evan

3 June – Chicken move and a surprise!

by

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.

#video #goat #babygoat #chickens #ducks #geese #homestead #homeschool


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

Lazy Sunday!

by

31 May 2026

The usual start to the morning today, moving the birds and letting them out.

I had to help the goslings out again, they still haven’t figured out the ramp. One of them later got its foot stuck in the fence. It seemed to have pulled or strained it, it wasn’t working quite right. So we put that one in the baby pen to keep it away from the bigger birds while it recovers. Evan said it was doing a bit better. I’ll check on it tomorrow.

We had company over coffee in the morning, had a nice conversation with our neighbor. He’s going to help us teach the kids some subjects in the home school, which is pretty awesome.

Then it was out to the pool. I think the battle with the mustard algae has turned the corner. I’d left the pump off for a day and a half, and the water was pretty clear, although not crystal clear. I had previously added clarifier to help the particulates settle/filter. There was a good layer on the bottom of the pool when I started.

You can see the line here where I’ve vacuumed and have not yet. I got it all done, and adjusted the water chemistry a bit and told the kids they could swim. They were very excited!

Upon the recommendation of a neighbor, I got a PoolRX mineral algicide and installed that in the pump body. That is supposed to help keep the algae down, so we’ll see how that goes!

After pool clean up time, the kids helped out by cleaning up the house for our Family Dinner night, where we host a number of guests for dinner. Then they went swimming and had fun. Garrett worked on his swimming with Meagan. Jarek performed the Star Spangled Banner on the violin for us, and Evan played the Mysterious Casbah for us on Piano.

While the kids did that, I took some time to nerd out and move Jellyfin to a postgresql database. Hopefully that will stop it from crashing as much. Nothing more irritating than being gone and getting a text from Meagan that the movies won’t play!

After dinner, it was coloring time for a bit before bedtime!

Thanks for reading! Sign up on our Patreon to know when posts get published!

#life #moments #chickens #homestead #pool #geese #kids

Friday fun day!

by

29 May 2026

Today started out like most other days, with the animal chores.

I took a video of the geese, ducks, and chickens being let out of their tractor this morning. They were very excited to be free!

Radnal of course was my helper.

Evan and Meagan were busy with the goats.

We then checked the mail, because that’s what you do.

After the animals were tended to it was off to the pool to check on it.

Clarity is improving, lots of particulates/dead algae in the water still. I added some more chlorine and some algicide and clarifier.

Tomorrow I will do another vacuum pass. I have some other things coming to assist with the pool, but it’s probably ‘good enough’ for the kids by Sunday.

One of our neighbors had some trees cut down. We arranged for them to drop off the branches. The goats really enjoy them. Then we grind up the branches with a chipper to add organic matter to the soil.

After that, it was off to the homeschool meet up for Meagan and the kids.

I was having a look at one of the trees that is having some issues. Looks like this one will be coming down sooner than later. Another fun project, yay! The one on the other side of the house has a similar issue, so maybe I will try to tackle them both together.

In the afternoon, we did a family DnD session with Jarek and our neighbor.

Then it was time to do evening animal chores. Zanzi, the white goat, prefers to have treehouse dining.

The goose was giving me the hairy eyeball when I went to check on them. They don’t really like being locked up for the evening, but better safe than sorry with the fox on the loose around us.

Saturday we will be up early as the big three kids have a swim meet starting at 7!

Thanks for reading! Sign up on our Patreon to know when posts get published!

#video #life #moments #geese #homestead #pool #homeschool #chickens