The rabbit lives!

So our new rabbit made it. Not only did she make it, but she dug a burrow while the other rabbits just sat and wasted their time. I like this rabbit already. This big beast remains docile for now. The New Zealands we have think they are wild like gazelle and have become very hard to catch. Yet, somehow Atlas caught one today and intead of picking it up and swinging it about like like he normally does, he just lay his body on it and snuggled.

That is the stuff cute baby moments are made of.

In the meantime, Silas and I worked to set the 4 corners of our henhouse in concrete. He is getting masterful with the measureing tape these days and does well enough at holding the posts straight up so I can tamp them and adjust them. Next paycheck I will be able to get the boards and whatnot I need to mostly finish this thing, aside from the paint. It feels good to have this place coming together.

I found some ads today for beehives and an article on how to raise talapia in a cow trough. More on that later.

Death, renewal, and a chicken coop

Over the weekend we had a rare but global warming induced snow storm. It usually does not snow here at all. It snowed 8 inches. One of the rabbits, as seen to the left, died. I found her this morning near where the chicken coop is being built. I brought Silas out to show him and talk to him about how the cold can effect animals and boys. He has been interrogating me all day as to why I killed the rabbit. He ran to his friends house and slapped on the door till they answered and yelled, "The rabbits is dead!" and ran away. The confused grandma looked at him and closed the door. He ran back to where I was, but I had buried the rabbit in a shallow grave. Shallow so the plants can better benefit from the rabbit flesh. I thought about showing Silas how to bury a creature but decided ought because he would likely dig it up, he being a wolf boy.


That evening, we went to pick up some concrete and sand paper and on the way home I decided to stop by the rabbit man. He is a retired Marine who has about 100 rabbits in cages. He raises them for meat, sells them to restaurants, to beagle trainers, to pet stores. He has been at it for about 2 years now and he finally has it to where he can turn a profit. He built a bass pond, has chickens, and literally is self-sufficient. I applaude him there. While we were there, Silas renewed his interrogation of all us adults (using his knife hand) as to why the rabbit got killed. I think I earned some credibility when the old man told him that sometimes rabbits don't survive the cold. That seemed to settle it for him.


Anyhow, I did not intend to get another rabbit tonight, I just wanted to find out more about breeding them and if he would sell my his darker colored breeds. He gave us one for free because he is an old champ and I, he says, am a repeat customer.
This is a big one. It is a giant breed, due to get about 15 to 20 pounds. Silas and atlas fought the whole way home about who gets to hold her. Silas won out and also won the scratches that go with it.

We will see how she fares the night or if the night fares her.

This sets us back a bit because the rabbit that died was our pregnant rabbit. Oh well... try again, I suppose.

As for my chicken coop, I finally lay the foundations in concrete. At this time, it will be 8x10x7 feet tall. As it is now, the chicken coop will be in a compound of about 55x35 feet where the rabbits and chickens will hang out. The chickens, being woodland birds anyway, will do well in the trees. The rabbits will just be rabbits in their compound. The boys lost my level, so I improvised with an empty nail jar with water in it. I was able to tell the level by how the water matched up with the label. Pretty smart if you ask me. Go ahead. Ask.
Silas and I lay the foundation by tamping down asphault chunks and then pouring concrete in. It holds. Really, the foundation will be the solid structure itself, but the beginning can't be ignored.

I haven't decided the colors I will paint it. It behooves me to set up with modern homestead with a sense of fashion and flare. Chickens and rabbits ought to live in a happening environment. I have got to figure out how to run a wire, underground, the 200 feet back required to power what I need powered back there by the coop. I do not feel like digging a 200 by 3' by 6" trench through roots and rock. I would loose it. I wonder how much a ditch witch would cost...

A ditch filled in

Today Janet and I filled in the ditch I showed days ago. At first I attempted to fill in a 2 inch layer of gravel and then dirt, but since the gravel was $3.40 per .5 cubic foot, I decided against it. Instead we collected about 30 buckets of broken up asphalt that makes up our ugly driveway, poured it into the trench to make a place for the water to run along the corrugated plastic pipe under the dirt without eroding it. It was successful. I think. I had started doing it a week ago, but a rain storm washed it away. I feel better about our chances this time.

The trenched area makes up the far border where our garden was to be. But it got me thinking: if a gardener digs just a foot down into the soil along that trench line, he will be assailed by angry asphalt and water muck. That can't be right, I think. So, I have decided to move the fence I will build about 10 feet over so that it will flow alongside the water trench, providing undigable area. This is exciting! Now, since the fence will border the ever flowing underground wellspring, we can now build up a dam where the spring flows into the creek bordering our property, making a small pond for exciting ducks and water foul! Sadly, it may prevent us from building a hang out spot where our nice tree is. Shameful!

The course of life

We've discussed and decided that for the next two weeks we're going to order our finances. Marriages and nations are wrecked by fiscal foolsihness more often than anything else, I believe. Our mortgage is 24% of our income right now. We did well with that. We also focus on paying 10% to the Lord and 10% to our future retirement bunker somewhere in Montana, where vile men cannot molest or make afraid, and if they do they'll be riddled with bullets, mad dogs, and home-made napalm. Then I'll go to work on them.

It's funny where life takes you. The thoughts and principles you grow up with shift and change but sometimes become reinforced with more intellect and passion than you ever imagined. Having children, being married, embarking into a brotherhood or warrior culture, it makes one spartanly sensible about what is important, like the importance of free-will and mastering your life, being strong, self-sufficient and therefore useful.

What about Godliness? In the ebb and flow of my life, with the inherent intellectualism I tend to gravitate towards, I sometimes have lost sight of the most motivating force in my life, that is faith or recognition of a knowable God. But lately I have been coming back to it. Why I always forget the pleasant feeling of peace and knowing and ability, I will never know. I don't think I will know. Much of what I knew I don't anymore and I have to earn back the intelligence that breeds so many inspired thoughts. Experiences lately have brought me again toward the "I Am" factor, the Existence of something that existed before we know how to record. And that we can know on a personal, real level the "I Am"---the real independent existing one, the one who says, basically, "Look gents, it's a tough road to hoe to get and be what I am, but I want to show you how. I have a way and all you have to really do is listen, to take simple steps and not do anything really dumb and we can work something beautiful out. Come along."---that has quickened me again. I feel like the living.

Our house

This day I feel it is good to post some descriptions of our land and what we are doing with it here in my blag.

The old dude who owned the house before us (from hereafter called "The Old Dude") really did not take care of the place. It may have been no fault of his own, or rather it would be tough to judge him. His wife got parkinsons and she really slammed and bammed the interior of the house with her electric wheels. He put an above ground pool on top of about a foot of sand behind the back deck. So now there is this large white bump in the yard. It is very unsightly. When I get my wheelbarrel, I will show this sand pile something about being ugly in my yard. I will use it to fill in where the nuclear-ripping dogs lived.

The Old Dude's dogs that used to live here with with the atomic bowels really created some hurt in their area. The area was dug out and sunk and water pools up to about 4 inches in a 30 x 10 foot area persisted for days after rain. That smacks of mosquitos and vileness. Or I will say, it did. Last saturday I took my 5 lb digging mattock, my shovel, ax, and wife, and dug a 40 foot trench that bends and twists like a snake caught in time. I chopped through roots the size of a mans leg, discovered loamy soil below, and dug still more. Now, my 2 foot deep trench has provided a place for the water to go and somewhere for Atlas to get stuck in a use his man muscles to heave himself out.

And heave he does.

Next paycheck I will buy some corrogated plastic pipe and pea gravel to lay in this hole and cover it up. No one will be the wiser except me and my blueberries. As it turns out, blueberries like their soil wet and loamy. As every patriot and true believer knows, if there is one benefit of 5 years of constant bombardment by nuclear dog bowels, it's thoroughly loamy soil. I know I would be "loamy". Where the ditch is at is the low point between the slight slope of the yard and a rather steep slope of a hill where the rabbits live. If I plant my blueberries there, they will thrive.

To the left of the ditch is where the garden will be, which brings me to my next topic: how nasty dog buns decimate trees.

These three trees must go. I am not usually one to go swashbuckeling on trees, but the dogs made them 'tarded. If I cut them and remove the stumps, my garden will have space to grow. We will also have area for a "being" because just left of this shot is a beautiful tree that is as trees should be. With the cutting down of these trees, I can saw and chop like an angry ork and make into cord wood. I probably have 15 cords of wood and a cord sells for $130 here, more if it is chopped with love.

Saturday I dug the foundations of my chicken coop. As you can see, I have not actually set the posts in concrete, but you get the idea. Maybe. Janet doubts my coop, but she will see. Fools mock but they shall mourn when it comes to chickens. The right of the coop wall will be the outside border where the "small animals" area (guineas, chickens, rabbits) will roam. From the right on will be goats and beasts like pigs.

Ask anyone and they will tell you that honorable chickens make a farmyard. They peck the bugs and unrully boys, kill snakes and roosters provide daring young boys with stories of courage and valor for years to come.

Lastly, here are two of our rabbits. As rabbits are apt to do, the buck has humbled these does and now in one months time we will have baby rabbits. Some 8 weeks after that, we will have rabbit stew.

We let them run about by day. They are getting full of themselves, believing that they are wild and free. I think free meat tastes better. In the top right corner you can see where the coop is . That is the size of the small animal area.

Our savage dog pack never returned. Perhaps even amatuer dogs know that wild men in underwear huring spears and axes are not to be triffled with. When I put goats in the back, I will find the meanest old hobbit with razor horns to skewer bad dogs and eat their bones. Word will spread all over the county about who protects these rabbits.

Like a thief in the night...

We had a visitors last night. It was not the goody goody gumdrop fairy. A pack of at least three nutty dogs banded together with a dark mission to ravage our rabbits. Janet, who is generally a rock sleeper, especially while pregnant woke up last night and said, "Jake! Something is wrong with the rabbits." I thought she had brought the crazy to bed. But then I heard rabbit squeals. I leapt out of bed and, underwear clad, ran out to meet these nasty things.

There were three dogs. One dog, the ringleader no doubt, ran away before I got the door open. I think he knew doom was imminent and like all leaders of secret combinations of evil, he split the moment the ship was sunk. The other two thought they could make off with the goods before I got to them. I picked up a large sapling I had just cut and ran out to javelin a nasty dog, but by the time I got to them, one of these black devils fled through the fence. We have a 6 foot fence. I do not know how he got through, but he did.

So there it was: this last black and white fool dog and me. I knew he was the hired muscle: not much for brains and instantly expendable in the view of his posse. He ran back and hit the fence and ran this way and that, but could not remember the escape plan. These dogs were amateurs.

I hurled my spear but it did not strike true. Suddenly weaponless against my foe, I remembered my ax in a stump nearby. I went and got it and tracked after this cretin for to chop and hurt, but he darted through some bushes and away. I had thought of locking the gate, making the fenced in area a "winner takes all" arena of death, but then gave them a piece of mercy. The coward dog ran for his life, through some bushes, barely escaping.

I have my maverick 88 loaded and waiting. Ambush is killing and killing is fun.

Our rabbits and our Silas