Just a Quickie

First day back from vacation and all my hard won relaxation has been blown to bits. More like buzzed to bits with a circular saw. The day started with insomnia. Go figure. I'm really not the insomnia kind of girl, and when it does strike, I don't handle it too well. I tried to go back to sleep, but my head was full of laundry and shopping lists and rafter calculations and the sound of my son coughing at top volume and it was just no good. Got up, made shopping list, grumpussed at various family members who could not be persuaded to get in the car and go shopping with me, and off I went. And there was an audiobook in the CD player, and I could hear it because no one was talking over it, complaining that it was boring, or screaming in incomprehensible Threeyearold-ese for me to turn it off. And then there was the weather (warm and sunny and generally perfect) and then there was coffee. And grocery shopping without the assistance of a three year old. And by the end of it all I was much better.

And then I tackled The Roof. This is the same roof that I thought I would finish before we left for vacation because rain was predicted and I didn't want to leave my poor coop


to get all damp and moldy. Between the weather (yes, rain; or more appropriately, RAIN, because some of it was pretty impressive) and the packing though, the only thing I could get done was a pathetic temporary roof and a tarp over the door.


Plus, I was thoroughly baffled by the rafter calculations, which apparently are based entirely on irrational numbers.

A little R&R seemed to help and by the end of the afternoon the first part of the roof was up. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that the coop now resembles a giant gift box with a handle. This is kind of hard to argue with.



In the mean time, the building supplies in my garage are slowly disappearing. There is a pile of rafters waiting for a little fine tuning and a heap of sawdust waiting for some kind soul to clean it up. There is also a heap of sawdust on me and I'm hoping that it is not really as combustible as people say it is. Tomorrow there may actually be a roof to go with the sawdust and the gift-box/coop and it will not be a moment too soon because the chickens are due to arrive in the middle of the week.

Vacation pictures are coming in the next post, although I'll pause here to note that while others fished, I was either spinning or knitting. The end result was this:


and this:
and an awful lot of this:

whereas all my family got was this:

On a final note (yay!), I have joined the Tour de Fleece and have decided to try to turn this giant heap of fluffy goodness from the Hagreen's shearing day (Thank you, Diane!!!)


into a whole heap of fluffy yarn

just waiting to be dyed. Because, really, I didn't have enough to keep me busy this month.