Lovely long weekend

We had a lovely long weekend. Saturday morning we took all the kids (Union Guy's kids and The Boy) and went to a big water park / swimming pool place for a couple of hours. It was great fun and I discovered that I am very much out of practice: I can only do one length of front crawl before my lungs give out and I am obliged to flip over and scull my way back to where I started from. Whew, that kind of aerobic exercise is a sure indicator of one's lack of oomph!

Inside the house there was some progress this weekend - we got the wall up in the stairwell, and trim around a couple of the windows. The Boy and I have curtains in our bedrooms now, too - Ikea had nice dark blue tab top drapes on sale for $14! Woohoo!

I did manage to get the chickens penned in properly: they now have a fence that is reasonably coyote resistant and they seem utterly uninterested in making any sort of escape. The kittens are quite fascinated by the chickens but have been keeping their distance - you can see one of the cats staring at the birds from his spot beside the piece of driftwood (a gift from a friend of mine who visited the coast and brought it back for me!). I had no idea chickens could be this enteratining - watching them dig and scratch around in the dirt is really quite fun ... even for a human.

The rooster crows in the mornings and we can hear him from the house, but as long as the window is closed it isn't enough to keep me awake (nothing wakes The Boy!). I hear the rooster announcing the arrival of the day, it vaguely registers in my brain, and then I just drift back to sleep. We did get eggs right away - the hens figured out the whole nest box thing without any real trouble, and we have been getting at least seven eggs a day. They are absolutely delicious, and the yolks are so yellow compared to store eggs!

Time to go tidy up the kitchen - I made lasagne for tomorrow's dinner tonight, and baked a few muffins while the oven was hot.