Down On the Farm

There are a few new residents in the hen house. Loryn was excited to see that one of the broody hens had a few chicks peeking out from under her. I love the coloring of these babies. A rusty brown one and a pale gray one... They are so cute! Our roosters are feather footed cochin bantams so they are little and we have an assortment of hens... Rhode Island Reds, Aurcauna, barred rock and bantams and little bantum cochin and silkie's too.

Walking out of the hen house I took a quick picture of the back of our house. The structure on the far left is the "tree house" my brothers and I played in when we were little. It is not safe to play in now, and Benny and Loryn have been talking about repairing the structure. Benny removed the ladder rungs on the tree house many years ago to prevent Loryn from climbing the 3 story structure.

Just past our gray house is the gray rice dryer, you have to enlarge the picture to see it. Benny built the deck in the back of our house, which is not quite finished yet. The weather got to hot for Benny to finish. I hope as soon as it gets cooler, he can finish. It is usable, but missing the final railing. We really enjoyed using it during the spring . It has solar lights all around it and we have a fire pit we sit around roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. The weather lately has been really much dryer and cooler so we sat out and had a wienie roast on Thursday night. After we had to turn on the lights when it got dark, the bugs came out in full force, so Benny was bitten quite a bit... The mosquitoes really like him best, he is so sweet!

Lately the view from my living room window is that rice truck. The farmer using the dryers now parked the truck uncovered one afternoon so I snapped a picture. When I was growing up the farmers did not use 18 wheeler trucks. The rice truck back then were much smaller. The family farm had to replace the ditch culverts last year so the farmer using the land could get his 18 wheeler in to haul rice. My aunt's were not so understanding why they had to spend money on culverts, but the old ones were over 50 years old and just were not suitable for the weights of today's farm equipment.
Loryn seeks out wildlife of all kinds. She knows the location of every banana Spider on the property and will let me know when they have moved their web, which they do often.
She also found the praying mantis while we were at the hen house and begged me to take a photo of it...so there you go.

Benny does try to spend time on his gokart on his days off. He found parts he needed , like a seat at gokartparts.com, and stalked the UPS man, hoping his package came early enough so he could have them on his week off last week. They did not come until afterwards so her had to wait another week to work on the gokart. So here is is at the point where he is figuring out the steering system.
And then I called him in a panic on his last day off. My power steering in my car when out as I was arriving to visit one of my little students. So he left his gokart to escort me home safely, figured out what was wrong, when to get the part and took me out to lunch! Plus he changed the oil in my car , too. He is so handy and can fix anything worth fixing... which is the main reason I am driving a 12 year old car. The car that won't die... I really want a new car, but not a car note yet, so I hope he can keep it going a year more until I am finished working on my masters. One semester is like 3-4 months worth of car notes... So when I finish grad school, I can get a new car, I guess!