Sunday, March 28, 2010

Rain rain go away, come again some other day...
The girls (chickens) are 3 weeks old now and are so ridiculously ugly! They are half feathered and half fuzz and I think this is their ugly teenager stage that we all go through. It takes both of us to change their food and water because the second we lift the screen they start flying everywhere...it's like the movie chicken run. :) They are a reminder everyday that we need to keep on trucking on the chicken coop!
It was raining way too hard to work outside, but we decided to set up inside the barn anyway. I was so thankful the barn roof didn't leak! We ran the extension cord into the barn and set up our cutting table. The only problem was I haven't yet re-wired the barn, so we only had the one outlet coming from the extension cord. So the inside of the barn was pretty dark, and after a few cuts with the circular saw we decided we weren't working safe.
I texted Mariah up at the house, and asked her to bring a splitter down to the barn and an extra light bulb for the droplight we had down there. A few minutes later I looked up the hill and down came my daughter in the pouring rain, in shorts, tennis shoes with no socks, and a dinky hooded jacket. I joked with Patty that we should make her a poncho. So while we waited for Mariah I grabbed a contractor garbage bag, and Patty cut a hole in the top for her head. When she reached the barn I showed her the new poncho. I wouldn't say she was excited about it, but she put it on and it went down to her knees. The head hole was a little too big, so I grabbed some florescent orange string that was for marking the fence line and Patty laced it up the back of Mariah's new poncho.
We plugged the splitter in and quickly hooked up the droplight. What a difference!
Before Mariah left, I asked her to take a picture of the back of the barn with her phone so we could have some record of our process. Patty gave her an arm hole and Mariah walked around to the back of the barn swishing in her garbage bag. She looked hysterical trying to photograph the back of the barn from within her tent. She headed back up to the house and we continued with our work.
It was coming down pretty hard, and even hailed for about 15 minutes so we decided to take on the nest boxes for the chicken coop. We had left the picture of the sample up in the house, so we guessed the measurements and used scratch pieces of plywood and T1-11. With the little stapler that came with our air compressor we quickly put together the two nest boxes. It turned out awesome!! We have four more to go and I think it will be a snap!!!