Summer Odds and Ends

With the kids back at school I'm able to get back to sculpting full time.....something I haven't done since March. A quiet house is magical and I feel so ready to get back to it. Sean is still working from home and will be until next summer. He's got a work place in the basement which we need to actually turn into an office one of these days. Once a week we go out for a lunch date and I sure look forward to that each week. We tend to pick up food that we ordered online and either eat on the patio of the restaurant or go to the park to eat. It's been a fun tradition. 

 

 

We officially put the chicken brooder back in the garage. It's been in my living room since April. I put three rounds of baby birds through it this year, the most I've ever done. Usually I have one batch of chicks every other year to replenish the flock but this year I got bit by the hatching bug. That was sure a fun experience. Tuna and his gang needed a bigger place to hang out so I built a chicken tractor. It's really just a movable pen that goes on the lawn and allows the chickens to eat grass and flap around. It's called a chicken tractor because it's like a tractor in the sense that if you leave chickens in it long enough they will eat all the grass and till up the ground like a tractor. I was able to make the whole thing out of scrap lumber, the only thing purchased was the wire mesh and hinges. We still have a small pile of lumber left over from the massive deck that used to be around the inground pool.....that was taken out 12 years ago. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

 

 

We were able to get our yearly load of hay bales recently. We've used the same farmer for three years now and it's working out nicely. This was the first year with the new (to us) truck. We sold the old Ford F250 and replaced it with the Toyota Tundra and the difference is night and day. Let's just say the Ford had a lot of problems. I am very thankful we had that truck but sometimes it just nice to get something without issues that just works like it's supposed to. We got our normal 12 round bales and that seems to last exactly a year for us.The skid steer makes short work of lining them up end to end (I remember we did this by hand one year!).