Category: Homeschooling

Back to School

We have been so busy getting so little done lately. Sometimes that’s how things seem to go. There is a lot that needs to be done, and there is a lot that we are doing. But does it feel like we are getting caught up? No. I guess that’s just the way things go.

We got the girls registered for their respective schools yesterday. Our youngest has not been in public school before, and the oldest has not been in for the last five years or so. Hopefully this is a good choice for them. We got them into a district next to our catchment area where the classes will be smaller and they should have the opportunity to know everyone well, and for their teachers to give them the attention they should be getting in an educational setting.

So that is the close of an era for me. I have had a kid at home for homeschooling every year since 2006. Seventeen years! Now, at 52, I have to get things together and figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I have till a week from next Monday.

Also yesterday, I went out to check the feed in the chicken coop, and saw there was a dead peachick on the floor. The mamma bird was not sitting on eggs anymore by the door. Why she had to nest right in front of the door escapes me. I saw her in the back corner of the run, and walked over. Every bird scattered but her. She stayed sat. I hated to do it, but I got her to get up and reveal a day-old chick. The other appeared to be three or four days old, at least. So, to prevent another loss, I gathered the chick and took it into the house where we set up a box and put it in for the night. It will have to be caged separately to prevent it being run down like the other one appeared to have been. I can see it going out again in a couple of months, when it is big enough to stand up to a flock of chickens. It only needs to be as big as a hen. The hens usually don’t bother with the peafowl the way they will do bullying another chicken. As much as I hated to separate the mother and chick, there is no better way.

My latest shop project has been a simple one. I have assembled a stitch pony so I can do some leatherworking at the work bench. It is a simple one, designed to clamp under the force of the bench vise. All I have left to do is get some tacks and put some leather pads into the jaws of the pony, then I can use it freely.

The tractor is running low on hydraulic fluid. It has a leak in one of the pistons on the loader. Honestly, it is a little depressing. Who wants to have to put it in for service. How long will they keep it for? But at least I know why the bucket has been drooping or reacting a little slow, I think. I think I know. I don’t know for sure, but when I tightened the hose to the piston, it acted a bit better. It just continues to leak, and I think I may be a bit tight on the crush washer and want to have a tech service it correctly. Maybe they can do it onsite. Or maybe they can just take the loader, if they have to. Then I can continue to use the rest of the tractor here for some jobs. I think I am a bit spoiled having had that tractor to do my heavy lifting for me!

Well, it is nearly 3AM, and I need to get back to sleep. Or at least try.

The Mud is Gone!

The mud has gone from all parts of the yard. Some patches had to be buried to vanish them, but after I did that with the tractor, I let things sit a couple of days and then gave it a go in the garden with the tiller. I was able to till without striking mud or sinking down too mauch anywhere. This morning I tilled the whole garden space again with the back flap on the tiller dropped all the way down, and it levelled the garden pretty good!

We had a gopher digging back in the orchard next to an apple tree. Yesterday I dug down and found the opening to his den and stuffed a pipe into that. Then I closed everything off again around the pipe and stuck the other end of it into the tractor exhaust pipe. I let that run till it was too hot to hold anymore, and then shut it off, pulled the pipe, and sealed the den. No more fresh tailings in front of the den this morning. I suppose that instead of eating the tree’s roots, the tree is going to be fertilized off the gopher.

I worked in the shop a bit today. The workbench by the south wall is finished for the time being. I only need to get a couple of fixtures and some bulbs to put some lights above it. I am happy with how it came out. I am happy that I got it pretty much the same height of the main workbench across from it, so i can span larger items from one to the other. I do need to get some electric power to it. I’ll be setting up my beeswax melters over there, and an oven to reseason my cast iron, too. That will get the stench of that chore out of the house, and make it easier if I find myself stripping old seasoning off the iron first.

I just have a lot of stuff that could use a home out of the workspace.

Missus is setting up to run an at home business with quite a few possible products. We have got a 60 inch loom set up now, and there are a lot of thigns she wants to make on that. We also have a potter’s wheel and a kiln set up, ready to start throwing. We both have lathes, and plenty of other tools for making all manner of things. I still need to get the sawmill set up. But that will come soon. It is getting time to get firewood going, and some wood to saw. It is also getting time to get the llamas shorn. We have busy days ahead of us!

The kids are finished up with their homeschooling. They will both be going to public school in the autumn. One is accepted to the school we wanted, and we are still waiting for a reply for the other.

This summer brings a whole change of pace for us here on the farm. It ought to be an advanture! With us both trying to earn here at home, nothing will be the same again.

The Drive Back From Malad

Our drive back from testing was when it was most interesting. But even so, it was not bad at all. The snow sure came down though as we went through the canyon. As you could imagine, in the summer it is a beautiful drive! I took the video in hyperlapse mode to keep it a reasonable watch!

School Testing

As our kids have been in an online Academy that is state sponsored, we have some advantages, like reimbursements available for school supplies and some activities. Money to use to teach our kids is a very positive thing! But that comes at a cost to us. One is reporting to the Academy what our kids have been learning each week and keeping up with Learning Goals, which also has to be demonstrated in that reporting. Another is testing. Our kids are required to do state testing, which during Covid was done online and from our home. But before, and now after, we have to go to a location to do that testing in front of a proctor. That’s all fine and well, and I don’t really mind it, as long as the kids are good with it.

We had testing for our youngest yesterday and have another session today. The location of her testing is the problematic piece for us. We have to drive to a town thirty miles away for it. There are a couple of ways to get there. The easiest is the thirty-mile route through the mountains between us and that town. It’s a short, pleasant drive along a two lane that winds through beautiful scenery. The other routes are much longer, double or more. One goes north, around the end of the range, and then back south again. The other route goes over the mountains at the southern end of the valley we live in, then north again.

The short route has a gate on it at the next town nearest us and can be closed during the winter due to lack of maintenance. But the weather was great yesterday, and the gate was open!

Today snow has fallen in a spring storm, and we are meant to get more. There are a few inches on the ground so far, and we are meant to get up to eight inches. That’s here, in the valley. Not up those mountains. We are due to be there by eleven o’clock in the morning, and there is a session scheduled for 1:00 PM, so I think that if we show up late, it is no big deal. We’ll try the short route, but if it is closed, we will go up and around the north end. That is the easiest plan B available. South is much longer. To do this, we have to leave in 45 minutes! If we are never seen or heard from again, someone who finds our house empty one day will be able to look into this blog and figure out where to look for us.

Okay, so not so dramatic. But it ought to be an interesting drive! Perhaps I’ll get the GoPro going on this one! At any rate, is it homeschool related, and a part of our story, so I thought I’d share it.

Wednesday Morning by the Fire.

It is snowing again this morning. Nothing like yesterday though. Just a little flurry. I see California is having rain again, so give that 24 hours and it will be here. It was warm overnight, and this morning I did not started a fire early this morning and am only getting around to it right now as I write this. It is coming up to 10AM. It’s not cold in here, but it is cool, and I figure one good blaze ought to take that chill off for a while. Plus, having a fire going in the stove is good for drying off those cast iron pans from breakfast, or softening the bacon grease enough to pour into the bin. I am doing both now. It’s much better to bring the grease up to a temperature warm enough to pour and put it all into the rubbish bin than to pour any of it into the sink, and down into the septic system.

I got a chance to get out to the shop for a few minutes this morning, and just a little cleaning put it into a place where I know what to do for my next steps that will make a big difference in cleaning it up ready for the new workbench. I will get to those steps this afternoon when I get a chance to get some things to the barn. When that is done, a few things need to get sorted off the foosball table before I am ready to be able to push it aside for the workbench to come through and set up. I am excited, but the tracking info still shows it has not moved yet. Do they ship stuff once a week, or does the shipper not actually have any tracking system? Who knows? When it gets here, it gets here.

The fire is not burning hot this morning. It really could be doing better. I just put a couple more logs on to see if that will help. I am thinking that closing up space in the stove will concentrate the heat better, and maybe those new logs will burn better. I think the wood got wet in the recent weather, even under the tarp, and not I am paying for that. I would really like to build some woodsheds out there to keep the wood in without messing about with the tarps that blow off in the wind. A good hard roof and sides would do a lot for keeping the wood ready to burn. Add that to the summer chores list. Add that to the current cost of doing anything! A fella wouldn’t complain about having a sawmill right now.

The extra logs helped the fire catch. I helped one of our daughters with her Social Studies. Missus has walked back and forth a few times with her computer in hand, and her headphones on while she works. I am back to a moment of peace now and can worry about that fire and some cleaning up around the house. Best way will be to put down the blog for the time being and get at it.

Projects Right Now

This calf gets called Brownie. It is one of our calves we are feeding out.
Our four calves in a temporary pen while I get the bigger one ready for their winter over on hay feed.
A sampling of the old fencing that is being replaced with new like in the next photo.
New Fencing installed on the east end of the pen I intend to keep the calves in while they start out on hay over winter. It will be easier to feed them on this side of the street.
The Truck and Trailer with 57 bales of hay onboard.

We have a lot more going on here than usual right now, and in spite of the heat, though I do have to take it easy in the midday sun. We have started piling up hay for winter, finally. I have the firewood coming along, and we are bottle feeding four calves that will be sold, or butchered, or both, depending on the situation come the end their time being raised up. The kids are in school on top of all this, and I am their home liaison, or teacher, depending on the child. Meanwhile, Missus is trying to set up a home-based business and see how it goes. She is doing that while holding down a full-time job, as you do.

I was working on the fence in the south pen on this side of the street when the dogs out back started barking. Turns out the goat and dog that live together had got out again. That turned our priority yesterday into replacing the fence that kept the older dog safely in. That dog lives with a goat; long story.

We got the fence on the dog run replaced by the end of the day and put the Odd Couple back into it. This morning I put in an N-brace in the end of the pens that I had started working on yesterday. I am setting those pens up to have large gates at their west end, so I can get things in and out, like the lawnmower, eventually a tractor, and haul out anything that dies in them. It is a practical move.

A real question I am kicking around right now is if I should let the Odd Couple continue on like they are and eliminate the goat’s old pen, making more room for another firewood bunk, or should I put it back together and keep them separate? I could use the space!

On the far west end of the property, where the gates will let out from the pens, I am building in an access driveway. I could put firewood along that, or I could line it with some poplar trees. I think I like poplar trees to shade the animals in the pens in the afternoons and to shade a place to park the truck. Just another thing I am kicking around. The drive is meant to make it easier to access the back with a trailer in tow and allow me to not have to back it. I have no troubles backing trailers, but I don’t trust there won’t be someone there at some point. I don’t want to run someone down.

Oh, and today I am watering the orchard trees, as one of them appears to have died. That’s not good.

The Season’s Change

Nothing marks the end of summer for the children quite like the start of the school year. The school year starts in the morning though, and we have got to get things going for the home education program. Our oldest is going to be taught via teachers online, and our youngest will have a school provided curriculum with e as her lead. Despite these, we have no idea what to do tomorrow, or who to log in with or whatever. If the year starts a little slow, so be it; it has happened before. We’ll get it figured out.

Summer does not end till the third week of September. Even as an adult I still have a time getting my head around the difference between when the school year starts and closes a hard curtain on summer, and when the actual season changes according to the Earth’s orbit around the sun and its reflection on the calendar.

The firewood collection is coming along well enough. I have almost half of it split and stacked, though there we need more to fill the bunk, and more to stack away for use in the fireplace and in the shop. I do intend to go get more wood still, and there is time to do it. We need to get the last of it gathered and split by Thanksgiving at the latest. We are limited to Friday’s now, though, because of school.

The new log splitter seems to be working out pretty good so far. It does not allow the carburetor to fill with water the way the Champion did. That makes it easy to start after wet weather. Not that we have had much wet weather!

The drought is still on here in Southeast Idaho. With the change in the climate, it is probably time to stop calling it a drought and accept it as the new way of things here, unless of course we are still in the course of change. Probably so. I think we will need to change how we do our thing here. Let’s see what comes this winter with the winds of change.

The weather station is working pretty good so far. I bought that new computer about a month ago, and it seems to be doing what it needs to in order to track the weather station and keep the database, and publish the weather online. I added a second monitor to it as it is powerful enough to run a lot more than just a weather station.

That’s what’s new here on the Peasant’s Manor Farm.

Wood

It’s a cool morning here on the farm.  The storms that flooded Yellowstone north of us barely brushed by and touched our little home on the valley floor.  The greatest effect here was cooler weather with a dash of wind.  Cooler weather is good for splitting firewood ready for winter, and so I did yesterday, with the help of the girls, stacking it while I gathered a new piece, and hefted it to the splitter, then ran it through.  We did a little more than half a cord yesterday, before being distracted by anything that was not work. 

The wood is still wet this morning, as is easily seen by the flies gathering on it to drink where the fresh splits were placed yesterday.  There was a little water around the top of the aircleaner colver on the log splitter, which reminded me that I needed to cover it before leaving it overnight, which I obviously had already done.  It is a a splitter we bought a couple of years ago, before the company that makes it redesigned it and put on a new cover that does not drink all the rainfall if can, and fill the carburator, and then the cylendar.  When I started it yesterday morning, the piston barely would move as I pulled the starter cord, but move it did, and I could hear the water squeezing out the exhaust valve.  I dabbed up any remaining water in the carb with a paper towel, then pulled the cord till the pison moved freely, and finally dumped some gas into the carb, and pulled again and again till it finally started. 

It is not an ideal situation.  The solution is not great, either.  But it solves it, and with much less effort that pulling things apart.  So I’ll take it. 

I took a log from in the way in the shop yesterday and mounted it to the lathe and made it into a scepter for my daughter for when she is ruling her “army of darkness,” also known as the barn cats. It is not a particularly useful project, but it is practice, and the log was not what I would have wanted to build something from, and it was just in the way. There is another one out there, so I may do one more.

Writing is done on the front parch these days. I have put on a tab with YouTube open, and Debussy playing. Debussy and the sounds of the birds chirping outside; could anything be lovelier? Maybe the same situation with hand tools on a bench in the shop, working a piece of wood into a chair? That’s the goal.

I have a reading date with my youngest daughter in a few minutes. We are working her through Rascal, about a boy in Wisconsin a century ago, who took in a raccoon. She is having troubles reading, so we are working on getting her some daily practice.

Final Run Till Christmas!

With the Thanksgiving weekend over, we are on the final run till Christmas, then New Year’s, and the long drag through winter. In January the seed catalogues will begin to arrive, tempting us with plants to grow over the summer. Then when spring finally comes, we will be out from under the snow, and thawing the cold out of our bones. But none of it comes till we slog through winter. Spring doesn’t seem that far away right now, but it never comes quickly when I find myself outside day after day, dark evening after dark evening, cold as can be as I do the chores and keep the poor animals alive that live right through the cold seasons that I struggle to go out in at all.

This weekend we talked about the state of our youngest daughter and her social wellbeing while she homeschools. She does pretty good, but she does get lonely for friends, and often wants company from us when we are busy trying to keep our family afloat on our daily tasks. Missus said to me that she doesn’t know why she didn’t think of it before, but the girl needs a dog. So, we discussed breeds and such, and decided on something close to a Beagle. We are not particular about pure breeds, so we looked and found some Beagle, Australian Shepherd mixes for sale only a couple of miles from our place, just over the Utah state line. I got a reply Saturday morning that if I could come within the hour, I would be able to pick one up before the seller goes out for the day. Right on that!

I brought him in tucked inside my jacket, and Missus took him off me and dumped him on our daughter’s lap. Do I need to tell you how a nine year old reacts to a puppy being dropped in her lap? Probably not.

The dog was a good boy on the way home, and a good boy all the way up to town a bit later to get him some supplies, feed, and leash. The only trouble was that he was sick in the car, and spent the day being pretty quiet, and mellow. I then noticed by late afternoon that he was kicking his leg similar to a horse with colic. So, I talked to Missus about the state of him and was soon out the door to pick up his sister from the guy who sold him to us. He has been perfect since.

That is how we got two dogs this weekend. They are nine weeks old, so that would put them around September 25th as a birthday. He is a good boy and she is a good girl. My daughter named her dog Spot, and I took our older daughter with to get the girl, and I told her, I don’t care the gender, my Beagle is going to be called Snoopy. That is how we got a boy named Spot, and a girl named Snoopy!

Tonight, as the weekend comes to a close, and we begin that final run towards Christmas, the two dogs are lay on a stuffed dog my wife had up on our bed, sleeping sweetly, and close to each other. I think if dogs could smile, that is what I would see on their sweet little faces right now.

I picked up some firewood with our oldest on Friday. As he loaded his jacked-up truck, he was moaning, “get a big truck they said. It’ll be fun, they said.” Pretty sure we both slept well that night. The wood is wet, and will have to hold out till next year, barring we don’t run out of this year’s wood. I guess we’ll see.

Where Have I Been The Past Few Days?

Over the last couple of days I have been focused on making sure of the girls in their home schooling, and generally either hiding from the rain on rainy days, or splitting up some of the firewood on sunny ones. I have given the lathe a break while I wait for a part I buggered up on it, and a tool to repair the part it attaches to, which I could replace, if they were in stock with Laguna. Well, not a huge deal, but I will not turn on it till the part and tool arrive, because I don’t want it to turn into a huge deal.

Meanwhile, I ordered Missus her Christmas present, but it is the kind of present that one must speak to the recipient about before committing to buying it. Currently she has got a Cricut, and makes lots of things on it. In a couple of weeks she will have a GlowForge and will up her game with it, and hopefully with an Etsy store where she will be able to sell things made from those tools, as well as her handmade art. She’s looking to start a side hustle. I’m looking to see to it that the rug under her is a red carpet.

Since there is a GlowForge coming, I have been spending time in Inkscape learning how to layout in that. I may or may not get enlisted in the process of running this side hustle, or I may just be able to use it to design a few personal things, or a placard for any furniture I make out in my shop. Whatever the case, I need to at least lay out designs and do basic operations to be of some use in the business.

That’s the most of it over the past few days. Obviously there was Halloween!

The day was pretty normal for us. We did not do anything out of the norm for ourselves, but the kids watched a couple of Halloween themed movies during the day. By evening our youngest complained because we were not going Trick-Or-Treating. So I put my two red lanterns on in the dining room and library, and turned off all the other lights. Missus put together two baskets of sweets in lieu of hordes of candy, then brought out a book and once the girls were settled into their sweets, she began reading Poe in her lovely English accent. I thought it was quite a perfect spontaneous Halloween!

It’s soon time to get our winter hay paid for and delivered. Maybe today or tomorrow will be a good time to get set up for that. This weekend is our grandson’s time over. I still have firewood to split up out in the Service Yard. I could do with getting it all done before winter settles in. If it goes at the rate the last few days has, then that won’t be too difficult a goal to achieve.

That’s about where things are at. The Holidays have officially gotten started with Halloween past us now. Next up is Thanksgiving, then the big one. After that comes the long, cold winter. It’s getting time to button down for that!