chicken pens & bee stings

Last weekend Michael and I went off on a pretty unsuccessful trip to Home Depot. The idea was to make a chicken pen light enough for one person to move it easily. The plan was to use electric conduit. The question was: should it be welded together at the corners? after talking to some folks about how nasty a material it is in terms of welding and fumes, we decided to see if we could find some joints. We picked up his neighbor Ed, who is always wandering around Cheshire looking for a ride, and heading to Home Depot. 30 minutes later we come back to the car. Ed says "what're you doing back here empty handed? you've been in there forever!" Alas, 30 minutes and two friendly customer service folks later, we discovered that the joints were all threaded although the conduit wasn't, and they were $3 a pop and only had elbows, no T's and no "3 way orthagonal joints" (to use to make the corner of a cube). PVC isn't great, because in the sun it gets really brittle, so maybe the Joel Salatin wooden ones are the best bet. The farm we went to up in Pownal has Joel Salatin pens (so does Homestead, where Michael works). they're challenging to move with one person - at homestead one person rolls the front side with the dolly while the other walks the back side forward.

The whole farm crew just went to visit our next door neighbor who raises chickens and beef. In his set up, he props the pen up on the tire and crate everyday because "about 80% of the chickens i get are roosters, and they're always fighting, so this way if there's a fight they can get outta each other's hair and cool off". He moves the chicken fence every two days, props up the pen in the morning, feeds them so most of them are out of the pen, and then moves it. His cows are the ones that often see our cows across the fence and spend hours mooing at each other. apparently one of our cows jumped over 2 years ago and hung out with his herd for 3 weeks before eventually coming home.



Meanwhile, I went in to harvest plums from the orchard last week and a bee flew right into my hair, starts freaking out, of course I start trying to brush it out of my hair, it stings me on the eyelid, another bee lands on me and stings me on the back of the neck. Another stings katie, we all run out of the orchard. over the course of lunch, my eye swelled more and more. I took some benedryl (and promptly lay down for a quick nap. i woke up and couldn't even open my eye. So Melissa drove me down to the clinic in Pittsfield, where the doctor took one look and sent me to the emergency room. anyway, I ended up walking out with a prescription for an epipen. Just to prove to my mom that I don't only put up flattering pictures of myself on my blog, here's what I look like 10 hours after I get stung by a bee on my eyelid.