Water, a Necessity of Life

This week was a bit chaotic with losing water and having some hot weather come through. Shane’s work schedule changed so now we have to be quiet until about noon, changing some of our routines too. We did squeeze in some time at the river though!

Pictured: Molalla River

Water Woes

Wednesday, July 6th (right after the last blog post went out) PGE did an unannounced “safety shutdown” on our power as they were trimming trees somewhere along our network. While it was a minor inconvenience (I was just sitting down to soak in the tub when it happened, so threw my hair into a messy bun to not get it soapy with no clean water to rinse), it came back on a little while later, earlier than they anticipated fortunately. Somehow in the 3 hours from the time it came back on we didn’t run any water. I went out to water flowers and nothing. Checked the faucet in the kitchen….nothing. Checked the breaker box on the porch and all looked well. Went down to the well to do a manual restart…..nothing. Took the control box off and did some hunting for a new capacitor in town….no one. Went to a neighboring town and found one, brought it home and installed it….nothing. About this time I’m seriously stressing out, but at least I was smart enough to leave the bath water in so we could flush our toilet! The next morning, Shane goes into work long enough to make sure things were running well then came home so we could figure it out. We took the control box and the pressure switch back to the pump supply store and purchased new ones. When home, Shane drained our tank out completely so we could reset the “bubble” in the tank. Side note: this is the old school bladder tank and not a newer diaphragm tank, which is part of our well woes we should remedy when we can afford it. While it was draining, he installed the new pressure switch first. Start with the cheapest part and go from there. We flipped the power back on and the pressure switch worked! I was able to return the control box and save $125! Thank goodness for Shane knowing how to do stuff!

Sheep Adventures

Shane and I caught and weighed the 4 market lambs still available. If you are interested, please go to the Market Stock Available page. I think I will hold onto them and the cull ewes for until Fall if they don’t sell before. Auction prices have plummeted! The breeding stock Katahdin and St Croix ewes I will also hold onto a bit longer as I really do hope they find some good homes. I will be breeding them with my regular flock starting July 28th for lambs starting December 23rd. I will be adding a $25 exposure fee to their prices (not a guarantee of breeding, but they will be with the ram for a month roughly) and they will be available the end of August once breeding is finished.

This tiny ewe lamb wanted to be as close to her mom as possible while I trimmed hooves. She’s so adorable!

Chicken Gender Reveals

Apparently Shane just realized one of the Australorp chickens is a rooster. He kinda slipped under the radar as he isn’t crowing yet like Mr. Rooster. The red wattles and comb are a pretty big give-away though! One of the Swedish Flower Chicks is a roo too and Shane calls him Cowboy Dan from a favorite book in his youth.

Some of Shane’s Chicken Videos:

Garden News

The tomatoes are starting to take off finally as are the onions. Those carrots still never came up so may try another batch of seeds in their spot. I’ll be doing more garden stuff today as it won’t be in the 90s!

Molalla River …. Again!

Shane, Morgan and I went down to the Molalla River again so he could fish and Morgan could play in the shallows. I realized I have failed as a mother when my almost 12 year old daughter has never caught a crawdad! She found one in the river but was too afraid to grab it so mama to the rescue. It wasn’t huge, but I taught the important lessons on how to catch one without getting pinched! She whipped out her crocheting and made me a quick granny square too! Yes, Shane caught and released quite a few fish too.