Getting things done.

Got a lot done this weekend, still plenty to do of course but that's always true. The Critter helped me, and a friend with moving wood. He wasn't quite as helpful as he thought he was, but he really enjoyed it. As you can see it was getting a bit chilly so he was bundled up, and I think he notices cold weather less than I do. The end result is we got almost all of the wood moved to where it needs to be leaving us with about 4 cords of wood stacked and ready to go for the winter. Our friend also did us a huge amount of help by clearing off the mess from working on the kitchen off the porch. The last major thing of the weekend was the last of the butchering of our kits from the season.

We still have a couple rabbits to butcher, but we need to decide which to keep out of Twilight's hutch since we'd let them get big enough that some of them look really good. Overall we have a good selection of meat, and it's a good thing that we'll be using the pressure cooker to cook it, because otherwise it would be tough since we let them get older than we normally would. Having already pressure cooked a couple of the rabbits, that works out just fine, and the critter really enjoys eating rabbit. Well, to be fair, he really enjoys eating just about anything and rabbit is the most recent thing that he's been introduced to now that he has enough teeth to chew it properly.

The big news is that we tried putting the black hen in with the chickens. You'll notice that she isn't in there. In the morning of Monday we let her into the run when she tried to sneak in at feeding time. By dusk when the rest of the chickens were going to bed, she and the turkeys were both freaking out, and she was just trying to get out to get back to her people. The Lady of the House made the judgment call to let her out for the night because it didn't seem like she or the turkeys were going to go roost, and it was inhumane to leave her freaking out like that. We hadn't expected just how badly she'd freak out at that.

Finally, I managed to get a shot showing the scene through the trees. It also shows quite nicely how much earlier the West side of the valley gets the dawn than we do. Of course, we get sunset later than they do. It's one of the fun things about living on the inside of a little river valley. Pre dawn of course comes well before the sun actually touches our little area, and it can be interesting to watch the line of the sun go down the trees to the ground and across. Not that I usually have time to do that of course. It's just an interesting progression to watch. It would be interesting to see an actual map of the sun exposure by time of day depending on the time of year.