Difficult Week

Part of life, especially an out of the ordinary life, is problems. Right????

This week was a frustrating one.

First of all....

It was difficult to sleep in the tent because last weekend it rained quite a bit. I didn't notice any specific leaks, but it was exceptionally humid. The comforter always felt moist and I kept waking up sweaty.

So the next day I was taking the sheets off to put them in the dryer, and I noticed that there was a small portion that was soaking wet. I also found a small slug on the floor next to the bed, which at first I thought was the culprit. But THEN, I lifted the mattress up (which was resting directly on the ground) and it was soaking wet as well. It seems there was a seam in the tarp-floor which must have leaked some moisture from the ground up into the mattress. The mattress was not only wet, but also MOLDY on the bottom. MAJOR BUMMER! We ended up propping the mattress up in my mother in law's living room to dry in front of the heater and fan. I think we will still be able to make it work, as long as we put the mattress up on the metal frame rather than on the ground. The reason we had initially put it on the ground rather than on the frame was because the ground is, shall we say....unlevel? So it was easier to make the bed level directly on the ground rather than on the frame. But, alas, we will have to just make it work on the frame, so we don't make the mattress moldy...

So this was on Tuesday, and we managed to make it until Friday until we reached yet another snag.

We let our chickens out, as usual, on Friday around noonish. A few hours later, Trystan informed me that the neighbor, whose property is a vacation home, was upset because the chickens had gotten onto her property and supposedly pooped on her car....

So this means that we can't let them free-range anymore. This depresses me exponentially. They loved going out and having free reign of the property. I truly believe it wasn't the chickens that pooped on her car, but just a regular bird, since I have never seen the chickens actually climb onto any of our cars.

We built them a little make-shift fence out of some free fencing we got from our awesome, amazing, wonderful friend Judy. They seem to be happier than being in the tiny coop all day, but one of them escaped today. We just let her hang out outside for a while (mostly because I couldn't find her) and eventually I found her pecking around in the coop, and then I put her back in the fenced area with her little chicken friends. We plan on putting the coop up next to the fence so they can go in and out as they please, but until we can do that, we will have to get them from the play yard to the coop manually. This means luring them into the enclosure with feed at the beginning of the day, and then one by one carrying them back into the coop at the end of the day. This has become more difficult as they figure out ways to evade being captured. But we will soon put the coop next to the enclosure so it will be easier.

So that was our week, a bit more exciting than usual!