Status Update 12/20/2011

Where are we in life on this hillside as we work towards being a homestead?

Homesteading:
We have acquired the floor wire for the rabbit hutches, and I need to get the materials to make the rest of the hutches so we can get our breeder rabbits from Michelle Chandler. Ideally we will get the rabbits off her hands sooner rather than later so she isn't having to feed and deal with them for longer than she has to. We have fully settled on the hutch designs which I should fully draft and post on the blog. It will be a 3' by 4' hutch that is 3 - 4' high.

Habits that will have to change

(Sorry for this going up late, I forgot to hit the publish button, and instead hit the save button! Sorry about that folks.)

One of my favorite luxuries and indulgences is a warm shower in the morning. While I wake up alert, I don't wake up at my best and the ritual of showering in the morning has long been part of my ability to be full functional for the day. Given the awesomely cold temperatures we've been getting up here I've been starting to reconsider my morning showers given that I'll be out checking on and feeding the rabbits and chickens next winter. Depending on how long it actually takes to do animal care, I may or may not change this long time habit. I mean, after all, the cold will probably wake me up quite nicely.

Visiting Michelle Chandler's Farm Pt. 2

Last week on Thursday we put up the first post about visiting Michelle Chandler's farm. In that we talked about our first impressions, and her impressive rabbit operation. I also mentioned that she had goats and chickens which was great for us to see given both our long and short term goals. Today we are going to talk more about her farm, and her goats and chickens.

A very alert Leghorn watching us carefully as we intrude into her personal domain. Mind you, that is one of the walls of the goat pen that the dominant goat apparently semi regularly kicks the chickens off when the goats are inside.

Visiting Michelle Chandler's Farm Pt. 1

This past Friday the lady of the house and I went to see Michelle Chandler's farm, ask a few questions, and see a successful homestead operation firsthand. While we were there the lady of the house took a good number of pictures, and we got to see more than just the rabbits, we also talked about the chickens and goats she had as well. In a lot of ways we found her farm to be a vision of where we wanted to be in a few years.

The rabbit in the picture is Bianca, an American White who is one of Michelle Chandler's breeders. She was a very solidly build animal, and substantially harder to keep calm as I held her than I expected given how calm she was for Michelle.

Quick Hit: Procrastination

Procrastination is a skill of sorts that one learns. It isn't laziness per se, it is putting things off to do another "better" time. There are people, especially in college who deliberately procrastinate until there is a rush and they have to finish quickly. They believe that the stress helps them work better, and as a side benefit they have more time to do what they want to. While I was never a big procrastinator in college, there were definitely times that I put off until later what I could have done now so I could hang out with friends, read a fun book, or just because I didn't give a damn.

Unfortunately both with a blog, and with dealing with construction or farming, this is far from useful. That high stress get it done now thing, useless when the fact you've waited means the weather is now wrong for what you need to do. In my case, I've been rushing around in these few unseasonably warm days to get pieces of the studio done that need to be done when it will be 40 degrees Fahrenheit or over for 24 hours at a time. The up shot of this is that I have been rather uninspired to work on the blog when I have had free time. I will try not to do so in the future. After all, now when I procrastinate and mess up by having too much to do in too short of a time to manage it all instead of a private loss of grade, there's the rather more public failure to produce a blog post.

Thursday the lady of the house and I will be talking about visiting Michelle Chandler's farm. She was generous enough to let us take pictures of her operation so expect a big and picture full post Thursday. Thank you all for your indulgence.

Edited to Add:
The lady of the house generously provided this image to put on here as a preview of Thursday's post.