At breakfast, I realized it had been several days since I went to gather eggs, so I headed out. There were feathers in the net—and the net was on.
Worse, there were tell-tale feathers in the laying house: beautiful wing feathers, left lying on the ground.
There were actually three different spots in the chicken netting with white feathers spattered. Socks knows the shock of the electric fence, and even if he had gotten inside, he's a playful predator, a running, chasing predator, not a calculating, creep into the pen and snatch a hen while she sleeps predator.
Oh—and eat all the eggs in the nesting boxes, too.
I think perhaps a raccoon got into the pen and carried off Chanticleer and the hens, and Socks found a carcass and commandeered it.
At first, I only saw one survivor out of the five.
Phil said he saw two. And when evening fell, three Leghorns returned to their house. If we can keep these three, we can eke out our egg existence another three months until the new birds (hopefully) start to lay. It'll be tight, but we can manage. May the Lord protect these last three.
I was so glad to see our guinea, too, and to hear his little tweetle through the day.
After breakfast, Phil and I headed up together today to work on the building. He had mentioned yesterday that he figured it took about three times as much strength to do the building on his own: even to move a panel, just a quarter inch shy of 13' tall, is a challenge on his own: rather than grasping it on the edge, as he could with a helper, he has to carry it in the middle, hands contorted, muscles straining.
Then there are the times when he is up in the lift, 13' in the air, and wants to know how a section of insulation is lining up along the bottom. Or he wants to make sure the insulation is hanging straight, more or less.
So even though I am very little help in the actual building (we only have one driver, and even if we had more, I don't know that I have the muscle power to screw into the metal framework), I am actually a pretty good Girl Friday.
Not a great one, though. I was supposed to cut lengths of insulation 12'4". The first section I unrolled, I was pulling out the measuring tape and noticed that it said 10ft 120", but the 120" was in bright red, very visible. And to me, for some reason, bright red 120 looks pretty similar to bright red 12'. I told myself to be on guard: that might be a bit deceptive.
And yet, despite my self admonishment, apparently I did cut one section about 2' two short. How embarrassing!
Again, we paid it forward. Tomorrow we'll have to reckon with the two sections of insulation cut incorrectly.
Phil does all the hard stuff: he goes up and down in the lift, drives in every one of the screws, even lifts the panels into place. I have certain things I can help with (holding up the insulation on the bottom while Phil drives the screws: without me, the insulation flops down; lining up insulation from the bottom up, holding panels in place while Phil fits them together). The rest of the time, I clean up the bits of fiberglass, and clean up whatever else I can.
It was immensely rewarding for me to consolidate some of the messy piles around the building site. The pallets that various building materials rested on look a lot better all in one place, beside fencing supplies and other things waiting for a home. And various tubing, a used car battery (!), some children's toys: scattered about, they conspired to make the entrance to the farm look trashy.
But to have most of the space clean, and the pile of randomness all in one place—that feels better to me. Like we're really making progress on creating a farm, rather than simply wallowing in a white trash life.
Joe, too, comes up to be with us. He rides the lift up and down, and would seek shelter at times on the inside of the building, in the shade. (Joe makes us all laugh. He fell asleep before dinner last night, and started sobbing at 12:30am. It sounded like a bad dream, so I asked him what the problem was. "It's Abraham. He took my chocolate. And he ate it all!" [Which is completely implausible. Abraham doesn't take things that belong to others.] He then cried harder, but I'm not sure if that was because the memory of the traumatic dream was too much, or that he was awake in a dark trailer and no one had any chocolate.)
After a few panels, Phil stepped back to look at the building. With one side done and the other side started, the building is beginning to look like an interior space. A bit.
Today we dripped together in the hot sun, and the blue wall facing the trailer gradually grew longer. And that is much more emotionally exciting than the road-facing blue wall: from the trailer, it just looks white.
The work is too hot and too physically demanding to do hour after hour without a break. I would estimate that we were actually outside working together about seven hours today, and we put up eleven panels. When Phil had the five guys helping, they put up five and we did two more: seven panels. Working on his own, with intermittent help from me, Phil has been able to do five per day.
But together, we had a good return on our labors.
It is almost bringing me to tears to even write about how meaningful that little section of blue wall is to me. As we were sweltering on the southeast facing wall, where the shade didn't come until sometime after five, I grew excited to landscape along the wall. It's a microclimate! A warm place, which will grow extra warm in the sun, sheltered from the prevailing winds. It might be warm enough to support my lemon tree! It might be perfect for some other tropical fruits (olives?) that are just a zone or two warmer than the general central Virginia climate.
And then it struck me that for three years, we've been working on the land, but the lack of a building has really made me feel transient. To have a solid wall facing the house, to have a real building, a big building: I'm overwhelmed. I have a microclimate!
Actually two, since the other side of the building, the northwest, will be cooler, and facing the prevailing weather.
From the road, I think the building looks quite imposing! And from the driveway, I think the gate that Phil and Jadon installed some weeks ago looks very farm-like. I like it.
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