newman”. I’ve put a photo of it above. It also came to mind today because of some lodging issues we have of our own right now. Well, chicken lodging anyway. 
We feed a heck of a lot of different animals here. I don’t mean chickens and ducks and geese – I mean those free loaders we didn’t intend to raise. Wild birds of all sorts, mice, gophers, and other little creatures we don’t see; some, I’m sure, we don’t even really want to know about. We are an open air farm, so to speak, so some of this is to be expected. Over the weekend, we had two funny run-in’s with thieves and scoundrels. 
Yes, yes, yes. I know we talk about the wind here a great deal. I supposed that’s because it is a big deal. Today we actually had wind warnings through 8 p.m. Our top speed in the last hour was 50 mph. The thing is, with that type of wind – it gets really difficult to do anything outside. Sue was hoping to get a head start on the weed whacking today, but the winds were blowing her over! The chickens have gotten somewhat used to the winds, and go outside to eat and drink, but they are also content to stay indoors. Did you hear about the warnings going out a few weeks ago back east? The Meteorologists were 