#chickens #goose #geese #helper #eggs #homestead #homeschool #video
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Hawk attack!
Our geese defenders did a good job today, scaring off a hawk that tried to grab a chicken! Fortunately, the hawk was not successful and our guard goose was on duty to scare him off.
You can see the hawk drop the chicken on the way out (dark shape). The kids said that the goose hit the hawk when it came into the pen.
#homestead #chickens #goose
Fun with water and fixing things!
Recently, we have had two water projects to do. One was the pressure tank in the well house. The other was the dishwasher.
Last week I came home from Scouts, and Meagan told me that there was no water in the house. I went out to the well house and found a scene that looked a lot like this (after we shut off the pumps):
The exit fitting from the pump was blown out of the pump housing. Easy enough to fix. it was about 9 pm, so I had enough time to run down to Lowe’s and get parts to fix it, and I did that night. We had water again, so that was cool.
The next day things were good, until later that night, when sitting at my desk I heard a bang. Shortly after, Jarek told me that there was no water in the bathroom. I went back out to the pump house and found this:
It had failed again, the same way. Further diagnosis indicated that the pressure tank was failed, as it was not having any pressure. The pressure gauge on top of the pump had also failed. Since it never built pressure, the pump never shut off, causing heat to build up and eventually deform the PVC pipe to the point where it could blow out of the fitting.
Off to the store again to get parts, I set to work on installing a new pressure tank and hoping that the pump was still ok, as it was rather expensive to replace the pump as well.
Evan is helping me chamfer some pipes prior to gluing them up.
The system is coming along nicely, but I ran out of parts to fully get the water filtration system connected. I was able to get the bypass loop complete and restore water to the house. Off to Lowe’s once more for the rest of the parts.
Garrett went with Jarek and I. Jarek wanted to get some seeds for a gardening project of his own. Garrett got to help the checkout lady, Susan, with scanning them. He thought that was the best!
Back at the house with everything hooked up! We had a noticeable increase in water quality after putting the filter system in use.
About a week later, the dishwasher threw an error code. As you might imagine, this ranks right up there with having no water in a large family. The seven of us make just a few dishes every meal, and that becomes a problem if the dishwasher is down.
I had lots of helpers on the first day (more on that later) of diagnosis. I showed the kids the guts of the dishwasher and how to diagnose it.
I ordered a new valve, which was the most likely cause of this (IE – inlet error) failure and put it on. However, the problem still persisted. I ordered another two valves, and the next day I put the one on that came today – one is still in transit as of this writing.
However, the problem still persisted. I took the system apart again and found water in the black tube (visible above), which meant that some water was getting through, but not enough apparently.
I ended up taking the dishwasher out, turning it around, and hooking it back up so I could test. The slow trickle above was with the ‘new’ valve on. I ended up taking that valve off and putting the old valve back on, and got a much better flow rate.
I cleaned out the plastic manifold, and put everything back together, and it worked! I’m not sure what the actual problem was, but there was some obstruction somewhere that was preventing the water from filling up like it was supposed to.
Jarek helps out by reinstalling the kickplate on the dishwasher after I put it back in the cabinets.
Garrett and Randal loved playing with my sockets – they were entertained for the whole time I was working on the dishwasher today.
“Look at me mama. I tightening someting with a tool mama.”
Baby Goats
Zanzi had her babies yesterday, we woke up to find her hanging out with two new kids, both boys!
Smolder decided to leave them alone, mamma wasn’t having it.
The next day, the kids were much more active and playing around happily!
#goat #goats #homestead #homesteading #animals #livestock
Animal Chores
Did animal chores today, checking in the critters.
I moved the chickens today. They were very excited about their new pen, looking for fresh bugs and such.
The geese were happy to have a fresh pool. They went for a little swim despite the hose still filling it up. Once I took those hose out, they hopped back in.
The goats wanted to file a complaint with management about the rain.A light rain started to fall. The goats were unhappy and took cover in their shelter.
The neighborhood guinea flock did a drive by.
I was being stalked by Smolder the cat while doing chores.
I checked in on the new baby chicks, who promptly ran for cover when i peeked in.I checked in on our new flock of baby chicks. We have some cream leg bars and silver laced wyandottes, and a couple roosters. We plan to focus on the cream leg bars and hatch some sex link chicks to sell.
We have a handful of goose eggs in the incubator as well, so we should start to see some hatching in early March if all goes well.
Adding some experimental things here for other social media sharing:
#chickens #homestead #goat #goats #chicks #babychicks
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Feb update – AOL Crossover, Computers, and more!
3 Feb 2026
Last weekend, we had Arya’s Arrow of Light (AOL) Crossover ceremony to what I call “big” Scouts, to distinguish Cub Scouts from what used to be known as Boy Scouts, now Scouting America BSA.
Meagan brought Randal and Garrett along for a visit, and for the ceremony later that night. We were given some camp chairs that fit them just perfectly and they loved them!.
I was playing with some of my toys you can see in the background, solar panels. It was of course a cloudy day, so I wasn’t able to recharge my battery pack that I brought to power the CPAP machine. I have a couple different ways I’ve been playing with for portable power, and these camp out have been a good time to experiment with them. I also set up the Starlink for its monthly exercise and updates.
Evan having fun with his fell Cub Scouts. They were running around finding pokemon stuffed animals earlier. That afternoon, before the ceremony, there was a flag retirement ceremony that the kids were able to participate in.
The rest of the camp out photos are here: https://photos.argentwolf.org/index.php?/category/67
The cross over ceremony was that night. I will put a couple of photos below, the rest I have on the gallery here: https://photos.argentwolf.org/index.php?/category/68
Here, she has had all of her Cub Scout things removed, ready to cross the bridge into Scouting.
The Scouts of the troop have received her and now dress her in the regalia of ‘big’ Scouts.
Jarek is not pictured, but he did have a speaking role in the ceremony.
It was a good ceremony, much better than last year. Nighttime photography is always challenging, and even more so when everyone is moving and lots of things are going on. Overall, I think most of the pictures came out pretty good, I only had a few that were not usable.
Year in review post
The Year in review is coming soon ™, largely due to a couple things:
1) bathroom remodel. The upstairs bathroom needs to be fixed, so that is starting now.
2) Tax time. yay
3) Data errors in the storage pool that holds the photos.
#3 has been the big booger that I’ve been somewhat avoiding dealing with, but as of today it seems to have resolved finally. I have a file system check in progress, (a zfs scrub), and if that comes back clean, then I will proceed. Otherwise I will need to rebuild the pool which will take a few days due to its size (27 Terabytes).
In other fun, I had two other spinning disks fail and need to be replaced. I had some shenanigans with a seller who sold me a non-Americas region drive, and thus had no warranty. So back it went and I ordered another disk replacement. Apparently the AI push is causing drive and memory prices to spike, so that isn’t fun.
Social Networks
At the request of Meagan, I set up a couple social networks, a Friendica (similar to the older Facebook) instance, https://friendica.argentwolf.org and a Mastodon instance (Twitter / X), https://mastodon.argentwolf.org to play with. These are federated social media servers, called nodes, that are run independently, but can talk and share across the network to each other. That way, you can follow someone and get their feed (or block them), and not be bothered by Big Social Media’s algorithm.
The blog (https://www.wolfandraven.blog) is also set up with this protocol, called ActivityPub. So now you can find and follow me at these places:
alan@www.wolfandraven.blog (this will notify you of blog posts there)
I’ve dabbled in these before, but they didn’t seem to be ready. After Musk bought Twitter, a large number of folks left Twitter and went to the ‘fediverse’ so there has been some maturing of the platforms in the mean time.
Along with my server project, hosting isn’t free and the Social Media companies make money by selling you to advertisers. So, all in all, I don’t mind hosting these instances as it takes back control of the feed and what happens with your data.
We also had some sadness with one of our goats, Chali, who lost her baby kid over the weekend during Evan’s birthday party on Saturday.
She started having signs of giving birth, but there was a bad smell. She was a couple weeks early as well. It turned out that the baby had died some time ago, but we weren’t able to determine when that was, other than the pregnancy terminated itself.
Of course, it was on a weekend, but we were able to have a helpful goat person come out and assist us with delivering the dead kid and make sure Chali was doing ok. Thus far, no signs of any further distress.
We are expecting several of the other goats to kid in the next few weeks. Also, we will be getting in more baby chicks, likely this weekend. Hopefully the cold weather will have passed us on by and we can resume our regularly scheduled Florida weather!
Kiddos and their fort
21 Jan 2026
The year in review post is forthcoming! We’ve been swamped with life and computer issues, which I’ll get to later for those who want to nerd out with me on it.
We have a bathroom renovation coming up to address water leakage from upstairs to the dining room, so that will be fun.
In the mean time, check out the for the kids have built on their own in the back yard.
Happy Yule 2025!
Happy Yule from all of us to you! Wishing you the best in the New Year!
Our Year in Review post will be forthcoming!
-Alan
Summer Update!
It’s been a hot minute since we posted an update. Life has finally gotten to a point where I can slow down a bit and post!
In November, we got back from the trip to home base in Florida.
Immediately, we were into the holiday rush between Thanksgiving, Yule, New Year, and missed birthdays.
My helpers helped me build a little patio deck for the RV.
Randal is very busy, taking a call here.
Here is the “lanai” set up with the Mk 1 side walls, which weren’t that great. I later replaced them with a proper sidewall kit, which was important as the weather soon turned cold and wet.
Of course, there was no slow down with activities. Straight into camping with Scouts, they kids got to climb the tower and shoot bow and arrow.
The elves were up to their usual shenanigans as well.
Of course, one of the most missed things was the digging pit. Which they promptly got yelled at for making it too deep.
I smoked a few turkeys for Yule dinner.
Presents on the lanai.
New Year’s Fireworks with friends and neighbors.
January brought more cold days.
We had given notice to the tenants to move out, but it would still be a little while before they were out and we could move back into the house.
More homeschooling and book work, but there was still camping with the Scouts. Alan and Jarek went to a winter campout that actually had snow!
February brought Evan’s birthday party and a pinata for the kids.
Late February brought animals. Baby chicks and preparation for dairy goats.
Randal inspects the neighborhood Tom.
March brought the goats!
March also brought the Pinewood Derby for the younger kids.
Arya and Evan work on their cars.
Arya sits with randal while they watch the races.
Garrett worked to build his own car at the lego table.
The end of March also brought back our house! The tenants were out April 1st, so it was time to pull our belongings out of storage!
April
April brought boxes, boxes, and more boxes. And furniture assembly, and all the other assemblies.
Alan and Jarek went to the Sun N Fun airshow with the Scout Troop.
Garrett thought that the empty boxes were the best toys!
Goats doing Goat things.
Evan got into soccer again, doing his favorite thing, running around!
Baby goats!
Evan and Garrett feed the baby goats
We added a couple goslings to our collection!
Jarek earned his Tenderfoot rank.
More boxes await!
Randal helps with the chicken feed!
Evan and Arya complete another year of Cub Scouts and move up in rank.
June brought more projects. Alan began work on the mobile chicken tractor. Garrett helps to assemble it.
A visit to the lake with family!
Unfortunately, afterwords Alan picked up some bug and got sick for a few days.
Chickens and Geese all grown up!
The end of June and first part of July, Alan and Jarek went to Woodruff Scout Camp.
It was a great time and a lot of fun! Jarek learned a lot and got to knock out a lot of rank requirements and earn several merit badges.
Arya gets some snuggles in with the goats.
Randal celebrates his second birthday with a rice krispi cake, as is tradition. Garrett is there to help him blow out the candles!
And that brings us up to August! We are mostly moved in, but still have a bunch of stuff to go through. We’ve been working on sorting out stuff that is too small or no longer wanted. Fortunately, we are finally able to age out of some baby clothes!
Alan has been working on several geeky IT projects, including moving the website hosting to a new server and getting all of the photos cataloged and accessible. That project is also moving forward, now that there is a little bit of breathing space.
I still have many posts from the trip to go back and catch up on. I am going to make a point to get some of those published out here by sheer force of will, so expect to see dribs and drabs of those now that some of this administrative overhead is done.
We are also gearing up for our next year of homeschooling, which will be a bit less exciting than last year!
Scouts is getting ready to start as well, and Arya will be moving up to the big Scout Troop later this year, so she will get to do more camping and activities as well.
Meagan is on the hunt for a buck to breed our goats again to refresh their milk, so that will be a new experience for us as well.
We have the chickens set up in a pastured rotational grazing, and that seems to be working out. They are almost all laying eggs now. We got some baby turkeys as well, and that has been quite the adventure. They are a bit different than chickens and have some definite opinions on where they want to be!
I hope you enjoyed this update. I’m looking forward to getting more updates out about our adventures soon!