It's an interesting life

Life has been interesting lately, and I have a picture of some of it. Today is going to be picture light because there's been too much going on to properly get pictures, and take care of work, and everything else. So. First and foremost, it's been cold, windy, and wet. The windy has had some interesting consequences including making the fire more difficult to light, and trees wandering around. Not like, Ents wandering, falling over mostly. Fortunately for our blue boy here, his hutch was sturdy enough to take a fairly substantial branch falling on it.


My primary concern right now is that the tree that came off is half broken, and could fall either on his hutch, on Sunshine's hutch, or miss both of them as it gets shunted off to the side by the trees it's leaning on. For the time being I'm checking it's position every morning since I can't pick up and move the hutches by myself, and with the ice around the Lady of the House can't help me even get them a short distance. Definitely a down side to putting the hutches in the woods, but the benefits so far have outweighed the detriments. The hutches are warmer, there's less snow on them, and the water bottles take longer to freeze which is the biggest benefit. I'm looking forward to seeing how things work out with a full year of seeing how the hutches do in the woods. I'm definitely seeing why there's some benefit to a barn based operation, but the lack of air contamination concern that being outside grants has been very helpful.

Rabbits wise, things are actually going fairly well, but I am glad it's about time for the teens to go. I'm glad because the hutches they're in are getting a bit crowded, because we need to reduce our feed bills, and because they're nice big rabbits at this point! Given that I've had a little time to cook lately I'm really looking forward to trying out some new things with rabbit including wanting to do rabbit and goat cheese in wonton wrappers, and a braised rabbit in tomato recipe.

Another challenge lately has been more house based than animal and homesteading specific based. We've finally worked out a good system for making sure we have a solid set of dry wood, and that's been great. We'd been having wood fires every night until Tuesday evening when I was out at work, the Lady of the House had a problem. Apparently the air tight seal on the wood stove went. The up shot of that is that the wood stove over fired, and the heat spiked up high enough to make the house smell like burning paint. Fortunately there wasn't much creosote in the chimney so there wasn't a chimney fire, but it sounds like it was a tense few minutes. After throwing a fair amount of water on the fire it finally cooled down and got back under control. Today we're picking up a kit for re doing the wood stove seal which looks easy enough. If it's an interesting process we'll get pictures and show what we did!

So that's life for the moment, and I'll hopefully go back to regular updates with photos next week!