Chilly Chickens

The chickens don't seem to mind the cold. Other than laying fewer eggs, they seem oblivious. They are waiting every morning for me to open the door and let them out, so they can run around in the sub-zero yard. They are certainly eating more. I don't like doing chicken chores in the cold though. Carrying waterers into the house to thaw by the stove, patching holes in the coop, carrying bags of feed to the coop. All for six eggs a day. I'm assuming egg production will go up slightly when temperatures go up to above freezing. When this cold snap ends, we are hearing reports of snow, so it will be interesting to see how the chickens react to that. We purposefully chose "cold hardy" heritage breeds, so they will probably be having snowball fights or something.

We've been hauling water from a friends house due to the broken and/or frozen plumbing. It is beyond my abilities to repair and we can't get a plumber for another day or two. Apparently, everybody's pipes froze on the Palouse. We will have to work out some kind of system to avoid this problem in the future.

On a more promising note, I saw thousands of geese in the valley yesterday. They should be coming up to the Palouse to search for grains soon. Setting up a blind and a decoy spread in the fields surrounding the house will be a fantastic break from sitting in the house and worrying about the plumbing.

I've been worrying about the plumbing and taking flights of fancy into, "what other disasters await us as the owners of a 100 year old farmhouse?" All I can do is just pray to let it go. The weather, the plumbing, the foundation, the floor joists...are all beyond my control. If something happens, we will handle it then.