House, Farm and Kitten Update

 The lazy days of summer don't allow for much laziness since I have every age bracket of swimmers in swim team. My first shift starts at the pool at 7 a.m. and the last finishes at 10:30 every day. On swim meet nights, we are back around 5:00 and often don't finish until 10:30. What is rather humorous is that my three Liberian children are awesome swimmers in spite of the reality that the entire country of Liberia never swims. I'm telling you, Liberia could take the Olympics if they tapped into their natural swimming ability. In spite of our time at the pool, we are accomplishing some other things around the house and farm. 

After bringing home the three half-feral kittens, the old man called me with a fourth. The fourth is mean and is slotted for a life as a barn cat. The other three have made some good progress but I'm still not sure about any of them being that great of pets, but time will tell. Julia sure has been great at holding them everyday. I am anxious to get them fixed and make arrangements for them because they are too big, too messy and too stinky to continue to live in a dog kennel in the basement! 

Julia and little Mia

Selah with the tamest kitty - Jasper or Tiger depending on who you ask

The first three

 I am super excited that the goat fence is electrified now and the goats have the run of the entire pasture. It turned out to be a pretty big job because new insulators needed to be run. A friend from church completed the job and I am thrilled to see them grazing all day long. We have enough room to get a milk cow now, but the grass is still poor quality and I'm rather intimidated to add cow milking to my daily to-do list!

Since our friend still needed work and our to-do list is a mile long, he took over where JD left off on the porch about two years ago. He put in the wainscoting a few days ago. Next JD is going to wire for flood lights to the back yard and then our friend will resume painting and trim work on the ceiling. 

Yesterday and today, he laid the tile in the porch; tomorrow it will be grouted. It is so nice to have the pile of tiles cleared from my kitchen corner and be able to put the furniture back where it was before the tile piles. Beyond that, the area seems huge without the scaffolding and tools that have lived back there for the last two years. The finished plan is to have two tables for eating in the porch along with the two chairs we bought for the porch. It's been such a long wait that I need to recover the chairs already.

 JD is still building the chicken enclosure. There were two white roosters eating my garden, so I gave them away on Craigslist. Since then, the garden scene has been fairly peaceful until today when the guineas ransacked my garden. They ate all the zucchinis and several tomatoes. They are also trampling the plants. Since they aren't going to live in the chicken enclosure, we have now ordered an electric fence to surround the garden. If that doesn't work, they are going on Craigslist. Rest assured, they would have left a long time ago if they weren't so awesome at keeping our tick population down!

  
The enclosure has now been nicknamed  "the chicken mansion". I don't think a finer chicken home is to be found in our county and I can't wait to see them behind bars contained in it instead of being everywhere they shouldn't be!