April at school

Now that the weather is warm and the grass is greening up, the guineas spend their days foraging. The polka-dot girl at upper right is on guard duty, buckWHEATing her "all is well" call. Everybody else skulks around eyeing the ground for bugs or grain. That's Mrs. Davis, the dark one at middle left, and J&E, the white one, just above her. They do this all around the school, up the hill, down at the neighbor's place, on the roof. They'd like to do it inside while watching television. Too bad.

C. gives them fresh water in the afternoons, and collects feathers and eggs (I feed and water them in the morning before work). Yesterday she found this in the bird house. With all those feathers all over, she expected to find murdered (or at least naked) birds, but the place was empty. She concluded that they'd had a pillow fight.

Garden notes
C. planted a bunch of garlic from the ancestral home, and worked on prepping one of the north beds for greens. And she "chitted" some of the seed spuds (I think that's what you call cutting them up, two or three eyes per piece, in preparation for planting). They have to cure for a few days before they go in the ground. She put a bunch of cabbage seedlings in ground in the little hoop house.The tomato plants are mostly up in their two flats in the kitchen window.

What the heck did I do all day? Oh, yeah, I coughed and coughed from last week's goat-combing fest. And I worked on fencing around the barn, to give the big animals some new grass and bushes to gnaw. And I drug sled loads of alpaca poo from the barn to the garden. And I found a dead cat behind the barn. That's about it.

Tonight I made brownies, because I could. I have opposable thumbs – why not use them for good? The secret to making good brownies is to use multiple kinds of chocolate. Mine have unsweetened baking chocolate bars, cocoa powder and chocolate chips. Pecans, too. Mmm.