Very draining week

A beautiful sunrise... stabbing me right in the eyes as I try to do dishes. The winter sun rises enough to the right of my view so that it isn't a bother at all. There are some downsides to spring. lol. The greenery pictured is the cores of celery I'm attempting to root. I figure we buy it often enough, might as well try to get it growing again. (I could do from seed but I have enough happening on that front.) 

Warning, this may be about 3 blogposts worth of post..... you have been warned.

We do have some important news: Hugslut was part of a downsize where her (ex)company chopped a huge portion of their workforce. Because she's a fancy office/salary type person there's of course a severance and we have our savings so it's not the end of the world. Hugslut's taking the week off (considering she had already decided to take a vacation next week) before getting back out there. She's got some great referrals and because she's coming off a well known company, finding a new job should be not too hard... We'll just be a little nervous until it happens is all.

In OTHER news: I cracked my coconut. I was working in the yard and stood up too fast hitting my head on the underside of the overhang siding. Thankfully it just barely scraped my scalp and didn't even really bleed. It just oozed for a few hours and now I have a scab about 3 or 4 inches long but only about a millimetre wide on the top of my head mostly hidden by hair. Not gonna post a pic of that but the inch & mm in the same sentence was probably the most Canadian thing I've said this year. I scared Hugslut though. I came inside and, apparently much too calmly, called out to her that I needed her to come see if my head was bleeding. I mean what else was I supposed to do? I wasn't gonna climb the stairs first. lol 

In OTHER OTHER news: The hearse is back in action! It has been SIX MONTHS since we have been able to drive it and now I shall tell you the tale. WAAAAYYY back at the end of October we ran the hearse battery dry by playing tunes and having the doors open while handing out candy on Halloween and had to get a jump-start. Well what you might not know is we haven't been able to use it since. I'm pretty sure it was about a week later that we tried to take the hearse to the grocery store and it wouldn't start. 

Over the months we tried a trickle charger/battery conditioner, we tried an emergency boost pack, we tried to jump it off the truck, we tried to get it rolling first( and then realized the hearse has a theft deterrent thing that only lets you roll it backwards unless you find the hidden button to turn off something about the gears?) AAAAAAnyway, it was frustrating and neither of us really had any inclination to fight with it too much in the colder months so it mostly just sat crooked in the driveway. 

The truck is fine for day to day and Hugslut loves to drive her lil green car, but for any distance

After Hugslut realized her calendar was open this week, she did a bunch more research and ran some experiments in jumping the hearse. On some advice that seemed to fit our situation, we drove in the truck aaaaalll the way to Canadian Tire for some 25ft long HEAVY DUTY jumper cables. These things are so heavy and cost about $100 but they can pass much more juice through them than the dinky lil jumper cables that came with the emergency kit we kept in the car.

Old and Busted

New Hotness

It was money well spent though. We hooked them up and the hearse jumped off the truck first time! Turns out that the battery can sometimes have enough juice to run the interior control panel and such, but still need more volts to actually turn over the engine. The smaller cables can't pass the high volts needed for this type of jump and the thicker ones certainly can. We were actually kind of worried the starter was broken or something and all it was, was insufficient juice. :-)

As recommended we left both cars running 10 min before disconnecting, and then we took the hearse for a two hour drive to celebrate but also to make sure the alternator had time to charge the battery and all stuff.

On the way back it was starting to get dark and I noticed... the interior light was on in the back of the hearse... We got home and started poking around. Eventually we came to the same conclusion, for some reason the hearse would just not register the back door as closed. On further investigation we found the contact plates that send the "closed" signal weren't connecting properly and rigged something up temporarily so the battery wouldn't just drain overnight again. We'll get it fixed up properly soon but Hugslut is pretty sure that's what caused the entire thing to begin with which means our most comfortable long drive car is back on the road!

This, is my fenced off garden area. I finally got everything up so lets see if I can explain this 3d fence thing... The yellow posts on the outside hold the white electrical tape/ribbon/wire. It's like, a woven ribbon with wires running along the edges and down the middle. This is what carries the zap. 

The brown poles on the inside are slightly taller than the surrounding electric fencing. There's a white cord running along the top and three ribbon lines run around at various heights... I know they're hard to see in that pic.... okay I have a pic of the peanut butter lure that shows off the blue ribbons. We'll get to the lures later but for now look at the 3 rows of blue ribbon. I also put some loose ribbon tied to the white cord because when the wind vibrated the ribbons it made a buzzing noise I'm hoping the deer will equate to bees.

I thought the lures were a key component to this new system. (The carrots at the center are really just to tell me if the system has failed.) The peanut butter, which is barely folded in tinfoil, is to get the deer interested and zap their sensitive nose with a nice big shock so they never want to come back to it. (the sides are open to let the smell out). 

That said, I'm pretty sure I watched the first deer explore the weird wobbling lines. Poor thing didn't bump into it, didn't even snuffle the tinfoil packet. He reached out with his lips to the fence line like a horse and got zapped on the extremely super sensitive inner lip! He jumped straight up so high and then ran away so fast the rest of the deer were like statues for a whole minute trying to figure out what upset him. Hopefully that was the big drama and the rest can pass by deer grapevine but there will likely be others. There was a young deer that I saw take a daffodil flower and spit it out half chewed just yesterday so clearly somethings have to be learned by each deer.

The way the 3d fence design works is this:

1. The deer learn the electric fence is no fun
2. They look to see if they can safely jump over it instead
3. They see the second fence right in their landing zone
4. They decide not to get tangled up in that mess and find an easier meal

See the thing is, with a running start deer CAN clear a single 6 ft fence, BUT the 3 ft fence that is 4-5 feet outside a 5 ft fence just isn't doable. . .  at least that's what the experts say. This year is about experimentation so I'll try not to cry too much if it all gets destroyed somehow.

I was reading up on keeping a rooster with hens and because he needs more protein than them, he may not be getting enough since I had bought layer pellets. I decided to give the chickens a couple of days of food at a time to test how much they want to eat and that wound up being educational. 

First off, they're (as a flock) eating about four cups a day, not the three and a half I expected.

Secondly, they make a HUGE mess. Henrietta seems to show off her top hen status by standing in the food bowl and picking out the very best of the identical pellets and scratching the rest out for the others to clean up/eat.

Next, they will eventually eat pretty much all the food... but because it's all over the ground for a few days, it gets dirty and wet and that's not good. Sprinkling food on the ground that they eat within the hour is completely different to leaving it there a few days.

Finally, I've decided to make a change. We are going to get some proper chicken feeders. I suspect they don't like sticking their head inside the feeder that came with the coop which was why they had a hard time getting enough calcium for a while, but they certainly can't be trusted with the big rubber feed pans so we'll have to get them bell feeders. At the same time we'll pick up some high protein/low calcium feed as the bag of layer pellets is running low anyway. This way Romeo can eat a reasonable portion, the girls can also eat what they need plus we'll have the dietary wiggle room to treat them with scratch more often,  and we'll have the shells free choice for them to take as they need. They seem to have no problem eating the shells they need from the rubber pan but I think a covered "feeder" for them would be best so the rain doesn't just make a mess.

That seems to wrap up this very full week. Please enjoy this not as good as in person photo of the full moon a few nights ago.