I did a lot this month, just not much in the garden! It’s been cold and wet and muddy out there and I’m a coward who hates the cold. But we really do need to get back out there and transplant the not-sunflowers and nasturtium into the chicken area and tidy up in general while waiting for the ponds. There was a bit of a kerfuffle about that as when J went to order them he claims that he doesn’t remember them costing that much (I’m pretty sure they did) and then he realised we hadn’t measured the heights (we had measured the widths and knew that would fit). Good thing he did as we found out that the 1200L ponds we wanted to get were too tall to fit under the grow bed frames. He then went to order the 1100L square ponds and decided he didn’t want to pay almost the same price for one that we could have gotten two from the other place, so now are other options are the same pond that we have already or food grade IBCs which are slightly smaller and I presume cheaper. He initially said that the IBCs are also too tall and would need to be sunk which would mean ripping up the paving which I was VERY unhappy about, but then he said we could just cut the IBCs in half and have them side by side.

nb: this is kind of in a thematic/narrative order not really a chronological one. We hit up Bunnings over a couple more weekends to pick up more concrete for the chicken fence, and of course bought more plants and seeds (fortunately I had the bag notebook so we didn’t double up on anything except chicken and insect mix which was done deliberately). On one of the trips we somewhat accidentally split up (on a previous trip I had seen a couple of paint swatches that made up my domain name and wanted them) so Eldest (who had come with us) ended up scuttling back and forth as messenger asking what seeds we had, and after finding (or not finding) his request and telling him I said the only “bad” thing about the notebook was no search function XD

Yesterday’s gardening efforts that I forgot to post yesterday. Youngest moved the raised sleeper bed to the correct spot and Eldest and I grabbed some free chicken food/mulch from the verge.

Aeris the Pig Dog vs Satan the Chicken of Indeterminate Breeding “Satan” was so-called because she kept jumping the fence and occasionally also climbing up onto the currently defunct aquaponics and then onto the shed and then onto the roof and jumping off the other side, and we’d then have to drive her back to the chicken area. Aeris “The Puppy” (who is currently 4 years old) eventually figured out what we were wanting after following us every time we went to round up the chicken and then started trying to help and after requiring a few corrections (she was just chasing initially because I guess she thought that’s what we were doing, and also she’s not meant to actually catch them) she’s been really enjoying rounding up any chickens (usually this one). The chickens don’t enjoy it quite as much.

We finally bought a NAS, it’s living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router). I’m currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata). Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it’s 53Gb and going to blow out as I’m shooting RAW.

Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the moderator department, which meant I completely forgot about the moderation until the new moderator rocked up on my door towards the end of my work period. Oops. Fortunately I work from home and can make up hours easy, and I hadn’t gone out to pick up my shiny new computer yet, though I had gotten dressed to do so. So all she saw was that my place is a mess, which is about normal and I don’t clean up for anyone!

This one crowed directly outside the window and sounded like he’d been recorded and some sound technicians had remixed and resampled it and added some reverb and echo and all that (can you tell I don’t know anything about sound?) and played back what a demonic possessed rooster would sound like if a film maker ever had need of a demonic possessed rooster crowing.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Not quite intelligent enough for a coherent post, so have lots of captioned photos instead. Homeschooling art and English: storyboarding with Mummy (who was working on AR storyboards)

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] A friend introduced the kids to the My Little Pony remake some time ago and with the starting of this blog post this song stuck in my brain (had no help whatsoever from the kids watching it a few times ;). So I’m a bit late for “tomorrow spring is here”, we’re about halfway through the first month of spring as humans like to count it. I think spring came a bit earlier than September. As far as I’m concerned it’s spring when the weather and the flowers say it’s spring.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Firstly, what in the hell is with the life category?! I’ve been (very slowly!) importing livejournal entries so I can replace missing photos. Very minor regret that I didn’t bother skimming through my shadowshifter livejournal before I deleted it as I probably had a few progress reports for my various projects kicking around on it, but oh well.