Yummed up

Em bought some seed potatoes today. She took Noah in to preschool and spent the day in town. It’s such a long drive it pays to make a day of it. While Sophie is in the US Noah has picked up a second day at preschool and Sue and Rob will take him in tomorrow and do their weekly shopping and errands. I remember reading about International Buy Nothing Day a while ago, and it has been on my mind again lately, thinking how most of our days are Buy Nothing Days. It does seem to mean that our spending just gets concentrated into fewer days, but I guess we don’t have the opportunity to make as many impulse purchases.

Home alone I squelched up to Sue and Rob’s and worked on the few remaining architraves for the Dairy. Complicated. Our old Dairy leans to the north by about an inch but the door frames had to be perfectly plumb so a few of the architraves get really interesting. I spent the whole day dressing and making architraves for two doors. A lot of work but I’m happy with them – recycled timber, custom built, made well. I worked under cover in the big shed, staying dry as the rain came in waves.

Em and I are trying to agree on how to set up our pens to avoid inbreeding in the chooks. I’m so confused I’m not even sure we disagree. Em wants to have two pens, with only one rooster in one of the pens. Any offspring (girls only, boys get yummed up) get put in the second pen and then every year or two the rooster gets the chop and all the chickens get put back in together and start again with a new rooster. I’m not so sure what my idea is but I thought if we had something like three or four pens, each with a rooster, then we could put the offspring from pen A into pen B, and the offspring from pen B into pen C, and so on. By the time the offspring gets back to pen A it should be OK to breed with their distant relative. Similar to Em’s idea every now and then we would replace the roosters with external stock. Do we want this many chickens? Do I really care?

“I’m grateful that I took those two dinosaur postcards and had a lovely day at preschool.”
(Confused? Look)