The main project today was to put a little roof over the chicken shed door.
Here’s the parts I’m assembling for the job.
Clearing the door
I installed it high enough to clear the door I thought.
Not high enough
But when I went to shut the door in the evening the door hit the roof just barely so I’ll have to adjust that later.
Burying the fence wire
I dug some more ditches around the pen to bury the the underground wire that will keep critters from digging under it and moved some good dirt into the ditches that I removed the driveway rock.
I also worked on getting the watering system hooked up for the chicken pens as each pen will have a sprinkler on top of it that will be controlled by automatic timers. I will need to run water pipes later and put water faucets around the area to get rid of the long hoses I’m using now.
Taking it easy
I spent the rest of the day chair hopping and doing some planning. I think I did a better job today taking it easy than I did yesterday.
I planned to go kayaking today down at Jenner. But my body was so sore from my chicken project I could barely get out of bed and get it going.
Visited Ray
I did get it going and stopped by Ray’s house on the way and saw his new puppy and shot the bull with him for awhile.
He says he’s getting a new truck so maybe we can get him out camping.
Kayaking got canceled and we talked chickens
When I left I was out of the mood to kayak and I just needed to give my body a rest so I drove on down to John’s house, Ray’s brother to visit with his wife, Cheryl. She has chickens so we talked chickens and I learned a few things.
A visit with two Johns
Around noon she had to take off so I headed on home. At the stop sign at the bottom of the hill that John lives on, John drove by in his county work truck as he one of the guys that puts the river dams in, in the Guerneville area and there’s a bit of prep each year. They’d just removed all the brush that caught up in the dam boards through the winter. I knew he was headed to the county yard so I followed him in. He and his boss also with the name of John were having lunch so I shot the bull with them until they had to go back to work.
Not in the mood
I drove on home and wasn’t much in the mood to do any work so I sat around the yard and studied the things I still have to do.
Working on the pen roof
Eventually I started to work on getting the metal roof for the pen squared away and added the 2×4’s you see in this picture to help the water go in the right direction. I still have to wire all the metal roof down to the pen but I wasn’t into that today and thought I was fortunate to get what I did done on it. It needs to get wired down before a wind gets it.
Burying wire to prevent digging
I sat around some more and then picked up the shovel and dug a ditch here to put some wire in to keep critters out from under the shed and out of the pen.
I’ve got the ditch dug on this side. There’s another one on the other side of the shed which I also did.
I doubled up some chicken wire and stapled it to the shed and then buried the wire in the ground to detour any digging.
Removing rock
Along the old driveway there is rock on the edge of it. Since I had to dig the rock out to bury the fence I removed it and will fill the ditch back up with nice dirt as it’s a place to grow things as the area will get watered from the sprinkler on top of the pen.
Here’s a better picture of the wire I will bury in the ground to prevent digging. I’ll move the rock to more useful places that get muddy where I need to walk.
I still have to dig and bury the rest of the pen, but all the rocked part is done and the other part is just dirt so it will be easier to dig.
I still had about an hour before dark so I sat around and chair hopped until it got dark.
And that was my day fairly restful even though I did get some work done.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.