Flowers, Chicks

hey there,

-- Not much to report this time around. I just spent 3 hours harvesting and arranging flowers, which is a lot less time then Eden and I normally spend. Normally we harvest way too many flowers, then bring them back to the porch of the main house, arrange them into bouquets and then clean up the porch afterwards. This time we went out to the flower garden, harvested and made bouquets down there, and had no extra flowers, plus no clean-up time. And it was fun to harvest not in bulk (a half-bucket of asters, a bucket of sunflowers, etc.), but just to walk around picking a bouquet's worth of flowers, tying them up, then going back out again to get the next bouquet.

....I'm most of the way thru painting wood finish onto the barn. The finish is to protect the wood from UV rays, plus preserve the color of the wood. I had started by climbing up this really long ladder, to get the top of the barn, which is about 20 feet high or so, then climbing down, moving the ladder five or six feet, then climbing up to paint. Then we got an extension for our paint roller, and since then it's been pretty quick. I've been saving this one side of the barn because the mother hen was with her chicks in that area and I didn't want to disturb them, but the mother and 4 of the 5 chicks were killed a couple of nights ago, so I will be able to finish the barn now, albeit with a heavy heart. We were all very sad about it. Matt had tried to get the hen and chicks into the coop, but to no avail, and so it was probably just a matter of time before a predator ate them, since they were outside. There's one chick left, with no mother, and we've put it in an extra sink we have, in the barn, with straw, food and water. I think we're gonna get a heat lamp as well. Hopefully it'll make it, but it's pretty sad -- I don't think it's gonna get the love it needs, since we're all pretty busy.

......That's it for now.....