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<\/a><\/p>\nThey will not be stopped.\u00a0 Not by cut telephone lines.\u00a0 Or by leaving a hole under the garden fence for the guineas to escape through.\u00a0 Not even by a boulder as big as a Volkswagen beetle which almost resulted in a tractor rollover.\u00a0 No, they will not be stopped.\u00a0 They even dug holes for the magnolia trees I got for my birthday.<\/p>\n
Cutting the line to the invisible fence in the process.\u00a0 Let’s hope they finish before they find an active electric line to cut.<\/p>\n Big has been assigned to projects at my parent’s house.\u00a0 I believe shelves in the shed and sides for the car port are on the agenda over there.\u00a0 Off he goes with his tool belt and supplies each day.\u00a0 Although he did spend a day making me a new milk bench for the barn.<\/p>\n It is so handy when they are old enough for carpentry work.\u00a0 Makes all that post-birth recovery time worth it.\u00a0 Well, almost.\u00a0 When he gets his license so he can run back the Redbox movies before we rack up another night’s fees it will be worth it.<\/p>\n The less skilled worker, Little, was assigned to pulling up oak trees sprouts form the mulched areas of the yard.\u00a0 Little was confused when I told him to check the mulched areas.<\/p>\n “You mean, the playground?” he asked.<\/p>\n “No,” I said.\u00a0 “The mulched areas in the center of the rock walls.”<\/p>\n “Rock walls?”<\/p>\n Oh, right.\u00a0 We keep meaning to make rock walls out of the single layer of rocks thrown in a circle and kicked around by the kids and dogs.\u00a0 And I haven’t actually mulched those areas.\u00a0 I mean, I throw the leaves in there in the fall, and I think about ordering a dump truck of mulch, but do you know how much they charge for a dump truck full of mulch??\u00a0 It’s chopped trees, people.\u00a0 In any case, the kids don’t have the imagination that I do.\u00a0 This doesn’t look like a rock wall enclosing a mulched area to them.<\/p>\n But once I clarified for him, Little dutifully spent time yanking up all the oak tree wannabes.<\/p>\n He and Middle also spent a day gathering chopped wood from around the property and stacking it in the woodshed.\u00a0 (We tend to chop it where we find it.\u00a0 That’s the Royal “We.”\u00a0 The Other Half chops wood.\u00a0 I complain about piles of it all over the property.)\u00a0 They did a lovely job.<\/p>\n And as soon as they finished, The Other Half picked up a fresh pile of wood from a friend’s house and dumped it by the greenhouse.\u00a0 Because nothing makes you feel the satisfaction in a job well done like having to do it all over again.<\/p>\n Pretty did not escape the work detail.\u00a0 She bleached the walls of the hallways and the stairwell to remove months worth of dirty handprints and muddy dog tail swipes.\u00a0 She even painted over the scuff marks on the stair treads.\u00a0 Holy whiteness, Batman!!!!<\/p>\n She was the primary bottle feeder of the lambs.\u00a0 Since having to heat bottles in response to crying babies all day and night was giving me PTSD.<\/p>\n And she gave C.C. a thorough grooming and makeover, including a fresh haircut.\u00a0 Oh, um, you look….marvelous, C.C.<\/p>\n As livestock manager, she was also tasked with the usual spring poultry and waterfowl hoopla.\u00a0 Blackbeard’s eggs turned out to be rotten (she missed a night during cold temperatures, perhaps?) so she had to be distracted and her eggs replaced.\u00a0 We gave her a few duck eggs that had been abandoned but were only a couple days old as well as 5 Ameraucana eggs.\u00a0 She settled right back down with a few disgusted hisses at us.<\/p>\n Cookie Dough chose a ridiculous place to nest so Pretty spent an afternoon rearranging cattle panes around the hay roll so that she could still brood but the grazing animals couldn’t reach her.<\/p>\n And silly Emmie was trying to brood on plastic Easter eggs.\u00a0 So she was given a few of Cookie Dough’s eggs and the rest of the nest filled with chicken eggs.\u00a0 As\u00a0 long as a duck hatches out a few ducklings, she’ll be happy and come off the nest.\u00a0 The chicks will hatch out early and as they do we’ll put them in the brooder room.\u00a0 The first hatches of the season are always a bit chaotic and require more micromanagement than those later in the season.<\/p>\n Guineas had to be captured and corralled in the back pen to be divided among friends.\u00a0 The flock has gotten too large and the neighbors have taken to ceaseless complaining about the noise.\u00a0\u00a0 The same neighbors that burn trash so that we have to hide in the house to avoid toxic plastic fumes and jacklight deer in the woods and target shoot at all hours of the day and night, but whatever.<\/p>\n We kept 4 free ranging guineas and there are 4 more contained in the garden.\u00a0 Pretty had to help in these capture campaigns as I have a nasty habit of screaming, dropping to ground, and covering my face with my hands when the guineas start flapping around.\u00a0 It’s a disgraceful weakness, I know.\u00a0 I must have seen The Birds at a sensitive time in my childhood.<\/p>\n Speaking of me, I was busy bringing out the summer clothes, perusing hand me downs, and getting winter clothes back in the shed.\u00a0 Piles were made to be given to friends, dropped off at Goodwill, and used for rags.<\/p>\n After multiple attempts and splashing gallons of water onto the floor, I mastered the art of using a water siphon to vacuum the gravel in the fish tank. Which then meant several days of gradually sucking up dirty water and replacing it with clean so that the fish wouldn’t be shocked by their clean tank.\u00a0 I’m not so sure why I should be concerned about shocking them since they don’t hesitate to shock me when I am siphoning by rubbing their slimy sides against my arm or trying to suck on me with their fish lips.<\/p>\n I mowed the lawn (Oh my, isn’t “lawn” a beautiful word?\u00a0 We haven’t had a “lawn” for years!!!) as well as the garden paths and the property by the road.\u00a0 And I didn’t even run out of gas until I was on the last strip of land next to the neighbor’s house.\u00a0 So I didn’t refill and finish.\u00a0 Wonder how many deer ticks he’ll get in that strip of long grass.\u00a0 Ticks he wouldn’t get if it was patrolled by guineas.\u00a0 Imagine that.<\/p>\n In addition, I was acting pharmacist for all spring break ailments.\u00a0 After Little’s eyes swelled shut due to pollen he was started on a regime of eye drops, nasal mist, and prescription allergy medication.\u00a0 Plus cream for eczema.\u00a0 Pretty was on a round of Prednisone after she developed poison ivy on her face which the pediatrician believes resulted from hugging the livestock guardian dog all the time.\u00a0 Especially after he’s been running through poison ivy down by the pond.\u00a0 Captain, one of the buck kids, was started on Corid since he’s had loose stool for a few days and it might be a run of coccidiosis.\u00a0 Poor Daisy, the barn cat, was getting arnica drops after she wandered into the back yard and was grabbed up and shaken hard by one of the dogs before escaping to a tree.\u00a0 And I was on a dose of Valacyclovir and pain meds for an outbreak of shingles.\u00a0 I even missed a couple days of work.\u00a0 Which delighted my co-workers to no end.\u00a0 They made sure to call me, text me, and email me repeatedly to see how my “herpes” was doing.\u00a0 People who work in the medical field can be so obnoxious<\/span> crude<\/span> insensitive sometimes.<\/p>\n All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.\u00a0 Plus it makes him lash out at his siblings, I bet.\u00a0 And mouth off to his mother, probably.\u00a0 So to keep my kids from Jack’s fate, we’ve decided to see a matinee.\u00a0\u00a0 We’ve loaded up on Easter candy in all our hidden pockets and pouches as well as Dixie cups so we can share a refillable drink.\u00a0 I don’t have any plans for dinner as by that time we’ll all be laying on the couch moaning that next time we are not going to eat so much candy and popcorn or guzzle 5 liters of soda. (Please.\u00a0 Of course, we will.\u00a0 We need to get our $6.75 each worth!).\u00a0 So, thank you The Lorax<\/a>, for salvaging Spring Break.<\/p>\n Beach, we’ll see you on the Do Nothing Day at school next month.\u00a0 Excuse me, I mean Early Release Day—when they take attendance, start feeding the kids lunch at 9am, and them put them on the bus back home by 11am.\u00a0 Have the ice cream cones ready!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The natives are restless.\u00a0 Officially they are on spring break.\u00a0 But it is not exactly the laying-on-the-beach, pier fishing, and soft ice cream cone break they were dreaming of.\u00a0 Not even close. The Other Half, my father, and Middle have been determinedly working to complete the water line trench to the garden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[182,181,173,184,179,19,183,178,39,113,177,180],"class_list":["post-4370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bottle-feeding","tag-cleaning","tag-duck","tag-fish-tank","tag-grass","tag-guineas","tag-lambs","tag-magnolia-tree","tag-pony","tag-tractor","tag-trench","tag-woodpile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4370"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4424,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4370\/revisions\/4424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n