Pictures of the gerbil lid

Gerbil Lid

Lisa asked me to build a lid for the fish tank we have Jessica's gerbil Pip in. So I designed one in Google Sketchup and built it yesterday. Here are some pictures of both the Sketchup model and the finished product. I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Busy Weekend

New Tractor

Unbelievably busy weekend so far! :-)

Friday night after work, we replaced the kitchen tap. It had been leaking for a long time, and had recently got much worse. We went over to the new Lowes in Orleans (awesome), and got a bunch of stuff, including a new tap for the sink.

It was quite the adventure. We shut the water off at the sink shutoff, but didn't shut off the house main. :-) Always a mistake.

The old (and unused) reverse osmosis machine left by the previous owners was hooked up before the sink shutoff, and there was a few minutes of excitement while water was spraying everywhere, and we had to shut off the house water (and the house water takes a long time to depressurize, even once you shut it off, we discovered.

After the little hiccup, we got the tap installed fine, and it's wonderful. :-) You turn it on, and water comes out of it in appropriate spots, and not in inappropriate spots.

All in all, the replacement took about an hour. It helped that we didn't have to install new shutoffs.

After that, we went out in the field with the tractor and post hole auger, and drilled a test hole. It works great! What an awesome invention! Now we're looking for fence posts, and planning the fence in the front of the property to keep goats in. Stay tuned.

Yesterday, we went to Yin yoga at Yoga and Tea in Carp. Yin yoga is mostly intense stretches held for a really long time: I quite like it (it was my first time).

I helped Jess with her sewing for a bit, and went outside to build a new lid for the gerbil tank. I made up plans in Sketchup the other day, and used the router table and tablesaw to construct the thing. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The design makes extensive use of half lap joints and dadoed inserts. I should post some pictures yet... Today we'll probably put the hardware cloth on, and install it on the tank.

Then, after we were all tired and ready for supper, the hay guy phoned and said he was bringing our hay in an hour! :-)

So, after we quickly scarfed down a delicious steak and potatoes supper, we went out again, and emptied out the hay shed (including the mini chest freezer that lives out there for chicken feed), and then they hay guy came and dumped off his load, and we worked for a couple of hours moving the hay to the hay shed in the loader bucket, and packing it tightly in the shed. 80 bales: it doesn't seem like that many, but each bale is really heavy (these are larger than normal bales that our guy makes). So after 80 bales, we were toasted, put the goats back in their shed, and went to bed.

Who knows what today will bring? :-)

April update

Just a brief update of what's been going on around here this Spring...

It's been beautiful! Late March we could already go out and start working on things. We've got a lot done already, cleaning up from winter, and getting ready for summer. :-)

We're tearing down one of our outbuilding/sheds and preparing to build a chicken coop.

We stripped lots (probably 40-50 sheets) of good quality sheet steel off various downed roofs on the property, should be useful when building new things (like chicken coops!)

We put up our solar lights around our property: it's starting to look like people live here! Plus, our "Beware of Dogs" sign that's followed us around from place to place.

We cleaned out the "red shed used for storage needs some work", and a bunch of other stuff off our property. We filled a dumpster with 1.1 TONS of garbage. :-) Plus, there's lots more where that came from. We'll probably get at least one more dumpster this summer sometime.

I put up some new pictures in the gallery: some happy chickens clucking around and our goats down at the bottom of their big field. :-) Fun stuff.

Lots more to come this summer, too! Stay tuned!