I worked on chores till about 9 today which is later than normal, but it was time to scrub out every ones water container which takes about an additional hour to do! It's amazing the amount of filth that can build up in a communal pig water trough. When chores were done, I had my oat meal and then it was off to the trailer! Today was about putting a tarp roll on the gate of the Egg-Mobile so that in bad weather we can shut it. I also tacked on another piece of plywood up top to seal that off.
We also built a ramp for the chickens to get in and out of and that was about it. By 1 o'clock I had successfully turned an old livestock trailer in to a Mobile chicken coop! I celebrated the completion by actually taking lunch break and eating a pound of ground beef, some green beans and an apple. Here's a shot of it's first few feet being mobile:
Once completed, our first order of business was to of course fill it with chickens. This means we had to catch 100 chickens by hand! Luckily they were in a fairly small pen, and Jim is a good chicken catcher. He would catch three at a time usually, but sometimes 5 at a time then he would walk over to the gate and pass them to me one at a time, I would give one to Colm, one to Maggie, and take the rest myself. Then, I walked to the trailer and popped them into their new home! Colm and Maggie cooed over every single chick they had, "Aww look how cute this one is..." "This one is really scared..." "Colm make yours kiss mine!" it was all stuff of that sort! Maggie dropped her on a couple occasions which meant I had to chase it down where it had open space to run from me or hide behind wheel barrows, but it's okay, I needed a good jog! Once the trailer was full of them, we pulled it out into the middle of the piglet pasture and un-hitched. as we were leaving Asher came up and started sniffing around the gate. Jim went down on one knee and grabbed Asher by the snout and made him look him in the eyes. "Asher, these are new members of the family, they are for guarding, notttt eating! Okay, you guard them, not eat them! Copy that?" I'm not sure what Asher would have said if he could speak English, maybe something along the lines of, "Okay, but what if I just wanna chew on them a little, is that cool?" Who knows though, I am no dog whisperer. I asked Jim how we will know if he eats one, because 99 looks a lot like 100 if you know what I mean, then I followed up by saying, I guess we can just check his teeth for feathers everyday! Jim laughed and said that's a good idea. We were debating just parking the trailer next to the pig pen, but then if anything was snooping around it, Asher wouldn't have been able to do anything but bark because he is in the pen with the pigs. Here is a picture of the Egg-Mobile in its new location!
We won't really know what Asher will do for another week because like I said we have to relocate the chickens mentally, now that we have moved them physically otherwise they would just run back to their old coop. So they are staying locked in the trailer until they realize it's their new home.
After that it was pretty much the end of they day, I started to clean out goat pens but Jim told me to just do chores and then be ready for dinner. I ate with the family tonight and help celebrate Maggie's Birthday! I took a card, well a note written on lined paper, and I included a stick figure drawing of her as a town girl with purse, and then I also wrapped a rock with some crystals on it that I found. I didn't wrap it originally, but then I remembered half the fun of getting presents is opening them. so I balled it up in some more lined paper. I think it got the job done. Dinner was homemade pizza by Tina! it was delish! And dessert was peanut butter chocolate ice cream cake! I had 7 pieces of pizza and my cake and the rest of Colm's piece. When the dinner was over the kids went to play with Maggie's new polly pocket dolls and Jim, Tina and I had some lovely post dinner conversation. We mainly talked about weird dreams we have all been having lately, and then Tina started cleaning up and Jim and I had a one on one talk about lucid dreaming. Which is just the kind of dreams that people have when you are conscious in the dream and get to choose to do things like fly or stuff like that. Jim was giving me some helpful tips on how to achieve this, because I myself haven't experienced it except for maybe when I was a little kid. Then Jim started telling me about his solo camping trips that he used to take when he was my age and younger. He lived in a tent for a long time because he dropped out of high school when he was 17 to travel. His story's always amaze me!
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