Turkey foolishness, and more home work with help.

An amusing occurrence occurred that puts something of a lie to the turkeys being smart. Let's be fair, they're smart at what they do, but figuring out what a fence is still isn't one of them. For some reason the black turkey who is the (mostly) dominant turkey wandered into the chicken pen and got stuck. No I don't mean physically, I mean for almost 10 minutes making contact and alarm calls pacing back and forth along the North fence line trying to figure out how to get out, when he could flap his wings once and be over.

Mind you, while he's losing his mind down there, his buddies the brown turkey, and the black chicken are devouring every last little bit of rabbit feed that I've spilled or knocked loose when feeding the chickens. It's a morning ritual, and makes me feel a little better about the feed that the rabbits throw on the ground as they eat. Anyhow, today the brown turkey and black chicken got every single beak full of it while the black turkey sat there and curiously, then sadly, then in increasing urgency called for his buddies. They did of course eventually end up getting back together and going on their merry way into the rounds of the woods to eat anything that doesn't move and looks good, and anything that moves that's small enough to grab, and slow enough to be grabbed. I was just sort of amused by the whole exchange between the turkeys as the two who were out absolutely took advantage of the fact that the biggest and fastest eater was stuck and not able to take food from them. As soon as they'd done they went and helped him find his way out, and he was glad to be rescued. He promptly brought the group back up to look for the normal leavings, and the other two followed along. Doesn't hurt to be thorough.

The other thing that's going on right now is we're redoing the kitchen. I should have gotten a photo of the floor that's the big thing prompting us having to redo the kitchen. Not long after we moved in we found out that the previous home owner was the worst kind of DIYer, one that didn't know what he was doing and had decided to mess with plumbing. He'd improperly attached the dishwasher to the sink drain which led to leaking through the floor that wrecked the drywall below, and soaked the subfloor. In doing so it wasn't just inconvenient, it started meaning that when there was humid weather we had what we affectionately called our speed bump in the middle of the kitchen between the sink and the stove. For some time we weren't able to do anything to fix it. Recently due to various circumstances we are in a position to do the repairs we needed to do some time ago.
We are further fortunate that a friend who knows what he's doing has offered to come up and help. With the limited time I have, having someone do the demolition for me is incredibly valuable. We feel very fortunate for the friends we have and the help they have given us, and this is another example of it. I'm going to be taking off Thursday and Friday from work this week to work on replacing the subfloor and floor in the wake of the demolition.

Demolition began, and we ran into an interesting problem fairly quickly. The cabinets have an unusual system of heating under them, it's pipes for the hot water heat running all the way under the cabinets, and it's caused the cabinets to be offset from the wall. The up side is it means less tiling since we certainly aren't going to mess with it. The down side is, we're going to have to be aware of things going weird with our heating in a way we otherwise wouldn't have to. If we get a water leak under there we just won't know until I'm down in the basement and water is leaking through. Not an ideal situation in my mind given our previous water through the floor in the kitchen concerns. Given the time frame we're looking at, which is "our kitchen isn't usable" we're probably going to just put a water sensor under there, mimic what the previous people did, and hope for the best.