Sunday, June 26, 2011

Bridge day 3, plus new baby lamb!

New baby boy born last night.  He is a looker, too bad he is the wrong gender.

Today did start out with a pleasant step.  I had messaged the Chicken Butler guy last night after noticing my failed door.  This morning I had a message from him and he is going to send me a brand new replacement.  I offered to send the defective one back to him.  Great news.  Annmarie is sore and tired, her left foot is swollen (I am sure from kicking the raccoon in an attempt to dislodge it from her leg) and I made her stay in the TV room all day with her foot elevated.  I would like to say she took the forced inactivity gracefully, but that is not the case.
Sarah found another baby lamb today.  It is from one of the batch we picked up in December.  Which means she got pregnant within one month of arriving at our farm.  Oreo has been busy.  We listed Oreo on Craigslist and no one has called.  I am thinking he may be our dinner at the medieval feast next month.  I just need someone to help me butcher him on the Friday before.  Still thinking about this, I like it.
The baby lamb is another little boy.  That makes four boys this year.  Two will be ready this fall and the other two won't be ready until Spring of next year.  He is very pretty.
I managed to catch a cat in our live trap last night.  No skunk or raccoon.  Sarah worked on chopping down the six foot thistles today.  She got halfway through them and will finish them this week.  We set up another live trap down at our inlaw's house.  We are trying desperately to kill off all the predators.  On a plus note, Annmarie bought all the reloading supplies for the 30-30.  I don't have time to do it, so we are sending Sarah to Grandpa's house on Tuesday so he can teach her how to do it.  He has no fine motor skills left in his hands, but he has all the knowledge she will need and lots of patience for his granddaughter.  If that turns out well then I am going to have her load a few hundred 38 cal pistol rounds also.  I may even need some 30-06 rounds!  Definitely need some 357 rounds.  This is just snowballing.
Day 3 progress, doesn't look much different than day 2!
Hard to believe we spent 8 hours on it.

The bridge is progressing.  I did not quite meet my goals today.  Some brainstorms are better than others.  Burning out the posts was a great idea.  Unfortunately, when doing this you need to be sure that you are not burning over water.  The steam came up and put the fire out.  I think it may have worked if we did not add the dirt to the top.  It did help as my helper had the stubborn post out in 30 minutes.  So we decided to light the other post on fire one more time.  I didn't figure we could get to that post and even if we poured concrete it could be done last.  Since we did not manage to pour any concrete it was no loss.  It took a considerable amount of time to set the far concrete forms.  There is a fabulous crop of rocks on that hillside.  I could not drive a single stake into the ground.  It was painful.  We had to assemble the entire form, get the height right and then back fill with large rocks to hold it all in place.  We pinned the whole form in place, hopefully it stays.
We did get all the rebar in place in the other five forms.  I even made round pieces of rebar to go around the vertical rebar pieces in the tubes.  Had to beat them into shape with a 3# hammer in the vice.
My help was mouthing off and being lazy so I popped him in the nose and gave him a bloody nose! LOL.  He was straining to bend the rebar in the vice and got a bloody nose.  Spent the last two hours with a napkin stuffed up his left nostril and blood all over his gloves.  We didn't even stop for lunch.  Neither one of us was hungry.  Of course by quitting time at 1815 I was starving.  So we are stopping for lunch tomorrow.  We did get the concrete mixer assembled just before quitting time.
Rebar in place and ready for concrete.

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