geese

Fizzling Thursday

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3 Sep 2026

Evan and Meagan got to practice early, and started doing some drills. Meagan made Evan a bet that if he blocked more shots than her, she would do his dishes(!). Sadly, he did not succeed.

Garret being a goober, as usual of course.

The other notable thing that happened today was our Ninja toaster oven started to go on the fritz. Which was rather disappointing and only then did we find out how much we really relied on it.

Drippy Friday

4 Sept 2026

Nothing quite like going out to the chickens and finding one randomly dead in the morning. No apparent signs of struggle or injuries.

Wildly crazy loud geese!

After animal chores, it was off to lunch with friends, then to the store. We were running low on our favorite peanut butter. Which, it turns out, was apparently also quite popular as there was none on the shelves when I got there.

Then it was time to change the oil on the truck. I was going to use my new oil extraction pump, but something wasn’t compatible with the setup – either too long of a hose or it couldn’t get down to the oil pan. I had to by a longer piece of tubing but it still didn’t reach.

Meanwhile, there was chess club. Garrett is learning to play, although he has a bit of trouble with losing.

The rest of the kids had a good time. Jarek and Evan can beat everyone there, however; so we need to find them some stiffer competiiton!

Fortunately, I had a Fumoto valve installed, which made it much less messy.

Normally, this results in a partial oil bath for me as 3 gallons of oil is liberated.

Of course, there is no time to change oil like when you are dodging rain showers!

I see a little person got a hold of my phone…


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Wacky Wednesday

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2 Sep 2026

We tried a little experiment, well two actually. One was cutting back the feed for the chickens, and two was using the Tractor Supply delivery service.

Cutting the feed back wasn’t that great. It caused a slow down in their eggs, and I’m not sure if it is related or not, but seemed to trigger a molt. Egg production pretty much stopped (writing this a couple weeks in the future..) and took a while to recover.

Tractor Supply also took their time delivering, missing the original promise date and stretched out the delivery over a few days. That was a little annoying as well.

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Attic Adventures!

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30 July 2026

Morning time, Chore time!

Checking on the mama turkey who is still sitting on an egg. She’s been pretty dedicated and made a nest in the tall grass. It was rather difficult to find her, you would not know she was there unless you walked up on her!

Garrett wanted a chess lesson. I gave him a good lesson in the basics. We used his new set that Granny sent.

I sucked it up and went back up into the attic to make some progress on the bathroom project. I found the vent for the downstairs hall bathroom, venting directly to the attic. I’ll add that to the list of things to fix.

I had left an A/C duct disconnected, so I went up to fix that. I also cleared out some insulation around the existing fan and made a hole in the ceiling, so I can access the area from the bottom. I need to rewire the fan and light on to their own circuit. Also, as you can see, it also vents directly to the attic space, so that’s my next trick, to install a roof vent and properly escape the humid air.

The heat has been crazy, but its cooled off a bit and both Meagan and I were in a bit of a funk. But we’ve been getting out of that, and now back at it with the projects!


Thanks for reading! Sign up here on the blog or on our Patreon to know when posts get published! I share these automagically to the Journey of the Wolf and Raven Facebook page if you prefer that. You can also follow me on the fediverse via @alan@www.wolfandraven.blog, or on Friendica at @alan

Catching up!

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30 June 2026 (13 June – 30 June 2026)

It’s funny how time flies. I went with Jarek and Arya to Scout Camp at Camp Shands this year, from the 14th to the 20th of June. After we got back, it took us a little bit to recover, and of course keeping up with all the usual activities the blogging fell of. Well, no time like the present to catch up!

A gosling that hatched on 13 June.

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Turkey poult and clean up Sunday!

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7 June 2026

Our Sunday morning (really Saturday night) started with with a cheep! A random turkey egg that we found stashed among our animal things hatched, and hatched much earlier than we were expecting.

The last two poults that we had managed to sneak out of their containment, so we are going to have to come up with another solution for this poult.

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3 June – Chicken move and a surprise!

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3 June 2026

Today was a big move day for the waterfowl pen. We moved it across the street to our neighbor’s yard, who lets us use it for livestock. We got a good video today for you!

The nice thing about these chicken tractor designs is how portable they are. We like them much better than the traditional coop where the poop piles up.

After taking care of the animals, the kids were off to swim team practice.

After swim team, the kids came back and had lunch, then it was time for history with Mr. Richard! Today they learned about the French Revolution.

After history, they watched a video on the French Revolution, and then it was off to the pool with Grandma!

Garrett helped make dinner! He is quite the helper and I’d say he, but all the of the kids love to cook!

After that, it was Adult D&D night, and movie night for the kids with Grandma.

During the day, I was working on one of my main tasks – catching up on purchases from Amazon and Costco in my accounting system, GnuCash. I did finally make my first AI assisted program to take the data from those sites and turn it into something useful for GnuCash, which has saved me quite a bit of time. Now I just some processing to do on the file, and I can close out this task!

I’ve also been working with ChatGPT on hardening the server, and I think things are in a better place now. It is much faster than I am at figuring out regexp’s for fail2ban, one of the security suites I use, on the server. Every day people, but probably bots, scan and probe the server. Now, we should be catching more of that and blocking them from trying to mess up the server.

Of course, there was one more thing. As we were checking on the animals before bed, we made a little discovery in the goat pen.

Two little baby goats were born tonight! We got them situated a little better in their pen, and reinforced the fencing. They can get out of the normal goat fence, so I moved over one of our baby chick fences which has a much tighter mesh weave on it to keep them safe.

#babygoat


Thanks for reading! Sign up on our Patreon to know when posts get published! I share these automagically to the Journey of the Wolf and Raven Facebook page if you prefer that. You can also follow me on the fediverse via
alan@www.wolfandraven.blog