Sneaky Hens

 Being Spring, my hens have been laying eggs like crazy.  Way more eggs than I can use in a week.  I need to get an 'eggs for sale' sign put up at the end of my driveway and figure out a creative wording to use on the nearby community Facebook pages so that I can advertise my eggs without getting a slap on the wrist from the FB censors for selling animal products (apparently violates their policy).

The week before last, however, I noticed a sudden decrease in the number of eggs I was collecting every day.  It went from 9-11 eggs daily to a range of 6-8.  Hmm.  They've got food, they've got water, they seem healthy, why suddenly are 1/3 of them not laying?

Turns out they were laying.  They'd just discovered a way to hide them from me.  Instead of laying them in the six nest boxes I provide in their coop, they were being sneaky and going underneath the tier of nest boxes and behind the extra bags of wood shavings  and bin of hay chaff (for rebedding nest boxes) I store there.

Because when I pulled all that stuff out last week while giving the coop a good Spring cleaning, I found not just a handful of 'missing' eggs, but TWENTY-NINE of them!!

Darn sneaky hens.

Low-Key Cleaning

 Recently, DH said to me "I have an idea, kind of a New Year's Resolution but let's start on April 1st, since the year began almost four months ago.  My idea is, everyday, let's find something to throw away.  Something that's been laying around that is either junk, or broken that we're never going to fix since we haven't all ready, or things we don't even know why they're here anymore."

Since he's usually one to not clean until he gets this fit to clean an entire room/garage/basement NOW and it takes an entire day or weekend and involves me no matter what I'd actually had in mind for that day/weekend, I though this dispose of one thing per day idea was a great one.  Something that's low-key, should be fairly easy to maintain, and over time will result in less clutter.  Plus, it's a good way to start a new habit: looking at what he/we tend to save and learn to let go of it sooner rather than years (or decades) later.

So far, so good.  Some days I see two things and I throw them both away rather than saving one for tomorrow.  And he's managed to see/find one thing each day no matter how busy his day is; like the day he had to go to work in person plus had a Board of Ed meeting that evening and was gone from home 11 hours of the 16 he was awake.

I have to admit, in case the obvious trash-bound items start to get harder to see on casual observation, I jotted down a list of things to look through, or places to look for long-forgotten unnecessary items.  Like the drawers in the low-table that's been down in the basement for about a decade and a half.  What's even in those drawers??  I haven't opened them in at least five years.  More than likely everything in there can go.

Since we tend to keep stuff until it's totally worn out, and even beyond that point, most of our destined for the trash can items are not in any condition to rehome. "Good" stuff with life left in it is going in a different place; a box that will either be donated to a charitable organization or listed online for free/cheap once a month.

Another low-key cleaning method I find myself employing when I don't want to be overwhelmed by the concept of doing one room top-to-bottom (mostly in the case of decluttering a room) is what I think of as stream-of-consciousness  cleaning.  I'll start in a room and say "What doesn't belong in here?"  Then I'll pile together anything in that category that go together in a different place (say, papers needing to be filed).  I usually end up with a couple of piles. Once I've been around the room, I'll take the biggest pile and put it in the room it actually goes in. While I'm there, if I see something in that room that doesn't belong, I'll grab it and put it in the spot/room it does belong.  Then I'll return to the first room, grab another pile, and repeat the process.  

If I actually get the first room done, all piles removed and put away properly, if I still feel like cleaning or have time in my designated cleaning time slot to spare, I'll look around whatever room I ended up in (the final pile from the first room) and ask myself the key question "What doesn't belong in here?" And the pile-making begins again.

It's kind of backward from what most cleaning gurus recommend to do, but sometimes it's the only way I can stay motivated to finish a room.  By leaving the room even for a few minutes and then coming back to it, I feel less like it's a dreaded task I have to fulfill and more like something I want to do during that time slot.  Like I'm not restricted to that spot until the room is spic and span (which makes cleaning feel like a dreaded task) but that I'm free to come and go at will, as long as I take something with me and put it away while I'm gone.

Horse Update, April

 The barn has gotten a ton of DH's and my time and attention this past month.  All stall walls are up, two stalls totally completed with stain, and mats installed on the floors.  The other two stalls have the first coat of stain on the walls, have the gravel floors leveled and tamped, and are ready for mats.

dividing wall between stalls

matted and ready for occupancy

the final two, just need floor mats

looking down the aisle at the four totally finished stalls

Once we had a stall totally completed, I moved the LBM into it.  She and the Poetess really needed separating.  They were having a territorial dispute over the dividing wall between their stalls, and it was taking a beating.  Since moving the LBM across the aisle feeding time (and any time they are indoors) is so much more peaceful.  No more kicking or biting the wall.  Those two get along fine outside, but inside, there was just too much estrogen for the space.  (I really hope future boarders are mostly geldings!)

As mentioned in March's frugal post, I bought a few landscape timbers, got ahold of some exterior grade house paint for free, and painted them white.  Now I have ground poles to work the horses over.  Poetess was familiar with the concept, having done some pole work last fall at the place I'd boarded her, but the LBM wasn't sure what that white thing was lying directly in her path.  She willing followed me over it in hand, after giving it a thorough sniffing, and has been a champ about going over it on the longe line and under saddle both at walk and trot.

freshly painted landscape timbers;

reminds me of brand new pieces of chalk from my school days

The grass is kicking into gear with the warmer weather and spring rains.  You can definitely tell where I longe horses at, LOL.

  

I've had some horse helpers lately too.  Faline helped prep stalls for dinner feeding when she and Buck were staying with us while little brother Sixlet was born.

K3 also spent a night with DH and I--we'd invited her to be 'brotherless' for 24 hours weekend before last, and she actually crawled out of bed at 6:30 a.m. to help with the morning feed in addition to helping with feeding the night before.  She's big enough now that she can also help by leading the Poetess (who is much more patient and less of a bulldozer than the LBM) to or from the pasture for me.

K3 crushing on the Poetess

The LBM and I are riding all over familiar territory outside the fences now, even if DH isn't home.  We even trot without a boundary!  I have to say, her trot is not my favorite, and I've decided that the western saddle I have really isn't the best fit for me; I'm unofficially keeping my eye out for a different saddle that will be more comfy and not make my body hurt after sitting the trot.  I do confess that if the goal is just to get the LBM to work her booty and burn more calories at the trot, I have starting riding a posting trot in the western saddle to save on my body parts.

The Poetess has been working beautifully in a surcingle and side reins (to test how she reacts to rein contact with her mouth).  Last weekend I added a dressage saddle to the mix, and she looked at me like "Finally!  I know what to do with a saddle!".  She's been awesome on the longe being calm at all three gaits and not rocketing off in the canter (which morphed into a gallop on a small circle to the right side) anymore.

slack side reins the first day

I think we are ready for me to get on her back.  Needs to be a day with non-muddy footing and when DH is available to hold her for me when I get on.  She's been practicing standing at the mounting block for me to lean over her back, but I want a handler the first time I get on just in case she reverts back to prior experience as a race horse trainee.  I do not wish to run like the wind as soon as my butt touches the saddle!

Sewing and Stitching Update, April

As the days get longer, and the weather gets warmer, I'm outside more and more.  Always outdoor stuff to be done around this little place here.  And I do love being out in the sunshine.

BUT that means I'm not getting much cross stitching or sewing done lately, and from experience I know that more than likely the amount will dwindle even more as summer gets closer.  So, unless we get a string of yucky weather days (and my housework is caught up; it gets a little behind with the longer daylight/nicer weather days too) there probably won't be as much to show/talk about sewing-wise until late fall gets here.

What did I actually get stitched in the last month?  Well, I got a little of the backstitching done on my squirrel.  Mostly around the eye, on the tail and one of the legs.  Only two colors of floss so far; I think there's eight colors used in the backstitching part of the pattern,

I mended Faline's (hand me down) Easter dress by putting new buttons on it.  It was missing three of the four original white ones.  I didn't have any white in that size, but I did have some pink ones that matched the flowers in the dress, so I went ahead and took the fourth button off and replaced all four.  There was also a part of the sashing around the waist that had come loose, so I sewed that back down too.  And forgot to take a picture, of course.

When I gave that to DD1, she mentioned that Honorary Son had a faux leather jacket that the underarm seam had come unstitched and he'd wondered if I could mend that too.  Unstitched seams are an easy fix (way easier than seams where the fabric shreds), so it didn't take long at all for me to stitch that back together.  Rather than unstitching the inner lining to redo the seam from the inside, I just mattress stitched it from the outside. That worked really well.  Unless you look closely, you can't even tell.  I did take a picture of that, I was so pleased with the repair.  It's about a six-inch long section.  Can you tell?

I had hoped to start cutting pieces for a quilt I've been wanting to make for almost a year.  I had the idea last May, and a pattern in mind (which I purchased when Missouri Star had a deal on printed patterns for $1 each), and a whole stash of fabrics that will work as it's done somewhat scrappy instead of with a fabric line.

While no cutting has been done, I did pull fabrics for what I'm going to call the Airplane Quilt. As you can see, there's a red white and blue theme.  It's intended for DS1, who was an airframer during his time in the Marine Corps, and worked on F-18s.  My goal is to have it finished for his birthday this fall, or, if not then, by Christmas.

My New Grandson Has Arrived!

 Grandbaby #6 arrived almost three weeks ago.  Despite being induced at the 37 week mark, he's the biggest one yet!  8 pounds, 6 ounces and 21 1/4" long!  Which is partly why the doctor decided to induce three week early.

Unlike my other grandkids, it's taken me a bit to figure out what his blog name is going to be. His siblings were easy, as they were both born during deer hunting season, so naturally they got deer-related names.  He was due in early April, and we knew he was going to most likely come via induction before Easter, and I really couldn't find a Spring-ish name that felt right.  And then it hit me:  He's the sixth!  

So, I introduce to you, Sixlet! Anybody remember the Sixlet candies?  I loved those when I was little.  He's small (ok, not compared to the other newborns, but compared to the size they all are currently), and he's sweet, and he's my sixth grandbaby.

Faline adores him

And now that he's here, and his quilt has been gifted, I can finally post a picture of how it turned out.

Knitting Update, April

 Remember last month, when I said I'd started a new pair of socks and was planning to adjust a toe-up crew sock height pattern into a pair of cuff-down ankle socks?  Yeah, I had too much other stuff going on (like having a 3 yr old and a 1 yr old for two days and nights while their baby brother was born) plus came down with a cold (a gift from the grandkids), and was basically mentally fried and ended up ripping out the entire 30ish rows I had knit on the sock because somewhere, somehow, the pattern was off and the desired design wasn't appearing the further I knit.  It was just a garbled, unrecognizable mess.  Which, since I was using solid color yarn, tells you how badly it was going.  I mean, with wildly dyed yarn that has lots of short color changes it's not hard to have the pattern get lost.  But yarn that is all one color, without even tonal changes?  Yeah, it was turning out that awful.

So, start again.  But this time, because I knew I was brain-dead and just wiped out, yet I still wanted to add a new pair of short socks to my wardrobe, I picked a pattern that was SIMPLE and written cuff-down.

This time around, I am making the Churfirsten socks from the book Operation Sock Drawer, although I am altering them to be only ankle socks.   I have an entire 19 rows done at this point, woo hoo!  17 of those rows are the cuff, so pretty easy and repetitive stuff. So far, so good.

I finished reading Beer and Loathing by Ellie Alexander (good, good, good, as usual from her) and managed to read two more books, one of which was very short:

Neurodiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer.  This is basically her doctoral thesis that apparently helped to spawn the phrase 'neurodiversity' but, I felt, it didn't really go into the detail I had hoped it would.  It was pretty short, so I did plug away and read the whole thing, but it wasn't what I had hoped it would be when I requested it from the  inter-library loan system.

Canary Girls, by Jennifer Chiaverini.  This one was interesting, partly because I like history, and partly because my own grandmother had worked in a munitions factory in WWII (the book takes place in WWI in England, so not exactly the same time or locations as my Grandma's southern US war experience) for a while until she turned yellow too.  Overall it was a good read, although I do have to say that in parts it felt like reading a high school history report--you know the kind, when you'd look up facts, try to put them in your own words and fit them into the outline your teacher assigned--more than a novel.

Right now I'm about 100 pages into The Tattered Quilt by Wanda Brunstetter.  It's okay.  Not great (although I tend to be a bit pedantic when it comes to assessing writing), but I will read it all the way to the end.  Mostly because I've all ready predicted what the ties between characters will develop into and I want to find out if I'm right.  LOL.

Frugal Accomplishments, March

Where did March go?  It was, apparently, a really busy month for me, because even though it was 31 days long, it flew by.   We did manage to do some frugal stuff during that time, though:

We ate mostly from the cellar, pantry and freezer.  This included a from scratch-ish banana cream pie (scratch-ish because the filling was pudding mix, but I had that mix in my pantry from a bulk buy summer before last!)

I cut DH's hair. He likes it really short, and at about the 5-week mark I can tell he's due for another haircut.

We needed to get some more wolmanized lumber and sheets of OSB for building the rest of the stalls in the barn, and I needed more stain/sealant for the wood, so we utilized a coupon for $25 off a purchase of $150 put on my Home Depot card and made one big shopping trip instead of getting a little now and a little in a month or so.  I'd been wanting to get some landscape timbers to use as trot/ground poles for working the horses over, and it just so happened that by adding 3 landscape timbers to what we all ready planned to purchase on our shopping excursion got us to that magic $150 mark.  So, when the cashier applied the coupon, my landscape timbers (plus about $4 more worth of lumber) ended up being free!  And then a few days later when the purchase appeared on my credit card I paid it off, so no interest accrued.

Then I asked Brad (who works at his family's painting business) if he knew of any white exterior paint that I could get for cheap.  He found a leftover mostly-full gallon of just that exact paint that had been at the paint shop for over a year, and offered it to me in exchange for some eggs, potatoes, onions, and garlic.

Tractor Supply ran a great deal for 25% off the log splitter DH has been contemplating buying to replace our old one that is currently not running (and he's tired of fixing).  So he stopped contemplating, and bought it.  By putting it on my Tractor Supply card rather than paying cash, we got another 5% off.  (And when the transaction appeared on the account, I paid it off with the cash we'd planned to use for the purchase).  30% off a brand new log splitter is tough to beat.  

(And now that he has a new one, he's actually decided to go ahead and fix the old one--with help from DS1--and put it up for sale.  Yay!  Even used, if it's running he can sell the old one for more than half of what we ended up paying for the new one.)

I found a deviled egg tray that holds an entire dozen eggs (so, 24 deviled eggs) for $3.29 at Goodwill.  I've been looking for about six months for one that holds more than 12 deviled eggs and is of good quality.

I went to a local book swap on the 30th and came home with eight books.  

Two other frugal things I did that weren't directly for me/my financial situation:

I mended the sash on a hand-me-down dress that Faline had been given and she wanted to wear for Easter.  It was also missing 3 buttons, so I replaced those using some I have in my button stash.

Honorary Son had a faux leather coat that one underarm seam had come out of, and I stitched that back up for him, so he was stylin' at Easter too!