Rainy Days

For a week or so, it was rainy, cold and muddy around here.

Then it was in the 90s for a few days.
 
Now it's cooler and we have thunderstorms most nights (and now it's pouring again).

Since I'm no master gardener, it's been tricky getting our plants started, but the greens are growing like crazy. The rain helped our pasture bounce back, so much so that one of the sheep somehow managed to get through the electric fence to the literally greener pasture.

During the rainy days and the long holiday weekend, we weren't nearly as productive we wanted to be, but we've still been checking things off our to-do list, while adding about a dozen more items for every item checked off.  

We're still working on the chicken coop/barn, but our older hens have started laying with a vengeance and we can hardly keep up. M installed the door, which has made life much easier since before we were climbing through a small, temporary, plywood door.​

We found the door at the Habitat ReStore for about $40 and M spent hours fixing it up. We still have work to do refinishing and restoring it and eventually painting it. We haven't decided what color the barn exterior will be, so I haven't picked a door color, but I'm really into red doors right now. So that could happen.

Before the rain, and after the rain, we've collectively spent days on the tractor mowing grass. Though M has done more mowing than I have. One Saturday I spent a straight 3 hours on the tractor and mowed maybe a quarter of a field, and came inside with a mighty sunburn before going to work at midnight to cover 80+ Air Force troops returning from deployment.

M has been working hard on finishing the barn, building forms to pour cement for a base for our new boiler, mending fences and otherwise doing loads of manual labor. 

I've been weeding, gardening, weeding some more, mucking out the sheep shelter and finding stray cats under the hood of my car. 

The other day I was already running late to work and as soon as I parked in the office lot and turned off the engine, I heard a strange sound. First I thought it might be the train, but no train sounds like that. Then I was really worried I had run over one of the bunnies that hangs out in the lot. 

So I got out and walked around my car, realizing the sound was coming from inside my car. As I rushed to pop the hood, I was thinking, please, oh please, oh please don't let there me a mangled cat in my engine.

When I got the hood open (that might have been the first time in years I did that), a small white and grey cat was looking up at me. Once she untangled herself from the tiny space she had tucked into, I got her in the care and turned right back around to go home. It had been close to 100 degrees the day before and pretty warm overnight, so not sure why she was in the car unless she chased a mouse in there.

On the way home, she was climbing all over the car and kept trying to climb on my lap and neck. I'm not really a cat person and she's got some serious claws so I was trying to keep her in the backseat or the passenger seat. We were almost home when she was trying hard to climb all over me and I was pretty sure she was going to cause me to crash, but we made it home all in one piece.

The cat had been hanging around our property for awhile so I put her in the garage to make sure she didn't get stuck in the car again. We have a cat door now, so multiple strays have been finding there way into the garage. One showed up more than a year ago and hasn't left. She came with a major wound on her back that has healed and she's become our loyal mouser.

The original cat, we call her Kitty, doesn't seem to like the car cat, known as Little Kitty. And there's another stray wandering around (who I just saw in the garage). We're hoping they all work it out amongst themselves.

Oh and we are now an officially registered with the state business. You can call us Bootlegger Hill Farms.  

Until next time, here's some photos from around here lately.