Saturday March 28,2020

In honor of his mom’s birthday, and maybe partly because of birthday presents delayed in the corona virus shipping slowdown, Marc set to work on the six-year-old chicken coop. What began as a spring cleaning pressure wash expanded to include a re-roofing project (adding sheet metal on top of the worn plywood roof), removing half the upper level hardware cloth “floor” which traps the chicken manure, luring the chickens into the coop and shutting them in before hooking up to the tractor and dragging the coop to its summer location AND re-constructing a nesting box on a slant so the eggs will roll down and out to a holding trough protected from chicken poo and pecks. WOW.

Meanwhile, I strung more electric fence wire to form a lane through the middle pasture where the horses were currently grazing, to open up the next pasture in the rotation.

On a sad note, in the morning I found that Oreo had passed away peacefully in his sleep. One of DJ’s jobs was to bury him; we chose a spot near the bunny pen. Oreo was born soon after our arrival in Alabama, back in June 2010, so he was almost 10. His brother, Vanilla Marshmallow, is now our only bunny.

Saturday March 21,2020

SATURDAY, March 21—we had planned a work day, when volunteer families would gather, working on projects ranging from fencing the back perimeter fence to pressure washing the somewhat-mobile chicken coop and moving it to summer quarters. Instead, due to the shutdown, DJ and our son Marc and another helper completed another 100 feet of perimeter fence along the front. We still made chili, but just our family ate it.