Author: Cabincrafted1

     This morning at 8 a.m., hubby checked in for outpatient arthroscopic knee surgery to see why and or repair whatever has been causing him pain for the past 8 weeks.  I had prepared a bag with knitting and magazines and ended up with his newspaper for the wait.  Last night neither of us slept, maybe getting a two hour nap after 4 a.m., but nothing more.  The wait was in his pre-surgery room for two hours while he was taken to surgery then recovery before he was returned to finish recovery.  My best laid plan to entertain myself was a complete fail, I was too tired to read, too unfocused to knit on the project that I had taken, so mostly I just sat.
     Though he seemed to be feeling a fair amount of pain right after, he seems to be reasonably comfortable now, sitting in his recliner with his leg elevated and ice on it.  After settling him in with his ice pack and a beverage, I measured the yarn that I made last night, about 213+ yards of fingering to sport weight.  The photo taken in daylight shows the more muted colors.  There is more of the fiber to spin into a maybe another 100 or so yards, then it will be washed and set aside until I decide what it wants to be.

     I’m hoping that his recovery continues to be easy and that we can soon resume doggie walks and horseback riding.

     After two nights of going to bed very late for me and getting up at my usual time, driving to Northern Virginia to return our son home after his week of work for us and then back the next day, followed by one of my nights where sleep must have been optional as I only slept for 4 hours in the early morning, last night I slept soundly for a good night’s rest and have slugged around today.
     The usual chores were done, feeding the dogs, watering and letting the pullets out of the hen house, a bit of house cleaning as the dogs seem to create more hair on the floor than they wear, but that is another story.  After lunch, I decided to just take it easy.  I have read a bit, spun a bit, and prepared a bag to take while sitting in the waiting room tomorrow while hubby has arthroscopic knee surgery to find out or fix whatever has been causing him pain for the past 8 weeks.  We stocked up on some lunch foods and a few days worth of other groceries, but basically just took it easy.

      The fiber that I am spinning is Merino and Silk, the colors are called Jamaica.  It is a pretty blend of shade that look much bolder in this picture than in reality.
      This will be the last fiber that I spin on this wheel as I was lucky enough to score a new used Ashford Kiwi II today that should arrive within a few days.  This has been a nice starter wheel and the person who has expressed an interest in her is a new spinner and I’m sure she will love her as much as I have as I learned.

     Wow, what a whirlwind week.  Eldest son came for a week between his school and his summer job to help us with work that we either lack the skill to do or for reasons of safety, shouldn’t do.  Over the years, I have developed some carpentry skills, can operate safely, a table saw, a circular saw, power drills and sanders, so I make a good carpenter’s helper, but I don’t do very good on my own when it come to making items bigger than a bird house or a spice rack.  Given instructions, I can follow them. 
     The week involved moving a bi-fold door, then building, finishing and hanging a new door, see post from Wednesday the 22nd.  I was a cutter and holder on this project.  This was a project for which we lacked the skills.
     The main job for which safety was an issue, was going up on the metal roof of the front porch and the front of the house and staining the 3 dormers.  Our son who spent 10 years between his bachelors degree and his masters degree doing carpentry and stone mason work in New Orleans, Asheville, and on our log home, and is still young enough and flexible enough to get up there safely, took care of that job.  I would go 2/3 the way up the ladder to hand him items he needed, collected items he no longer needed, but otherwise worked on other projects.  He spent the better part of a day up there only to have horrendous thunderstorms that night and we worried that the stain would be damaged.  It seemed to have survived ok, but it then rained for the next two day off and on.  Friday morning, it finally cleared, but the wind was howling and we were a bit fearful for him going up again, but he did and managed to finish the job. 
     On the rainy days, he worked on building a chicken ark/tractor, a portable coop and run for the meat birds, to get them out of the temporary pen that I put together a few weeks ago, in hopes that I will continue to raise meat birds for him.

Chicken ark minus roof

     On Thursday morning, while waiting to see if it would clear and dry off, we got in about an hour at the shooting range for some target practice. Since it didn’t clear,  he was working on constructing the ark and I was learning home brewing and made 10 gallons of beautiful stout style beer that is burbling happily in the root cellar.  Friday morning, I got up early and made the third batch, putting another 5 gallons working with the other 10 and then worked on the ark while he finished the staining.  We finally quit after 5 p.m., cleaned up and drove the four plus hours to Northern Virginia to return him home arriving at midnight.  The ark is not quite finished and another of our tasks not completed, so he and our grandson are going to ride the bus back down next weekend to finish those jobs and try to get the back deck re-stained.

15 gallons of racked stout fermenting

     This morning was spent helping with errands, including a clothing run for son, a grocery run for their family and looking for birthday presents for grandson from us and his parents.

Oldest grandson with what is to become his birthday present from his parents along with lessons.

and with his new bike, the gift from us.

    After helping them run errands in Northern Virginia this morning, as they don’t have a car and then taking them out to lunch, I did the return drive to the mountains, home just in time to prepare our dinner, feed the chickens and collapse in my recliner.  It has been a busy, busy week and I am tired.

     Nearly 10 years ago, eldest son, who is currently visiting and doing some work for us, began experimenting with fermenting vegetables and homebrewing.  Having attended or hosted several events where his homebrewed beer, mead, or rootbeer were served, I can attest to his ability.
    Three years ago, we had 2 of our children marry within 3 months and eldest son and our daughter by love as their wedding gift, made 15 gallons of  varieties of beer for each of the celebrations and it was very well received.
     In August, we will be celebrating the baptism of two of our grandchildren and the 90th birthday of my father on consecutive days at the location that my cousins, siblings, father and stepmom and friends vacation each summer.  He wanted to take 15 gallons of beer for this celebration fest as well.  I have never been present for the entire process.  I have visited them when the carboys were burbling on a shelf.  I have helped decant from one carboy to the second for the second ferment.  And I have been there for clean up session and to decant it into a keg to pressurize and finish.   
     I have expressed an interest in learning the process and as all of his brew equipment is stored at our farm and he has made his brews here for the past several times, today is the day for me to take an active part in the process.  The idea was for me to help him with the first five gallon batch.  Him to watch me do the second five gallon batch.   And for me to do the third five gallon batch, basically unsupervised except to have him lift the huge stainless steel pot on and off the stove and to pour it from the pot in the sparging phases, while he worked in the garage building a chicken ark to move the rest of the meat birds into and to house the fall crop of meat birds in August.
     It hasn’t quite worked out that way.  We worked together to measure, mix and divide the malt and to clean the equipment.  Once we got underway, he felt that I was following the procedure and recipe directions well enough to skip me to the third batch first.
     We are in the later phases of cooking a very dark stout that smells wonderful.  The chickens thought the malt grain that we cooked for the wort were a great treat.  I am a bit concerned that we will only get 2 of the five gallon batches made and as he is leaving tomorrow, I will either have to do the third while he finishes the last dormer staining before I take him home, or I will be tasked with trying to do this on my own next week and I am not sure I can physically handle the big pot with all the hot liquid in it.  Maybe we will end up with only 10 gallons this time and supplies in the freezer for another batch another visit.

Bags of measured malts.

Insulated box that hold the kettle to keep it at the right temperature without fiddling with the control knob on the stove constantly.

Clean carboys awaiting the brew for the first ferment.

Checking the temperature of the cooking grains before sparging for the wort.

The monster kettle.

First batch into carboy for first ferment.  One batch down, 2 to go.

     The chicken tractor/ark is well under way while batch 2 is begun.  A good day.

 
  Today was the day!  We decided that we really were a couple of weeks late with the big Cornish Rock Cross birds, the real meat birds and son is here, the willing harvester of homegrown chicken meat to do the dirty deed with whatever help I could tolerate.
     Out of the 6 original meat birds that I purchased, two turned out to be a different smaller egg laying breed, two didn’t make it to adulthood, and the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum had eaten themselves to the size of small turkeys.
     After doing what I could, helping with set up, getting the water for scalding to temp, reading instructions to him as he went through the process, then helping wash, chill and finally shrink wrapping and weighing them, the deed was done.
     The first one up this morning ended up being a hen, she even had a nearly formed egg of a good size.  She was one of the dinosaurs and dressed weight in at nearly 9 lbs.  So large that she had to be split to get her in 2 Food Saver bags.  Next up, the other big white bird was a cockrell, not quite as large, only about 8 lbs.
     To see if any of the others were ready, though they are only about 11 or 12 weeks old, we harvested a feisty Rhode Island Red rooster and if you have ever seen a plucked rubber gag chicken, that is what he looked like.  He only dressed at 30 ounces and won’t be good for much more than making chicken soup or stock.
     It was a learning experience.  I know that I find the smell of the cleaning process totally revolting.  We learned that it takes too much time to set up and clean up for only a couple of birds, they need to be done by the dozen.  I learned to use the new vac and seal Food Saver and discovered that you have to double seal the bags to get a good seal.  I am glad doing the deed doesn’t seem to bother our son, or they would all die of old age before I could do it, though I understand that it gets easier the more you do.  I don’t mind the washing, bagging, sealing and weighing.
     I could and usually am an ovo-lacto vegetarian anyway.
     The other reason for his trip was to do some work that hubby and I cannot do.  Son custom built all of our bedroom and downstairs bathroom doors.  We hung a bi-fold for our master bath and did not like it.  It was relocated to the storage closet in the basement rec room that was finished off last summer.  The doors are a sandwich of closet cedar between a spruce frame with Eastern Red Cedar trimmed around the outside edges.  It took two days of him working with my being a helper/go-fer to build the door and stain it.  It is in the process of being hung and it is beautiful.

     While he is here, he has also re-stained two of the three outside dormers and will finish the third if the rain ever stops.  We may also try to get a chicken ark/tractor built so that a fall flock of meat birds can be raised to keep his family in meat for the winter.
     The best part is having him home for a visit.

     As summer approaches, the schedule is starting to look hectic in a great family sort of way.  This weekend, our oldest son is coming to visit and work with us for a week on projects and house maintenance and to begin the harvest of all the meat birds that have reached a size to do so.  He will arrive by bus, but I will return him home in a week by car, so that we can take a cooler full of frozen chickens from our flock and beef and pork from the farmer’s market.  While he is here, in addition to the chicken harvest, we hope to get a chicken tractor build, the front dormers re-stained, a bathroom door built and hung and move a bifold door from our bathroom to a closet in the basement.  If time permits, we will at least measure and evaluate the possibility of putting a double fence around the garden and orchard to put the chickens in the moat between the fences to keep the weeds and insect population down.
     After that trip, I will be home for a month or so, then go to NoVa, leaving hubby and the pups here to take care of the hens and any roosters who were too small to harvest next week.  I will provide childcare for a few days and then bring grandson and son home with me for a half week visit and to harvest the rest of the meat birds.
     Toward the end of July, I will return to NoVa to loan my car to them for a month so that they can make a visit to Virginia Beach to the other grand parents and to our vacation spot to celebrate my Dad’s 90th birthday and our daughter’s kid’s baptisms at the site of our daughter and son in law’s wedding 3 years ago.  From that trip, I will return home by bus and make us a one car couple for the month.  Daughter and family will arrive a couple of days later and stay with us until we all leave for the celebrations.
     In late August, I will return to NoVa on the bus to do my annual childcare with our grandson since son and daughter by love return to school a week before he does.  By then the chickies should be reduced to the 7 hens and they should be laying eggs, so hubby will have a bit more care to do.
     Hopefully, all of this will still allow enough time to keep the garden weeded and harvested and the produce preserved.

    
We’ve been having intermittent internet problems for months.  It seemed to be getting worse and knowing that the wireless router was about 7 years old, we replaced it last week.  That did not cure the problem.  Over the weekend, it was hit or miss whether we could get on at all and often in the midst of doing something, it would fail.  This morning,  I called our telephone coop to see if the modem was ours or theirs and they said it was ours and that they sold new ones.  We drove to the next town to get it only to be told we should have brought the old one for them to check out before making the purchase (think they could have told me that on the phone?).  Back home, disconnect and back to the phone office to wait and be told it wasn’t the modem.  After telling them that both computers are only a few months old, the wireless router was brand new and knowing that the modem wasn’t faulty wasn’t helpful, they sold us a new modem/router combo.  Now I need to see if Staples will take the other router back.  After hooking it all up, it still didn’t work.   Auggghhhh!  A call for service and they reset us from their end and for now, all seems ok.

      In the midst of hooking it up, the pups were outside for some exercise, it took them all of 5 minutes to go get in the creek.  Double Auggghhhh!   They have been retrieved and hosed off.  Shadow is tied up on the back deck.  Ranger is locked in the utility room and Momma is not happy at either of them.

     Our last riding lesson was in early February.  Right after it, we went skiing in Colorado for a week, then a local trip to West Virginia with hubby’s sister for another day of skiing.  This was done with no injuries, though I did take a head whacking spill in West Virginia, but with no real lingering effects.  Shortly after the skiing, we had a string of beautiful almost spring like days and Ranger would still get in the car, so we started doing doggie walks on the Huckleberry Trail or at Pandapas Pond.  The last time we did, hubby complained toward the end of the walk that his knee was hurting, though he hadn’t stumbled or twisted it, just dealing with the 180+ pound dog.  His knee continued to bother him and after a week or two, we made a trip to our GP who diagnosed a meniscus tear, gave him a steroid shot and told him to see a specialist if it didn’t feel better in a couple of weeks.  It didn’t, the specialist ordered X-rays which showed no damage, injected another steroid shot in a different place, prescribed anti-inflammatory meds and said an MRI was next if that didn’t help.  It didn’t.  The MRI was Thursday, showed no meniscus tear and another appointment is scheduled with the doc in a week and a half.  This put a halt to riding.
     In the midst of not being able to ride, we joined a Horse Master’s Club, an adult offshoot of the US Pony Club.  The local chapter, the Sinking Creek Pony Club operates out of the stable at which we rode.  The first two meeting of the Sinking Creek Horse Master’s Club were organizational and informational and today was the first mounted meeting.  Hubby was a bit concerned as weight bearing on his knee equals pain, but he wanted to try and I wanted to ride too, so we signed up for the riding meeting.  As this was our first mounted meeting and as many of us had not been on a horse in months or even years, we did only flat work.  This was the first time I have been in the ring with more than just hubby, we had 6 of us riding, a new challenge.  It was mostly an assessment ride, but for the first time, we were taught to canter.  I wasn’t sure about doing this, it was voluntary and I am still a bit unsure at a fast trot, but when Doc broke into the canter, it was so much smoother, like a rocking horse instead of a spring loaded bouncy horse.  What an awesome feeling!  As it turned out, using the higher ramp for mounting worked for hubby, riding didn’t bother his knee and even dismounting was ok, so maybe we are “Back in the saddle again…”

     One of the animals I had discussed about raising on the farm is alpacas.  When we first started talking about them, they were way too expensive to really consider and we fear the coyotes might go after them as they are relatively small animals.
     Today I had the opportunity to go help with an alpaca shearing for a couple dozen animals.  It was quite an experience.  I was the first helper there and beat the shearers who got lost by an hour and a half.  This gave me an opportunity to get to know the critters.  Some are friendly and want attention, others are just very curious and nosy.  Some grunt, others hum, sounds almost human.  They vary in size depending on age and gender, but the largest weren’t any bigger than our mastiff.  Some have longish snouts, kind of Llama like, others that are much cuter, have short stubby snouts.

     In addition to shearing, they were also getting their monthly worming injection, which was going to happen just after they were sheared, but as the shearers were late, we held each one while they got their shots.  During their shearing, they also got their toenails clipped and the clippers were the size of my garden shears.  A few of them also needed their front teeth ground down and I must say that part grated on my nerves.
     To shear one, their front and hind legs are stretched out like they are being tortured on a rack.

Some took this stoically, others cried and spit.  The first cuts take off the prime fleece, the blanket and that I watched as it was shorn and bagged.

My job was to collect and bag the seconds, the neck, tail and leg fleece and sort it out from the hay and other material caught in the fleece and to also sort out the trash fleece, that which is too short or too full of matter that can’t easily be cleaned.  This was a lot of up and down, kneeling and rising and after 6 hours of it, I am sore and tired.  When I left, only half were done.  I’m sure the other helpers will also be worn out.
     The alpaca is not nearly as cute after the shearing.

     It was quite an interesting learning experience.  Maybe someday, I will be able to buy a fleece like that, clean and card it and prepare it for spinning.

     It is raining, not sweet spring showers, but bathtubs full.  We were almost out of chicken feed and with 23 squawking mouths to feed, and with me going to help at an alpaca shearing tomorrow, we braved the torrents to go to town for feed, pine shavings for the coop and lunch for us human types.  We got home to find our farmer friend here to pick up the morter mixer we are loaning him, stopped to chat in the barn for a few minutes, then on to the house.  The temporary coop had a seriously sagging roof, the tarp was filling with water and disaster was looming.  As that pen is the testosterone bin anyway, I felt sure that gallons of water suddenly dousing the only dry spot of their pen would not be welcome.  I was already wet, so a little more time in the rain wasn’t going to melt me, I haven’t been accused of being made of sugar for many decades.
     Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the giant Cornish Cross meat birds, that look like turkeys at this point, go through food and water faster than the other 21 combined and they were unhappy with me for neglecting them this morning.  They are so fat that they can’t even get up in the coop and just huddle under it.  I did erect temporary walls on two sides to try to keep them dryer and put a feeder and waterer under with them to meet their needs.

Tweedle Dum and Lucy, quite a size difference

     Last night, I decided that three young roosters in the hen house was not working, so I captured one of them and moved him to the testosterone pen where since he couldn’t pick on the pullets any more, he would get in a fight with another rooster.  I captured two of the pullets that were in that pen (the meat birds to be) and transferred them to the hen house.  That left two roosters in with the girls.  After thinking about it last night and wondering if I will have enough hens to produce the eggs I desire, I moved two more pullets in the rain today and captured another rooster from the hen house to cull.  That still leaves two young roos in the hen house and one of them will have to go, but I am waiting until closer to harvest day to see which one has the better disposition.

The foreground 4 are now happily in the warm dry henhouse

     In the middle of the relocation, I hit on a solution to tent the tarp a bit, to run the water off instead of it pooling.  First I had to get rid of the pool that was already there.  Using my upper back and the back of my head, I stood up and the back staples came out of the tarp, 10 roosters and 2 pullets, along with my feet got doused.  They ran out into the rain, figuring out there it was coming in drops, not buckets and looked at me like I was the meanest creature of all time.  The tarp is now tented in the middle with an expansion pole inside a bucket, the back side of it is restapled and they can again get in out of the rain.  As a consolation, I gave them a second perch.
     My wet clothes are drying, I am warming up, chicks are tended.