Busy weekend, brutal cold

Mama and Kimberlyn set up shop at Trade Day’s Saturday morning. It turned out to be a very nice day weather wise. They had some customers who actually bought some of the items they had for sale, but all in all it was a slow day. When the final tabulations were made, they netted $65. At least they made some money. With all the clothing they had – some of it quite nice – they had a lot of lookers, but very few buyers. The majority of their profits came from the sale of one of the three-foot tall scarecrow/snowmen Kimberlyn had painted. And of course, my Christmas donkey sold right away. The rest of the profits came from the sale of lip balms and earrings. On the bright side, people at the bee keeping club and church are excited about the lip balms. Those items will sell very well over time. Mama and Kimberlyn are already planning another batch. They are also rattling around ideas for more painted crafts. Kimberlyn’s artistic flare is impressive in that area. Mama’s ideas add well to the scope of the work they do with those plaques.

Victoria was off Saturday. Sort of. She tagged along with Mama and Kimberlyn and helped them get set up in their spot. Then she was sent back to the farm to pick up a couple items Mama had forgotten to bring. Both of those items sold, so I suppose it was a wise use of Victoria’s time and gas. After that was done, Victoria had to report to the pharmacy to rearrange the shelving to create an area for newly classified drugs. She was only supposed to work for a couple hours but the work was far more involved than originally thought. She ended up working about six hours on the project since it had to be completed to keep the pharmacy operating efficiently. She was worn out when she finally got home.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, I worked all day getting more things rearranged and cleaned up. I took apart the pallets we were forced to attach to the pig enclosure. They had served their usefulness and were looking ugly. I had been wanting to get them taken down for some time, so it was nice to finally get started on removing them. I did not get them hauled away because my tractor was having issues. A clogged fuel filter I believe. I also started outlining the new pig enclosure. I hope to make it a little less unsightly when we have pigs on the farm again. While I have the old enclosure torn down, I will get the tractor and refill and relevel the area the last pigs we had tore up so badly. In between picking up items that had been cast about in various places in the coop area and putting a creep feeder in the goat barn, I worked on getting the well house cleaned up.

Mama and I want to make the well house our honey house. To that end I moved the newly built hives from the shop to the well house. That will give Mama and Kimberlyn more space to lay out their crafts as they are assembled. It will also help us keep in mind the purpose of the building. I will eliminate all the items that should have long ago gone to the shop or the garage. Especially paints and other chemicals we do not want around the honey or the honey processing equipment. As Mama and I talked about the cost of honey supers and hive parts, we decided that I will build all we need in the future. It will become another ongoing project at the farm. Praise the Lord, I have a shop and the tools required to do that work.

Brutal cold coming today. I was shown and app called MyRadar a few months ago and I have used it consistently since downloading it to my phone. On that app, you can track the line of the cold front as it plunges south. We are only a few hours from the cold overwhelming us. As soon as I get home, I will have to take up hoses, turn on heat lamps, set up heaters and draft reducers and double and triple check the well houses. The forecast is for the morning temperature to be 22°. I will not be shocked if we are in the teens when I leave for work tomorrow morning. The uncertain part of the forecast is the rain that is expected to come as the temperatures drop. According to the current forecast, we will be at freezing by noon and well below that by the time we get off work this evening.

Welcome to Winter.