So we check the trail cam periodically, and on this last check found a picture of this cutie.
We believe this is a common gray fox, and the trail cam has picked up a few pictures of her (him?), but never straight on like this one. This is one of the biggest reasons for building Chicken Fort Knox. The photo was taken less than a 100 yards from the coop. Not only do we have foxes (and coyotes, and bobcat), the neighborhood dogs tend to slip through their electric fences and go for a stroll through our property. Dogs and chickens don’t go together either, so we need to anticipate trouble. Everything likes to eat chickens.
picture, that is. Our town has some nice walking paths, and there is a herd (or two) of deer that hang out near the paths. Last week I saw two bucks amongst the does. I see the does quite often, but spotting the bucks is more rare. I tried to take a photo with my phone, epic fail.
Epic phone picture fail
So I have started to carry my good digital SLR camera on my walks. It takes a little longer to get through my walks, because not only am I walking farther to see if I can find more picture opportunities, I stop a lot. Oh well, fresh air and sunshine is good for the soul. I also have taken some nice pictures of the does as well. Maybe I will even spot that older buck again one of these days, with camera ready.
I love the pantry in our house, but there wasn’t an area to put spices that made them easy to find. I recently sorted the spices and discovered three containers of garlic salt. Apparently I thought I was out because I couldn’t find any so bought more. Three times.
I decided to make my own spice rack for the pantry door. I’ve tried the wire racks screwed to the door, but they tend to fall off when accidentally bumped. (And I often forget my edges and bump into things! Ugh.) Not to mention cleaning up glass and wasted spice from the floor is not a preferred activity. So I measured my space and my largest containers and made my plan.
I went to the lumber store and picked out 1x4x8 select pine, and found some beautiful embossed pine trim. There are several ways to construct spice racks; I could use rabbet and dado joints, biscuit joints, or mortis and tenon joints. I decided to work on my chisel and hand saw skills and do mortis and tenon joints. It took me a while, but the last mortis was much cleaner than my first! Here is a picture of the side boards with all the mortises cut.
The saw I used is a Marples hand saw, fine cut double blade pull saw, which I absolutely love for fine cuts. (Especially when my band saw is buried at the back of the garage. Cleaning out the garage will take a couple stages and the chicken coop comes first!) I also used a 1/2″ straight chisel that I made sure was nice and sharp before I started.
I was pleased when I glued everything together how well it came out! I was planning on painting it white, but the wood looked so pretty I changed my mind and put on a couple coats of clear. After filling the nail holes and a few gaps with wood filler. (Have you tried the color changing wood filler? I haven’t used it before, but it worked well. A little shocking to spread bright pink paste on my project, but when it was dry it faded to a nice natural color, and sanded well.)
So here is the final project all ready for my spices! I’ve made the mistake of putting items on a finished shelf before the recommended 24 hours, and have had things stick to the shelf. So I’ll give it a good 48 hours then load it up! Yay for pantry reorganization!
A couple days ago my eldest asked if she could stay up to watch the lunar eclipse on Sunday. Um, yes! I found out later that she also gets extra credit points in Science class for taking a picture or bringing a parent note that she went out and looked at the eclipse. We found out that the next lunar eclipse doesn’t occur until 2022! So I pulled out my good camera, the tripod, and coats, and starting at about 10pm, we started going out and taking pictures every 10 minutes or so.
This was particularly exciting, because before our move our luck seeing stellar events was not stellar. The haze, humidity, clouds, and light pollution meant that we hardly ever were able to actually observe much in the sky at night.
Now we are more country, there is far less light pollution, and we actually had a fairly clear sky! Happy dance! And as the lunar eclipse progressed, we could see more and more stars. We were able to identify Orion (which was the only constellation we could see at our old house regularly), Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, and the Big Dipper. (Now that we can see so many more stars, I think it is time to get out the charts again and learn our constellations!!)
This morning I opened up Adobe Photoshop and did a collage of the best of the images (there were many very blurry pictures, hmm, need to work on my moon pictures too apparently). Enjoy!
What? WordPress will let me put in my own logo? Well, of course I need a new one then! Yay! I originally thought maybe a chicken silhouette with my Caryn’s Creations logo, and since we are getting Faverolles, it should be a Faverolle silhouette… uh. So while fluffy and adorable, Faverolles do not have an easily recognizable silhouette. The graphic would have looked like Shmoo on a tree (squee!, but no.). So instead I revved up Adobe Illustrator and I egged my business logo. I think it came out great!
