Prius for sale

Buddy tells us what he thinks of us! ;-)

Plums and pears together - next year, both trees will be better pruned to avoid crowding!

Today I listed my Prius for sale. I spent a good part of the day yesterday vacuuming out all the dog hair. It was even all over the ceiling of the car! It's now as clean as it'll ever be...and hopefully, it'll soon belong to someone else. I listed it for about $2K less than other cars of the same caliber were listed, hoping to generate some interest. I don't know if it'll sell at the asking price, but if it does, I'll be selling it for the same price I paid for it. Unreal. The plan is to pay off the loan on it (obviously) and then put most of the remaining money towards paying off the other car. What little is left will go towards buying firewood and filling the oil tank before the fall weather hits.

Yesterday, H finished up most of the lean-to. We had to rotate it again as we learned more about Oregon winter weather (apparently, the rains come from the south during the winter here...so a southern facing lean-to is a bad idea). We rotated it, put on a front wall (that comes part way down) and added the missing side. He also started adding the shingles, but it turns out that we didn't buy enough. We'll try to get more this week. It looks nice though, and last night, both goats slept in there...together! We think they are becoming friendly. So far, Buddy doesn't really run from me in fear, but he won't approach me, either. I'm working on trying to win him over with treats, but it's hard because if I have something yummy with me, Sass wants it too and will butt Buddy away. We'll get it figured out sooner or later.

The chicks are fighting fairly often. I guess that's normal for 3-4 week old chicks - they are establishing a pecking order. The only problem is that one has gotten a number of his lower back feathers plucked out by the other chickens. I read that this could be due to too hot temps, or too crowded living conditions. Considering that it didn't happen until we put a cover on the brooder, we think they might be too crowded. It's supposed to get warm again this week (temps in the 90s), so I think we are going to move them out to the coop a little earlier than originally planned. We can rig power to it, so that we can use the heat lamp in the coop at night (when it gets cold), so it should be ok. They'll definitely be safe in there, too. We need to install the perches, build the nesting boxes, and enlarge the door and add the sliding cover part before we can let them loose in there. I'm thinking that we can get this done tomorrow night - and get them out there on Wednesday.

I attempted to make yogurt again yesterday. I used a real culture (ordered online) and tried in incubate it in a cooler filled with hot water. The yogurt didn't set up at all. Ugh. I tried finding a yogurt maker locally yesterday, but no one carried them. I may just have to order one. I don't know if this isn't working because I'm not mixing it right...or if it's that the temperature isn't where it should be. I'm thinking it's the latter. I figure that using a real yogurt maker will eliminate a bunch of variables and I can figure out what I am doing wrong. We did buy a hand-crank icecream maker yesterday. That'll be fun to experiment with!