The chickens are enjoying the lack of cold and have spent most afternoons pecking and scratching about the place. As you can see the flock is well integrated now.
Honey's a bit wider and starting to waddle a little but not much. When the goats are laying around in the afternoon sun, it just looks like she's had a good meal. The vet will be by in a couple weeks to give both goats their annual vaccines. Giving Honey her vaccine 4 weeks before kidding means the babies get a free ride on her antibodies until they're old enough for their first shots at two months old.
I've been trying to keep track of everything for the farm and house on paper and that just was NOT working, especially for the things that have to happen more than once. It's sometimes hard to keep track of the last time the filter on the cat's water was changed (for example) and it's even harder when there's two people who might have done it; which is why Hugslut and I have been developing our household systems so that the little things don't fall through the cracks.
We're using a project management program now and it seems to be helping because we can mark tasks with any combination of start dates, due dates, sub-tasks, tags, and even mark a task as "waiting on"/"blocked by" another task that has to be done first. I've also found that with a little tweaking, we can now even use it as our meal planning and grocery list app.
Getting organized like this has been on both of our mental lists for a while and I'm feeling less stressed out knowing that everything is in one place and if I'm not sure what to do next, I can confidently just look there.
We're also looking into getting a whole home battery backup for the times when the power goes out. Much quieter and more convenient than a generator, especially since the outages here rarely seem to last a whole day. This will let us run the well pump and water UV system as well as keep the fridges and freezers cold. The system we're looking at should even allow us to run The a heatpump to keep the pipes from freezing in the middle of winter (But not both heatpumps let alone the baseboard heaters, so a long outage in the winter would still mean bundling up).
The spring sunshine is finally strong enough, and the nights are above zero for over a week straight at a time which has allowed the greens I planted in the fall to actually start growing! I harvested a bunch of salad greens and planted some other seeds like peas and carrots.
It was SO good to have fresh greens from our own greenhouse again. :-) I found a deal on beef at the grocery store to slowcook in the crockpot, and made a goat cheese and basil dressing for the salad greens.
It's not all been lovely. I've been trying for weeks now to get Samsung to send me a replacement part for our fridge. It's not the end of the world but it's just so frustrating that they've sent me the wrong part TWICE now and if I were to buy the correct part directly it would make my entire fridge out of warranty.
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| The broken original with the first wrong part. |
I got them on the phone and after a BUNCH of time we figured out the first person wrote down my fridge's model number with a letter O instead of a zero... okay well mistakes happen. He sent me a link and I confirmed that the one he was showing me was the right part... and then they sent me this.
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| The broken original with the second wrong part. |
I already got back in touch and got it escalated to a supervisor and all that and HOPEFULLY they'll be sending the right part now. I also asked that they look into how on earth they sent me the right part for the wrong fridge and then the wrong part for the right fridge... but I don't hold out much hope.
Thankfully the fridge isn't missing an essential part and it's just the thing that helps keep the door shut snug but damn. I'm also trying to get a replacement part for one of our windows. So there's been a BUNCH of back and forth with folks who MIGHT be able to help. I was supposed to get a call back on that one last Wednesday but... **shrug** Guess I'm calling them again this week.
I made a "deer resistant" flower bed along the driveway this past Friday, and nature decided to have one more snow the next morning. It all melted by the end of Sunday (which was yesterday) so it seems mother nature played her April Fools Joke a couple days early.
Here's a little drawing by The Latest Kate that I ran into the other day when I needed it. Hope it helps someone else.
