I hope you all had a good Easter/Passover/Whatever week. It was, of course, an unusual Easter weekend because of this:
Chareva usually puts together an Easter-egg hunt on the property and invites friends and relatives. She didn’t bother this year, of course. There are rules about gatherings, you know. Some healthy kid might breathe in a coronavirus out there in the fresh air and die within minutes. Or something like that. Turned out the weather wouldn’t have allowed for an Easter-egg anyway, but we’ll come back to that.
On Saturday, we got several steps closer to having one of the old chicken yards secured. The yard is surrounded by good fencing too thick for a raccoon to chew through, but thanks to our hilly, uneven terrain, there are places where the fence doesn’t quite meet the ground. I don’t know if you can see the gap in the picture below, but trust me, a raccoon wouldn’t miss it.
Even where the fence does meet the ground, we need to keep Rocky Raccoon from burrowing under. We learned from experience that a double-layer of pavers does the trick. If there’s a raccoon strong enough move those, I should probably just get out of his way and let him have the chickens … or least use a higher-caliber rifle to kill him.
I sleep later than Chareva, so by the time I woke up on Saturday, the pavers had already been delivered. There are 168 of them in that stack.
I’m all in favor of getting some exercise doing farm work, but carrying those things one at a time to where we needed them seemed a bit ridiculous. I elected to move a stack at a time with the hand truck, then we placed them along the outer fence.
The yard we’re securing shares an inner fence with the other old chicken yard. There’s nothing at this point to keep Rocky Raccoon from waltzing right into that other yard, which means he could scurry under the shared fence and help himself to a chicken dinner. So we put down a layer of pavers along the shared fence as well.
I certainly got in some exercise pulling a hand truck loaded with pavers across the hill and down to the entryway to that yard.
In some spots along the shard fence, the ground dips enough that it took three pavers to cover the gap.
The pavers aren’t fancy or pretty, but they do the job. If we ever redesign or move the chicken yards, the pavers are at least portable.
We ended up using all 168 of them. In fact, we’re probably going to order two more stacks of 168 soon. Chareva wants to secure the chicken run as well so the chickens can have access to it after dark without risking becoming a main course for a raccoon.
We have one more task to accomplish before moving the existing flock into that yard: we need to get out some twine and fix a few holes in the net. I don’t know if a hawk would try to swoop down through the holes, and I don’t know if a raccoon would try climbing through them, but we’re not taking any chances.
I’m sure the chickens will be happy after the move. Their soon-to-be new home has plenty of vegetation and will certainly have plenty of bugs to peck.
Their current yard, by contrast, has been pecked down to the dirt.
As I mentioned, Sunday wouldn’t have been a good day for an Easter-egg hunt even without social-distancing orders. It rained sheets for a good part of the day. When we get heavy rains, all that water eventually runs down the hills that surround our property.
Our creek usually looks like this — I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, in fact:
After the rains finally stopped on Sunday around 5:00 PM, it looked this:
Here are some shots from different angles.
That’s why my bridge over the creek is chained to a big ol’ tree. As you may recall, when I built the bridge, I figured it was too heavy to be washed away by rain. That theory lasted until the next heavy rain, when I had to go retrieve the thing from rather far away. I’m all for outdoor exercise, but I can do without having to lift and drag that beast again.
Stay healthy, my friends.
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A creek that’s dry except when it rains here in Missouri is called a wash. That word has a mountain of definitions in the online dictionary. Love the job you do for your chickens.
It’s not quite a wash. There’s water in the creek (or “crick” as some of the locals say) most of the year. Just not so much.
Love that cartoon! There have been some reports about minor authorities getting majorly officious when it comes to enforcing social distancing.
Yup. It’s crazy. People are acting as if coronavirus is airborne HIV.
One of the things they use to believe was the pyramids of Egypt were cursed because explorers who went in died. Turns out there were viruses in there that killed the explorers.
Yeesh, those viruses must live a loooong time. (Well, I know viruses aren’t technically alive, but …)
I have a lingering cough from a cold. No fever. That means I’m not supposed to leave the house. And I can see why–for all I know, I have the coronavirus. I’m too sick to go out, but not sick enough for a test. I’ve thought of driving to Illinois for a test, but they’re rationing them, too. As for Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan–those states have gone berserk.
Last year, I had bronchitis for three months. I really hope that doesn’t happen this year.
Fingers crossed.
You got a nice full-body workout with those pavers! One of the joys(?) of having property and animals to tend/repair/build is that you never have to pay gym fees to get a workout. And, when you get through with your workout you can look back at it say “I did that!” I live on property over in Arkansas where the terrain is much like yours so I know what you deal with. It’s all worth it at the end of the day though.
Yup. I like gym workouts too, but finishing a farm project leave me dog-tired-satisfied.
The New Normal, where healthy people are quarantined. There is nothing normal about any of this. We are getting our Constitutional Rights trampled on and most people seem to be OK with it.
We’re all prisoners on work release.
Yeah, it’s disappointing to see how quickly we become sheep when we’re afraid of a virus.
Our Governor tweeted last night, “You leave the worrying to me. We’ll get through this. You just stay home and keep practicing your social distancing.”
I was hoping he’d check for monsters under the bed and read me a bedtime story. What next? Telling me to eat my veggies until I make all gone?
I guess we keep practicing until we’re really good at it.
Is it the virus we’re really afraid of or is it the threat from authority via fines and jail time, etc?
I’m more afraid of the authoritarians than the virus.
Lori get yourself some high dose VIT C, Vit D3, and some zinc.
The strange thing with Main Stream Media is they never mention prophylactic measures we should take to build up our immunity.
I guess Big Pharma has a strangle hold on that, since they provide a lot of revenue for networks.
Another thing the media is really good at is promoting fear.
Ohio and MI, will soon be joined by other states demonstrating.
This quarantine is soul crushing and people will have enough of stupid.
Every time I post videos on natural remedies, Facebook flags it as Fake News ™. There is an MIT grad named Dr. Shiva, running for Senate in Mass. who is calling for a more common sense approach to this and every item I have posted on Facebook has been removed.
Thanks, Nancy. I take those supplements and I’ve also upped my adrenal and thyroid medicines. The adrenal and thyroid medicines helped last year along with antibiotics. I hope I don’t need antibiotics this time because I can’t get a medical appointment. I’d wanted to adjust my medicines after taking lab tests, but it’ll have to be DIY.
I think we’re getting dangerously close to supposed cure being worse than the disease. I see the curve being flattened. And I also see the economy being flattened. Millions of people losing their jobs as “non-essential” businesses are shut down. I know people personally affected by this, namely the bartenders at the pool hall I play at. It’s been closed for a month now. What a difference a month makes. An economy that was booming is now on life support. All the leftists babbling about “sustainability” should really take a good hard look at this. The current situation is not sustainable.
I think we’re already past the point where the cure is worse than the disease.
Is it beyond Rocky to dig, or is it the case that this would take long enough that you would notice? We caught our dogs digging under cyclone fence into the neighbors yard once. They probably would have succeeded if we hadn’t noticed and filled in the hole.
We used to have Easter egg hunts in the Chicago burbs. After one too many freezing experiences, we just decreed that we would do it the first weekend in May, no matter when easter was.
So far, Rocky hasn’t been willing to dig deep enough to get under a double stack of pavers. That would be quite a tunnel.
Yeah I saw your Fathead documentary and your sources are highly questionable. Your “experts” have their own agenda for bashing the Lipid Hypothesis. You misuse people’s lack of exposure to how scientific studies and experts work. Nothing about your documentary is remotely scientific and you are just as bad as SuperSize Me. Your documentary is entertaining but lacks any basis in reality. You’re contributing to this misinformation campaign in America. You are everything wrong with documentaries.
Dear Moron: I’ve written multiple posts and given speeches (available online) explaining how scientific studies work. Sorry if the explanations are over your head, but it’s clear to anyone with half a working brain that I very much want my audience to understand how science works.
The “agenda” my experts have for bashing the Lipid Hypothesis is that it hasn’t held up to scientific scrutiny. I’ve explained why it doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny in multiple posts — which again, I assume are over your head.
If you’re insisting I’ve got the science wrong, prove your point. But since I can take an educated guess about your own agenda, I’d suggest you read this first:
https://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2015/03/31/to-the-vegetarian-evangelists-updated/