Litterbugs. Ugh.

One of my farm chores is to do the mowing of what I call "the grounds" on a weekly basis.  That includes anything that is mowed "for looks", so that our place will look nice an tidy - the yard, down the driveway, along the road, etc.  Since our property is a corner lot, we have a lot of area along the road that I maintain.

I just don't understand, in this day and age, after years of anti litterbug and "don't mess with Texas" advertisements...why do people still throw trash out of their vehicles?  Every time I mow, I have to stop numerous times to pick up trash that people have thrown onto our property.  I just don't get it.  Can't they wait until they get home and put it in their trash can?  We aren't on a busy highway.  We're on a county road, off the beaten path.  It's a destination to nowhere except a cemetery or someone's home.

I keep this empty container in my mower cubby to stash the trash while I'm mowing.

Fits in here, nice and tidy, with my clippers to snip little rogue trash trees that grow along the fence line.

This is the trash that I picked up yesterday.

Along with... surprise! THIS!  

Hello, Karma.

Vardo Setback

Well, it's been a while since I've worked on my RV-to-vardo project.  When the mood finally struck, I made a horrible discovery.

We had a leak, which damaged part of two walls and rotted out a large part of the floor on the slide out...the part that I had already done several things to.

So, this sets me back and will make the reno more involved than I had intended.

Tom tore out the floor and replaced it and also tore out part of the walls.  We're trying to save the wallpaper job that I did, so that's one reason we didn't tear all the walls out.  Thankfully, most of the damage was below the windows.

It's not all bad, though.  I didn't like that old carpet that was in there, but I couldn't justify tearing it out - expense AND it was just a lot of work.  So, now at least the carpet is gone.  The bottom of the banquette rotted out, so that's a loss.  Since the whole floor had to go, I just took the jackknife sofa/bed out, too, and am getting rid of it.  I have a great plan for a replacement bed that I'm excited about.  Also, having a little table and chairs instead of the banquet might be nice.

The Coop Yard

This is how the conversation went early this spring:

Me:  We need to rebuild the chicken coop yard.

Him:  Why?

Me:  Because, for one, it needs to be bigger.  Sometimes, we need to keep the chickens in their yard for a few days at a time and they need more room to scratch around.  Like now, several chickens are laying their eggs somewhere besides the coop and we're only finding one or two eggs a day.  It's ridiculous to have 18 chickens and get so few eggs.  Also, we need a safe place for the newly hatched chicks to be.  Out of nine that hatched this spring, only two survived.  Secondly, we built the yard we have now back when we didn't know anything about chickens.  We only made the sides about four feet tall and the chicken wire that goes across the top is sagging so much.  The weeds took over last summer and it killed my back pulling all those weeds out because I had to bend over double to fit under the "roof".  Also, I'd like to incorporate a few other features into our chicken yard.

Him:  We don't need a new chicken yard.  It's too expensive.  It will cost a thousand dollars.

Me:  Ok, well, you'll have to keep the weeds cleared out of it because I just can't do that anymore.

Him:  **blank stare**

'nuff said.