Classes this week, so many more, losing chickens, the weekend, weather report

I had three eight our classes this week. Red, my now retired-back-on-contract coworker, taught the in-person class on Wednesday, but I attended and supplied support where applicable. All the classes went well. We are getting better and better prepared for the online classes. I am discovering little errors that no one but me would notice but I am having a difficult time keeping up with the updates in the online presentation program we use. As new classes are created, I have to ensure each class is updated with the most current material. So far, it has worked out well, but I have been the only one presenting the online classes. The real test will be when someone other than me delivers one of these classes.

Yesterday, while I was teaching a class, I was trying to keep up with a Slack thread that involved the addition of twelve classes in late October and throughout November. Those are in addition to classes I have already been scheduled to present. That will be a real challenge. I have made myself a goal to have all the presentations corrected and updated in our online presentation format by Wednesday of next week. That will be a huge undertaking, but I need to have it done so that as future classes are created, they will be replicated with the correct content. In the event that someone has to take over a class for which I become unavailable it will be ready to go when they open the program. Many of the classes being added through the end of November are internal classes that will introduce our new employees to not only our instructional content but also to our instructional philosophy. It will enable us to keep everyone on the same page as they promote and sell our programs. It will acquaint them with the overarching mission of our company as we support Operator Qualification programs in the oil and gas industry. I am looking froward to those classes even though that puts me up to seventeen classes in the month of November.

Mama and I went out last night to look over her flock. She has lost several chickens lately. Two seem to have died of natural causes, one was killed by the pig, and two disappeared during the day as they foraged on the property. We are now left with 42 hens total. We have four roosters as well, but Mama does not count them in the totals. I am not sure if loss that is a huge issue, but we do not want to lose any more because it will start to affect our egg count - which is finally up to about twenty per day. I am assuming we will keep up with the count to ensure the coyotes are not winning the game of feeding off our little flock. If we decide to keep the chickens cooped up, I will have to make a few changes to the fencing, because there are several hens that have figured out that they can fly up to the top of the inner gate, and from there get onto the roof of the coop. They will then cross the roof and fly down onto the open ground. Eliminating that route of escape will require a bit of work on my part. I have not eliminated the roof-route escape because I do not want the coop yard to look like a maximum-security prison.

Mama and I do not have a lot of plans for the weekend. I will need to go for more hog feed, and I have a couple small welding jobs on the docket. Other than that, I will open the hives to look over our bees’ progress within their hives. I am planning on getting ready to remove the honey super on the one hive. Hopefully, they filled a significant portion of the frames and Mama and I will get to harvest honey this year. While I am working the hives, I will put the feeder tops on the hives so we can begin feeding the bees. There is almost nothing for them to eat right now so they will need supplementation through the Winter and into the Spring.

Meanwhile, Mama is working on getting off of Facebook and onto Rumble – an alternative, conservative social media platform. Although it is more of a YouTube equivalent I am encouraging her to be the first Color Street stylist on that platform. She is making her first videos today and we hope to have them approved and uploaded today – or tomorrow at the latest. With the current illegal activities Facebook is engaging in, it is time to move away from them and my online resources have identified and provided Rumble as an alternative. Just FYI, the conservative alternative to Twitter is a program called Parler. Check them out.

Maggie told Mama this morning that Aaron had called her from the boat and alerted her to the fact that he was seeing snow from his offshore perspective. Maggie asked Walter to look out the window to see if it was snowing. His report was that “there is no white stuff falling from the sky.”

I suppose that is about as specific as he could get.