Well, howdy.

A lot has happened. The most exciting is that we are consistently getting 4 eggs a day from our girls. With this bitter cold, we do not have long to find said eggs before they crack. The dogs, however LOVE when we find the cracked ones. :)

The warm weather earlier this month had the chickens laying their eggs in the doghouse. We wondered why the production went down when the temperature went up!

The goats are doing very well. They mostly hang out in their shed, and we have been giving them hay everyday for a while now. We also put in a bucket warmer, so they have access to water all the time, not just the three times a day we brought it down to them before. :) Also, we no longer have to haul 5 gallon buckets of water three times a day. :) (We didn't, really--in the morning, and then 'refreshed' it with hot water twice more.--we have some nice new muscles. :)

Our dogs are cold. Poor Kodiak--she is our Doberman, and has short hair. We have been giving them as much fat as we can, and are feeding them twice a day, but they just don't seem to bulk up very well. Gunner seems to be doing just fine, although he is a bit on the thin side as well. They LOVE that we have the heater down with the goat's water. Now they don't have to wait for us to get their water, either!

Oh, speaking of, we decided to get a pet-water-er for the chickens. It's just a blue bowl that you plug in, and it keeps the water from freezing. Then everyday, you take an empty bucket and a fresh gallon of water down. The gunky water goes into the empty bucket, and then fill it back up. One gallon seems to last them just fine. We take an extra gallon down with us in the afternoon, but usually it just goes into the dog's dish.

The fish have passed on. This was entirely my fault. I was talking on the phone while changing their water. This is two days after they survived the ice storm. Well, I wasn't paying attention to the water temperature. They had been in 56 degree water, so I put them into a quart jar with some room temperature water in it. And by room temperature, I mean in the kitchen. Which was a surprising 65 degrees. Then I filled up the tank, and put in the water treatment stuff, and waited for the 20 minutes. When I went to put the fish back in the tank, they were acting funny. 10 minutes of being in the tank killed all but one of them. He died about 10 minutes later. Weird. So I looked at the temperature thing on the side of the tank, and it said that the water was at 72 degrees. I fried them. Not fried-fried, but the poor things couldn't handle my intensive 'warm-up' program. :) Now I have to put a disclaimer on it "Not for the cold-blooded." :)

Cats, good
People, staying warm.